planet kde chinese update

Things move fast once they are moving. It was only 2 days ago that I announced the existence of Chinese language blogs on Planet KDE. Since then, several things have occurred:

• There are now a total of six Chinese language blogs being agregated on Planet KDE 中文!



• The community decided to change the url from "ch" to "zh" so you can now access it via http://zh.planetkde.org or http://planetkde.org/zh



• Franklin Weng, who is also a KDE translator, is now the maintainer of Planet KDE 中文. He has been reaching out to as many of the Chinese speaking communities as he can to find relevant and interesting blogs by KDE contributors that are written in either simplified or traditional Chinese. His enthusiasm and efforts will ensure that Planet KDE 中文 prospers under his care.

What next? Well, we are still looking for more Chinese language bloggers to add and we need to spread the word that Planet KDE 中文 exists so that people may benefit from it. :)

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chinese language blogs on planet kde

On my recent visit to Taipei, I worked with some of the local KDE community members to identify ways in which we could help support both the various Chinese-speaking KDE communities as well as the local KDE community in Taiwan. One of the things we identified was getting the same level of support and exposure for Chinese language community content, such as blogs, as we do for other language groups.



Upon arriving back home, I set about adding a Chinese language section to our blog aggregator, Planet KDE. With the support of our sysadmin team, this went live today and you can now read Chinese language KDE blogs from Planet KDE.



We only have one blog on their right now, but it's a great asset to the Chinese KDE community: it contains primarily translations of KDE related news and information found elsewhere. With your help, we can add more blogs and original content. How? Well, if you have a Chinese language blog that is KDE related, or know of one, please let me know and I will make sure it is added to the new Planet KDE area for Chinese language blogs.



My next step is to remove myself from this role and pass on maintenance of the Chinese language blogs to someone in the Chinese KDE community. Seeing as I don't speak/read Chinese nor live in a relevant region, I am a language and geographic barrier that we don't need here. :)



This is, of course, only the first of many steps towards increasing the support for our friends in Asia and elsewhere who contribute to, use and generally appreciate KDE and feel most comfortable communicating in Chinese. It's also a step in helping bring together the local Taiwanese KDE community by providing more visibility for them to each other. We have more planned, but all great journeys start with such small steps.

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collect.kde.org is live!

A quick update to my previous posting about collect.kde.org during the Berlin Desktop summit is in order for two reasons.



First, collect.kde.org is now a fully functional battle station .. er .. Synchrotron installation. Things that are added to the shared sources repository will automatically appear there. As an application (or application add-on) developer, you can quickly and easily set up your own provider and start populating it with items. It takes all of about 2 minutes to set it up. How to do this is documented in the Quick Start section of the README.



Second, we now have three applications using it: KDevelop for API documentation downloads, the share plasmoid for updates to the Javascript backends (covering the case where the web API for any of the services change) and Dr. Konqi (so that its configuration controls to help users generate useful backtraces can be updated over time). Just as exciting, it looks like at least one (non-KDE) application may end up hosting their own Synchrotron instance to service their needs. Cool!



So If your app has data that you wish to control the updates to (as opposed to user-contributed and -curated content, which is better done through opendesktop.org), you may wish to consider using collect.kde.org.



I'm collecting questions developers have as they start using collect.kde.org and will be writing a Techbase page in the future that provides a clear tutorial that covers both the basics and these questions. Don't let the lack of that tutorial stop you though, check out the README and get started.

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system tray icon hiding

To all application developers who create a KStatusNotifierItem in their application, please consider making your icon as friendly to the user through automatic hiding as possible. The system tray is a very valuable bit of real estate and unless your application's entry there is actually useful to the user, it ought to be hidden. KStatusNotifierItem allows you to set the status of your icon to Passive, Active or NeedsAttention. Setting it to Passive will automatically signal the system tray to hide the icon automatically. The user may always override this in the settings, so if they always want it shown .. they can!



Of course, what is the meaning of "useful"? That's the trick here. We're trying to make the system tray as "quiet" as possible for the user so that the entries that do show up are a good signal to the user that they actually matter.



So now the battery icon goes away when the system is plugged in and the battery is at 100% charge and the information icon (jobs and announcements) goes away when it is empty. I've patched a few other applications such a konversation and ktorrent to also go Passive when they aren't actively downloading or there are no message alerts (respectively).



