This Friday (20th August) me and Ubuntu translations man David Planella want to spend the day making sure translations in Kubuntu are in tip top shape. Do join us on IRC in #kubuntu-devel if you want to help out. See the wiki page for some things we will be checking.
Planet KDE is your insight into the lives and activities of KDE, a community making lovely free software.
Occationally I get asked to add feeds to Planet KDE which aren't KDE contributor blogs. News feeds, user blogs and non-English blogs are the usual requests. So today, thanks to the helps of others, I've updated our software and added opt-in support for these different types of feeds. Just click the configure button at the top of the page.
If you have a KDE project news feed (including KDE related distro news), a KDE user blog, or a KDE blog in Spanish or another language do file a bug or add it yourself to the feed (it's in svn) with the new define_feedclass attribute.
I also updated the software to Rawdog 2.12 which should help keep the memory usage on the server down.
Thanks to Ade, Stuart and Kurt for helping with various bits.
Interviews
I did some 30 second video interviews at Akademy in Helsinki. You can download them to get a feel for the people and place of Akademy. Unfortunately I've been unable, in the limited time I've devoted to it, to convert them to Oggs, ffmpeg doesn't want to do it. I've also been unable to find a simple HTML5 video gallery script that would make a simple HTML page with the videos embedded. Do let me know if you have the answers to those. I recommend Frank's interview for an insight into what our board spends its week doing.
Eben Moglen Talk
Before Akademy I went to see Eben Moglen give a talk at the Scottish Society for Computers and Law. Eben is a much overlooked rock star of free software, having written the GPL licences and made many other significant contributions.
His talk was about the dangers of embedded software, taking the example of the software in cars because it is a topical issue but also in other life critical areas such as aeroplanes and medical devices. Failures in the software result in people dieing but unlike other life critical engineering there is no regulatory overview. Various governments have strong regulatory requirements and testing for the mechanical parts of a car but none for the software. Given the complexity of the software that would be the a difficult job even if regulators cared, which they should start to do after the Toyota issue. Eben's solution, predictably, is to make all such software be required to be free software. That way all bugs become shallow and problems can be quickly fixed. Unfortunately the current situation in Europe is not promising, the EU Commission bans software on medical devices from being free software. This is in the belief that it would be a security problem if such software was modifiable. There does need to be controls on who can modify such software, but banning it from being Free Software (and the breaches of the GPL which result) is clearly a bad idea.
Some questions from the audience including one from Fred Macintosh who very nearly become my MP a few weeks ago, if he's put "interested in Free Software" on any of the 67 leaflets his campaigners put through my door I'd have been far more likely to vote for him.
Travels
I left Akademy at the end last week and travelled to Helsinki. My Friend in Helsinki wasn't in so I gatecrashed a group of international cancer researchers and played Pictionary instead. Later I went to the beach and went for a canoe around Helsinki harbour.
No rest from travel though. This weekend I caught a ferry to Amsterdam then a sleeper train to Prague for Canonical's Platform Sprint. Journey was all good (except for the frightening number of stag and hen parties on the ferry). As usual booking land based international travel is a pain with several unconnected booking systems. Prague turns out to have an awesome artificial white water slalom course so I spent the day surfing on the waves.
Politics
The Liberal half of the new UK government set up a website to discuss repealing laws. Predictably enough most of the ideas are nuts so I decided to see if the site would work for what it was intended for, repealing bad laws. If you are a UK citizen, please give your rating to repeal the obscure Children and Young Persons Harmful Publications Act which bans comics. I like (some) comics and a law which bans them, even if it doesn't get used, is a bad law. I wonder if Nick Clegg will listen.
Helsinki Sun Set
Coming live from Akademy over IRC later today (Finnish today anyway) is Kubuntu Tutorials Day.
Alan Alpert from Nokia will teach you about Qt Quick and QML. You will need to download and install Qt Creator binaries before the tutorial. Qt Creator from the archive is not new enough.
Johan Thelin will give an intro to coding in Qt. Make sure you have Qt development files and Qt Creator installed: sudo apt-get install libqt4-dev qtcreator
We also have sessions on Beastie Hunting, Packaging and Merging with the Ninjas and Kubuntu Maverick. Do join us on #kubuntu-devel from 18:00UTC on Wednesday.
Akademy started with a pre-conference welcome drinks evening today. Lots of KDE developers old and new.
There is a Flickr group for Akademy 2010 but it seems I can only post 6 photos to it, which is a strange restriction.
Lots of Nokia people here
Chit chat
Someone thoughtlessly organised a sports tournament during Akademy
Free beer doesn't stop people from hacking
Finland turns out to be lovely, full of trees and liquorice and cheese eaten with jam. The only bad thing is the mosquitoes which rather take the fun out of a post-sauna sun bathe by eating you alive.
Tm_T asked for this one
Finland, Finland, Finland,
The country where I want to be,
Pony trekking or camping,
Or just watching TV.
Finland, Finland, Finland.
It's the country for me.
as in previous years we are proud to sponsor
Me and Aurelien Gateau and Michael Casadevall will be coming from Canonical. It's going to be great!