If your application doesn't have something to actually tell the user: set the icon to Passive. The system tray icon is not a replacement for the task bar. (In fact, in 4.8 it is quite likely that application entries will appear in the tasks widget instead of the system tray by default!) There is an exception (as usual ;) which is applications which provide user interface in their system tray entry, such as media players. We generally discourage such usage, but it can make sense in specific cases. Over time, we'd like to see these uses also phased out in favour of merging those interfaces with the relevant UI; media player controls and the volume control, for instance, or instant messaging accesses and a proper presence Plasmoid.

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COSCUP and Taiwan

I arrived back home from the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters (or, more succinctly, COSCUP) yesterday. Staring at the cursor blinking in the big open text box in front of me, it's hard to know where to begin. Really, there is more than I can possibly share in a reasonable amount of space. So I'll try to summarize and keep it to the point.



First off, people would not keep their hands off the tablet running Plasma Active with the Countour user interface. Despite it being alpha software, people loved it. They got the idea of the four essential concepts right away: Activities, Recommendations, Peek (at your running applications) and Launch. Several people asked how they could get one. They also provided me with tons of valuable feedback, some of which we'd already heard before and had on our worklist and others that were new to me. This is great!



The presentations were varied and several were excellent. Even though most were (of course :) in Chinese, many of the slides were in English so I could semi-follow along. The really telling thing, however, was the audience: rooms were full to standing-room-only and the audience was quite evidently fully engaged. The topics were mostly about mobile, server, web and embedded. This is where the attention was, even though there was a laptop in front of nearly individual. We are taking the desktop for granted now (not a bad thing, but a natural stage) and looking into the near future that is around us. We need to keep giving people a great desktop experience, and move forward into the new form factors as well.



I also noticed a few people with tablets and keyboards, using them as lightweight laptops, if in two pieces, when seated at a table. It's another tween-category in the device spectrum, which is going through a fantastic time of differentiation, though it will almost certainly be followed by a period of post-experimentation consolidation.



I met with a number of companies while I was in Taipei, both at COSCUP as well as outside of it. I have a lot of follow up work to do, but having a tablet UI which is a truly open ecosystem and which looks as good as this already does gets us attention and interest. That is shares so much code with the Desktop and Netbook interfaces also fascinates people. There is great potential in these relationship building efforts for KDE in terms of increased support and investment.



I also continued talks started by Armijn about hosting a KDE event in Taipei, possibly alongside COSCUP, next year. Many people affirmed their commitment to help us achieve this, and while we're still working on the details (and will be for a few months yet), I'm confident that we will pull this off. It will be beyond amazing to follow the successes of KDE India in Asia (an example I used many times with people in the local KDE community in Taipei) with a strong KDE event next year! I was highly impressed with the level and efficiency of organization at COSCUP: it's a large event, and it ran very smoothly with a lot of very nice features like on-site lunches (and even some dinners!). The people who can make a KDE event in Taipei a roaring success are there, and now we need to do our part in making sure it comes to fruition.



I also spent time working with people in the area on how to bolster the KDE community there. We held a really nice BoF at the end of the first day (where people kept playing with the tablet some more ;) and, among other things, out of that came the decision to set up a Chinese language section on Planet KDE where people can blog in Chinese. This should be appearing in the very near future and I'll post a follow-up announcement when it goes live.



A few days after COSCUP, I gave a presentation for the local Linux User's Group which was well attended. It was held in the upper floor of a lovely restaurant. People ate dinner together first and then out came the projector and the presentation started. We talked about KDE for a couple of hours, most spent in the Q&A period. We looked at KDE from a community perspective as well as a technological one and examined KDE's past, present and future. I even fixed a small problem live on the projector that we ran into during one particular question and when the `git push` completed successfully after testing the fix, everyone aplauded. That was a very nice experience. Again, people played a lot with the Plasma Active tablet. :)



While I did a lot of working in the 5 days I was there, I did manage to find time to experience the city itself. It is a complex city full of flavor and texture. It was hot and sticky (and rained a few times most intensley), the food was amazing and the people were even better. I exchanged gifts with a few of the people there and, I like to think, made some great new friends that I hope to see again soon. I also took a few hours before my flight left on the last day to visit the National Palace Museum, which has an astounding collection of diplomatic documents, jade, pottery and bronze work. I managed to see a few other sights at night after the business of the given day was over. However, I also learned that it is impossible to really experience this city in such a short time. I passed more gorgeous temples, more markets, more interesting looking shops, more restaurants eminating curious and wonderful odors and more interesting sights than I cared to .. I wish I had had more time.



My take-aways from this trip are, in short:

• We have to get the word out more about our direction on tablets, both within the KDE community and outside of it. Not enough people are aware of what we've been cooking up, and it's time they did. This is a unique offering in the F/OSS space, and compliments our desktop efforts beautifully.



• We also need to work on our HTML5 and Android compatibility stories, starting with deciding what they are.



• I have a lot of follow-up work to do in the coming weeks with people I met. The reach of KDE in Taiwan is in its infancy, and we can improve that situation with attention and outreach.



• I have a lot of business focused writing to do to support our new efforts



• A KDE event in Taipei next year will be wildly successful if we make it happen (and it looks like we can and will)



• I need to go back ;)

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kde email list unsubs

If you, like me, are the administrator of one or more KDE emai lists, you may have recevied a small (or large) flood of emails a few hours ago letting you know that various addresses had been automatically unsubscribed from your list. When I received my share of these emails I grew concerned: why were 80 addresses suddenly axed from the plasma-devel list?



Well, fear and worry not. It's just our sysadmins doing what they do best: making our infrastructure better. The new mailing list server is now handling bounces correctly and if an address bounces too much then it automatically unsubs the address. The mailing list setup on the old and venerable ktown server wasn't doing this, and so stale addresses had piled up over time.



I was relieved to find out that's all it was when I asked in #kde-sysadmin on irc. Whew! :)

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COSCUP day 1

I arrived in Taipei at a bit past nine in the evening yesterday. I had started out at 19:30 CEST the day before, flying through my least favourite airport in Europe (Heathrow), on to Hong Kong and finally here. I got a good five hours sleep after doing the usual evening-before prep work, woke up, showered and had breakfast with John Corbett in the hotel cafe. Then it was off to COSCUP by train.



The metro system here is modern and efficient. I bought a metro card and filled it with NT$100. At the last station we were approached by another conference goer: a Finn who now lives in Taipei and has a company that specializes in MeeGo. They also have offices in Tampere, where I'll be next month. What a small world!



My presentation on KDE's Plasma Active was very well received and the live demo seemed to impress. Many people came up after to ask questions and discuss. I exchange business cards with numerous of these people and with some arranged to talk at greater length after the sessions. There is a real appetite for a truly Free and Open device OS right now, due a variety of factors, and we're bringing exactly that to the table.



Even though we're only in alpha and just starting the polishing and stabilization phase of development for our first release of Plasma Active with Contour, something I made clear to those in attendance, the ExoPC demos definitely made ripples, and perhaps even a few waves.



After meeting with Jos and the OpenSuse guys here in town and discussing how we can arrange for a KDE event in Taipei next year with organizers of this year's event, I wrapped up the day with an extended BoF with KDE contributors and enthusiasts. A couple of translators along with some coders and enthusiastic users attended. We ate pizza and talked about KDE. They asked questions and I did my best to answer them accurately and to the point. I did a little KDE trivia quiz and handed out some Swiss delights (chocolates, cheese) to people who came up with the best answers. Then we huddled around my WeTab and explored Contour together.



I got back to the hotel sometime after nine, twenty four hours (and a bit) after I had first arrived in the country. I could feel the energy the day had taken out of me, but I also felt elated at the progress that was made and the wonderful people I had the opportunity to meet.



I decided to reward myself by wandering down to a night market in the area where I hunted about the various stalls for some food. I had a pancake wrap thing that was quite delicious but it wasn't for a few hundred more meters until I struck true gold: a small wheeled cart parked next to a wok half filled with oil. An old wisened woman stood behind the cart which was filled with trays holding various ingredients: tempura vegetables (some of which I'm not sure I know exactly what they were..), mushrooms, tofus and seafood. I picked out three of the most interesting looking vegetables, which she measured out and then dropped into the hot oil. They bubbled away for a minute or so and then she drained them and coated them in a wonderful spicy powder.