If you want to try out Qt 4.7 and the interesting new world of Qt Quick ("from now on /the/ way to make GUIs"), Kubuntu 10.04 users can try it from the experimental PPA. The Qt Creator packages there have Qt Quick designer integration.
Ubuntu Developer Summit is over, we emerged from the deepest darkest Belgian forest full of plans for the next six months of Kubuntu. The specs are written and we have a lengthyTodo list. If you've ever thought about helping out Kubuntu take a look at the Todo list and see if there's anything that inspires you.
If there's a theme to our plans for the next six months it's filling in the obvious holes we have in our offering. KPackageKit has plans for usability love, we found a way to have an "App Store" view in KPackageKit, new printer setup tools are in the works, samba file sharing might well get fixed. We'll also have Kolabsys keeping an eye on our KDE PIM packages. There's hopes for a "mobile" version of Kubuntu for weeny devices and the Netbook and Desktop CDs will probably merge into one. Oh and we plan to ship with Rekonq for a web browser, it's getting nicer every day. Agateau showed his plans for a global menu bar which is currently being discussed with the Plasma Netbook guys as a possible way to save screen space.
If it all works out it'll be a lovely release, do come and join us.
Ubuntu Magazine were handing out copies of their German version featuring "Interview Mit Kubuntu Chef Jonathan Riddell", I quite like the idea of being a Kubuntu Chef mixing up packages in my kitchen.
Team Kubuntu! Rodrigo, Aurelien, Scott, Roman, Jonathan, Roderick, Jussi, Another Jonathan, Daniel
Politics politics. Here in Waloonia we have to spreak French, walk half a kilometre north and you are barred from speaking French and have to speak Dutch. Go a further kilometer north and you're in Brussels where you have to speak French but in practice everyone spreaks English. And they manage this all without bothering to have a government. Almost as crazy as home where the old prime minister resigned to make way for a posh English chap who will doubtless steal our milk and make us pay a poll tax. Really I should have been in London tonight to visit Buckingham palace and put myself forward for the job of Prime Minister and had the chance to found the Pacifist Free Software Kingdom of Scotland (plus southern principalities), but I missed my chance all because I'm at the Ubuntu Developer Summit planning the next six months of Kubuntu.
We've had a guests from a couple of my favourite companies here for the first couple of days. Thiago and Jergen from Nokia's Qt dropped by to convert the world to goodness and correct pronounciation ("it's called cute"). Secret basement meetings with design teams got some of the inner world of Canonical developers converted while Qt Quick got the designers wanting to know when my 4.7 packages would be ready so they can stop using that Flash rubbish.
DX Team consider conversion
Then Paul Adams made a humungous entry to covert the world of groupware to Kolab. We get lovely testing three times a day for our KDE PIM packages, they get to make server packages and the hopeful promise of Kolab on a server CD before the next LTS.
Kubuntu developers are here in style. Jon the Enchilada made it through the volcanic ash and Daniel Nicoletti will wow us with improvements to KPackageKit.
Brussles Ping? UDS Pong!
Today we released Kubuntu 10.04 LTS. This is the first Long Term Support release to feature KDE 4 Platform and Applications. It's very exciting that the long journey to KDE 4 has come to the level of stability where we can call it LTS.
A big thank you to the hard working Kubuntu team, too many to name but they have toiled day and night over the last 6 months to make sure you have the latest software with the minimum of bugs.
Read the 10.04 LTS release announcement to find out what's new and how to download it or upgrade from 9.10.
Aaron Seigo did a session yesterday with distro packagers on Plasma Desktop Scripting. Here are the logs in HTML and plain text.
Something exciting happening tomorrow
Aaron Seigo will be hosting a session on Plasma Desktop Scripting in #plasma on Freenode IRC network at 16:00UTC on Tuesday (today). It's intended for distro packagers but all welcome.
On the kubuntu.org front page we list a few interesting Kubuntu users of various shapes and sizes to give a feel for how diverse use is.
One rather cool user which is missing is Weta Digital. Whenever I've been out the flat this week I've seen adverts for the Avatar DVDs, those blue 3D faces are all made on Kubuntu desktops and a whopping 35,000 cluster of rendering machines. That must be a large proportion of computers in New Zealand running Kubuntu.
I am Kubuntu
Then I got an e-mail from a guy at Lionstracs makers of groovy musical keyboards. The keyboards run Kubuntu for all your composing and music playing needs.
This YouTube video of the Kubuntu keyboards shows them in action.
I am also Kubuntu
No doubt KDE is spreading out from the classic desktop use, from niche embedded use like keyboards to massive budget graphics we're taking over the world!
Long Term is coming...
Kubuntu 10.04 Release is nearly upon us. This Thursday sees the Release Candidate with final release due a week on Thursday.
So we need ISO testing (and upgrade testing) pretty solidly between now and then.
The ISO testing Kubuntu page lists what needs testing. Join us in #kubuntu-devel if you can help.
And testers will get a sneak preview of our all new logo, made after much pondering and brainstorming and re-learning how to use Inkscape.