I picked up a Taiwan Beer, to see if it is as disappointing as Armijn keeps telling me it is ;) , and wandered on home in the wet heat of the night and digging into this huge bag of wonderful, deep fried, spicy vegetable wonderness. I'm back at the hotel, still have some left and just cracked open the beer to calm the riot in my mouth.



What an excellent end to a first day here. I get up about six hours to do it all over again tomorrow. I can't wait.

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the circle is small

Yesterday I added virtual keyboard support to konsole: select the text area and the software keyboard, if any, appears. This frees me from having to lug around a keyboard with my tablet just to do command line stuff. It was a small patch, nothing fancy, really. Took me maybe 10 minutes.



Today I `zypper dup`d my tablet to get the latest packages and to my wonderment there was a new konsole package. After it installed, I started up konsole and sure enough: on screen keyboard delight!



Less than 24 hours from development to deployment: I wrote and tested it on my laptop yesterday, this morning it is on my tablet which only has packages (to keep it semi-sane for demos and user testing). What more could a developer dream for?



Suse's OBS, which we are using for these things, absolutely rocks. And with this tool enabling their passion, Sebastian and the other Plasma Active packagers are quite simply rocking the house and helping keep the development-deployment-testing-feedback circle small and tight.



Beautiful.

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Taiwan, or: no rest for the weary

Tomorrow evening I leave to participate in the Conference for Open Source Coders, Users and Promoters, or COSCUP, in Teipei, Taiwan. I will be presenting on Plasma Active and helping spread the KDE and Qt story (and love!) while I am there.



My presentation will be in the second conference room at 11:30 on the first day of the conference, the 20th. I will be laying out the concepts behind Plasma Active, the four elements of the Contour shell and wrapping up with a live demo. All in 30 minutes. It has become an exercise in cutting away everything that can be, but no more, in a drive for clarity with impact. :)



There will be a meet-up of KDE enthusiasts on the evening of the 20th in form of a KDE User's BoF which I will be attending. If you are in the area and are a fan of KDE or just interested in what we do, please join us!



I'll also be around for a few extra days meeting with various people, though I do still have some spaces in my schedule which I plan to fill as I meet people at the conference.



A big thank-you to KDE e.V. for their support in this endeavour, to COSCUP for the opportunity to present and to Armijn for helping make so many vital connections in all this.

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every new beginning

The Berlin Desktop Summit was a roaring success from my experience at it. We, as they say, pushed forward on all fronts: cross-project collaboration, KDE Frameworks (the next major version of KDE's libraries and runtime requirements), application development and, of course near to my heart, our Plasma workspaces.



We had a lot of opportunity to work on Plasma Active things, including a BoF in which we combed over the various elements in the Contour shell and beyond to come up with a very nice set of issues that need working on. This is critical as we've moved past feature addition in the UI and are now focussing on polishing for the next ~2 months which will lead up to the release of Plasma Active One.



This is a perfect time to get involved as a developer, especially as a few hundred more of those who attended the Desktop Summit have ExoPC devices. ;) We've built a very big wiki page housing our task list and will be triaging this list to something more workable than .. well .. a giant wiki page. So there is lots to do and much of it is a "low hanging fruit", which is usually the sort of thing those just getting started find easiest and most rewarding to work on. If you'd like to join us and take on one of the open tasks, visit us in #active on irc or send an email to active at kde.org.



Of course, with all the activity around Active, I got the innevitable complaints from some that we weren't paying enough attention to the desktop. I found this personally a little frustrating for a number of reasons that can be best summarized as "that doesn't match reality".



I fixed a number of bugs while at the Desktop Summit, all of them for Plasma Desktop. I've personally spent more time on Plasma Desktop issues than Plasma Active so that our desktop shell does not bit rot. I'd love more hands helping there, and we do get regular patch submissions from new faces fairly regularly. In addition, I've been putting significant efforts into libplasma2, which is what underpins all of our shells, particularly Plasma Desktop.



All keep in mind that we've worked on the desktop and netbook shells over the last ~four years. We've spent less than four months now with some of our resources (not all!) on Active. This is not a zero-sum game, either: Plasma Active has brought us new resources we would not have had without it, such as our interaction designer Fania who comes to us by way of Basyskom thanks to Eva's interest and involvement.



Moreover, a good portion of the work going into Plasma Active also helps out the other workspace shells due to the amount of infrastructure and code shared between the shells. This is part and parcel of the design of Plasma: a way to affordably create purpose-specific shells through code and design reuse.



Finally, ignoring the device space would be eventual suicide. The future absolutely contains the desktop (sales are still growing for desktop and laptops, by-the-by), but it will be augmented by devices which people will increasingly expect to work together. Their choices in one category will (and already do) affect their choices for other form factors: my choice in tablet may affect my choice in laptop.



On top of all the logical argumentation, there's also the fact that it's fun and enjoyable work. It's important to me to keep our Plasma project injected with joy and fun. It keeps people motivated and moving, it gives life greater meaning, it makes it more worth doing.



Since I've wandered this far off topic, I may as well say something that often comes into my mind while working with my fellow Plasmaters: we feel like much more than just a team of people banging out code next to one another; we're good friends and supports, an understanding and gracious support for all our dreams and efforts. It's not often in life one gets to be a part of something like that, and I am quite grateful to be a part of it.

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Getting Plasma Active on your tablet

Want to get Plasma Active on your tablet device? We'd like to help you.



Join us on IRC in #plasma-active #active on Tuesday, July August 16 at 14:00 UTC or Friday, July August 19 at 12:00 UTC and we will hook up with a choice of operating system that gets you with Plasma Active on your device ready to use and ready to contribute.



See you then!



Update: That's what I get for pounding out a last minute entry on the way out of the appartment. Yes, it is August (not July) and #active (not #plasma-active) .. :)

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collect.kde.org

I am about to leave Berlin to go back home for almost an entire week before heading off agian to Taiwan. While visiting wiht my good friends Marco and Sebas over beer I finished installing Synchrotron on the server the amazing (and award winning!) KDE sys admin team allocated it for.



Synchrotron is a simple way to offer Open Collaboration Services on top of a git repository. You commit to the git repository and in a few minutes time (configurable) Synchrotron will add it to the OCS service. Plasma will be using this to ensure that we can update Javascript addons on the fly. This is most important when online services change, such as how the BBC UK Met weather service changes the other year. KDevelop will be using it to offer single click downloads of API documentation.



There is a lot of ways that Synchrotron could be made even beter, such as internationalization based on HTTP requests or supporting multiple git repositories for the sources.



In any case, for KDE software: if you have an application that could use a way to push new or updated data or content (Javascript, documents, data, etc.) you can put your data into the synchrotron-sources repository and they will magically show up via OCS ready for integration with your application's GUI using the KNewStuff library. Let me know if you need any help getting started. :)



This is a very nice way to end my time here at the amazingly productive Berlin Desktop Summit. I'm leaving with a smile on my face.



Oh, and did I mention that we fixed (or at least we're 99% sure it's fixed) the bug in the taskbar which causes blank spaces to show up when using "Only show windows on the current desktop"? Turns out it was also possible to duplicate with other similar "Only show ..." features. Thanks to Alex Fiestas for pushing on me to fix it. It's one of the half dozen or so annoyances that I fixed, added to the innumerable ones others fixed, in KDE software while here at Berlin Desktop Summit.



All while we move forward with Frameworks 5.0. All while Plasma Active is looking better than ever on hardware like the ExoPC Intel gave out the other day: it took one evening to install it and work out kinks to get it to an easily usable and demoable state.



This is an amazingly exciting moment in our community. 2012 here we come!

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Important Announcement Coming Today at Desktop Summit

Today at 17:30 there is a panel presentation here at Berlin Desktop Summit that is unfortunately titled "KDE Platform 4 Roadmap" and the schedule says I'm presenting it. This was submitted prior to the Platform 11 meeting in Randa so it could make the speaking schedule here at the Desktop Summit. At the time I didn't know what precisely we'd decide on at Platform 11 .. and the title reflects that.

What I did know was that we would want to communicate the results (whatever they would be) from Platform 11. That is in fact what we will be doing. Better yet, I will be joined by David Faure, Kevin Ottens and Stephen Kelly in doing so.

Interestingly, however, the presentation will not be about KDE Platform 4. It will be about KDE Frameworks 5.0.

Yes, you read that right. Coming out of Platform 11, we have a roadmap for the next major releast of KDE's libraries and runtime requirements. The emphasis is on modularity, dependency clarity / simplification and increasing quality to the next level. Our goal is to give us better tools for desktop app development, give our KDE mobile projects a leg up and make KDE's libraries something that Qt developers can and will use.

There are many steps to get there: reexamining what is in KDE's libraries that ought to be in Qt proper; dividing up the libraries along the lines of the new organizational charts we've drawn up at Platform 11 and subsequently presented on kde-core-devel, etc.

We do not wish to introduce anything highly disruptive, however. As with Qt5, we want this to be a mostly-under-the-hood set of work. We will be taking this opportunity to adopt some new technologies behind the scenes to increase interoperability, such as introducing a Secret Service implementation that can phase out KWallet. (Yes, we have automated migration code ...)

Application development will not be pausing as we do this: releases every six months of application improvements will continue based on the 4.x codebase. When Frameworks gets to the point where it is ready for serious banging on, then we will start repurposing our highlight applications to the new codebase. We don't want application development to be held up by the library development, and we don't want the library development to create much, if any, need for "porting" application code. We want "just recompile and test" to be the common case, with whatever changes do become necessary to be of the simple and even automatable sort.

If this sounds rather different from how we approached 4.0, that's because it is. The requirements, needs and context for this release are utterly different. We're after evolutionary improvement and broadening our developer ecosystem, and our plans therefore need to, and in our opinion do, reflect that.

We will be communicating these developments over the next months in more official and comprehensive means than this personal blog entry written while I'm sitting in presentations at the Desktop Summit. ;) However, I wanted to make sure people knew what was coming in our presentation and hopefully motivate people to therefore show up and participate!

So one more time: Today at 17:30 in our panel discussion in Kinosaal room at the Desktop Summit we will be discussing the plans for Frameworks 5.0 in detail, taking questions and entertaining the thoughts shared by those who come. Be one of those people! :)

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more minimalist panels, off to berlin

Yesterday I cleaned up a few bugs in the system tray, particularly with how it was refusing to resize smaller after icons would automatically hide. In the process I cleaned up a few other issues I noticed; e.g. I made the notifications icon autohide by default and got rid of the vertical line which was looking more and more vestigal as the rest of the chrome around it had been ripped away. The bug fixes will be in 4.7.1, some of the visual changes will only be in 4.8.

This follows rather nicely in the steps of work we did for the Plasma Desktop 4.7 relesae in making things a bit cleaner and easier to get around. Yes, we added a button for the activity manager to expose that more, but we cleared up a number of other things. In fact, that's what prompted me to take ten minutes out of my day today to write this blog: I read a user comment lamenting virtual desktops and how they don't like to use them. This was a problem for them due to some other desktop environments being increasingly tied to virtual desktops as part of critical workflow. Which reminded me of a little thing we did for 4.7: if you have only one virtual desktop (or, put another way: you don't use them), then pager in the panel disappears. If you change your mind later and bump the number of virtual desktops up, the pager reappears. This elminates the oddness of having a pager with just one virtual desktop on your panel.

Also related to the pager is some work Martin put into KWin recently: starting in 4.8 KWin will define the layout of the virtual desktops. Previously, and as is documented in the NETWM spec, this is up to the pager. This made sense back then: everyone had a pager, and probably only one, and the window manager didn't do nearly as much with window presentation as modern compositing window managers do. Today, it makes little sense. You can have multiple pagers and the window manager exposes virtual desktops in all sorts of ways through desktop effects. So, we've moved that functionality to the window manager, which makes things simpler and more consistent.

One other small thing we did in 4.7 on the panel is make the default launchers in the taskbar for file manager and web browser follow your prefered applications as set in the system settings. Which means we have one configuration that we ship, but it matches what you want. Including if you change your mind later. Since they share space intelligently with the tasks, it means less space used: when the app is running, the launcher goes away. (Btw, a bug in 4.7.0 around that feature has been fixed for 4.7.1, so if that isn't working for you properly, the fix is just a patch level update away.)

Merging application system tray icons with task entries is only on the roadmap for 4.8. Yes, I know: FINALLY! :) All of these efforts to streamline and simplify are making for a more polished result. It isn't all just trimming and rearranging, however: I plan on adding Share Like Connect to the panel by default as well. We will be working on these things in various BoFs and hacking rooms over the next week in Berlin.

Speaking of which .. I've finished packing for the Berlin Desktop Summit and am working on my presentation now until I head down to Zürich HB to board the night train. I have my football boots, a WeTab, a PandaBoard, collections of various cables, writing books and the necessary amount of clothing for the week there. I can't wait to see everyone there, listen to the talks, collaborate with people that I only get to see in person every year or two, hack until my fingers bleed and my body demands sleep and, of course, karaoke in Alexanderplatz. It's going to be amazing.

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wetabirific

Last week, I received a WeTab, hansomely provided into my care by the folks at OpenSLX so that I can track Plasma Active development on that device. Getting it set up was quite straight forward, particularly as the one I received already had firmware that supported booting from external media. Perfect. After a few small glitches related to the release of Plasma Workspaces 4.7, which caused some of the repositories to move around for us, I got the thing up and running. There are still some rough edges, and I'm hoping Sebastian and I can huddle together during the upcoming Berlin Desktop Summit to file some of them off as he probably currently has more experience with the WeTab and Plasma Active than anyone else.

One result of having the WeTab in my hands is that I've been able to start collecting a list of tasks that need attention between now and the 1.0 release of Contour. It's also giving me great hands-on opportunities with Plasma Active on a device of this form factor.

The WeTab itself has more than enough horsepower to drive the system and the battery life isn't too bad either. What things I do find odd are the result of some understandable design trade-offs. For instance, the screen size is huuuge compared to other mainstream tablets. This makes it awesome for reading books, watching videos and other types of media consumption. It also makes it rather less portable than the 7" tablets out there, to say the least, and it also costs on battery life (which is still in the satisfactory range, however). It's intel based and not really what I'd call "perfect for tablets" hardware: it has a cooling fan in it for instance.

All the quirks aside, it's a terrific platform for developing and testing Plasma Active with and I think it hints at some really interesting potential use cases. The screen is big enough and high quality enough to be used as a desktop. One our first stable release of Plasma Active is out, I want to explore the interesting possibility of "mult-form-factor" devices with it. Namely, I'd like to be able to put it in a cradle on my desktop with a wireless keyboard and mouse (which I already have and which work great with it as expected) and use it with Plasma Desktop. When I remove it from the desk and take it with me to the, say, the living room or off on a train ride, I'd like it to switch seamlessly to the touch-friendly Plasma Tablet interface with Contour. While the WeTab has a built-in screen that would be suitable for both, smaller tablets and even smaller pocketable devices (e.g. phones) don't and that then brings in the idea of a device that can drive a second larger display when docked and show Plasma Desktop on that external display.

There are already a couple of devices on the market that have experimented with this "mobile when you take it with you, a desktop experience when you dock it" idea, though to my knowledge none have yet really taken off. However, as tablets continue to improve both power consumption and compute muscle, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a sizeable market of people who would prefer to have just one computer that can switch between modes.

For now, however, I'm focussed on detailing what is left to do to make Plasma Active ready for release. I'll be bringing my list with me to the Berlin Desktop Summit and once we've BoF'd on it, I'll share the tasks, particularly the "low hanging fruit", so that it will not only be documented but so that people who would like to get involved have easy and well-defined entry points into KDE's foray into mobile.

Once again, a big "thank you!" to OpenSLX for their belief in this project and for putting their support behind it with time, effort and investment.

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new Plasma Active repos

If you are having issues with software updates with Plasma Active, the reason is that the repositories have changed around a bit with the release of Plasma Workspaces 4.7. Such is life in a pre-release project of this scope. We've documented the new repositories on the wiki in the Repository Setup section.

For quick reference, if you already have an installation, do the following:

zypper rr kusc
zypper rr plasma-active
zypper addrepo --refresh http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/47/openSUSE_11.4 kr47
zypper addrepo --refresh http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Active/openSUSE_11.4/ plasma-active
zypper mr --priority 90 plasma-active
zypper dup

Things should be back to good again after that.

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BDS: a focus on leadership

You may have noticed in my last blog entry on Plasma content at the Berlin Desktop Summit (BDS) that I'm not giving a Plasma-related presentation. I'm helping with the BoFs, yes, but no Plasma related presentation in sight from me. What gives?

Well, the presentation schedule was highly oversubscribed this year, which is a good thing: it shows there is a high degree of interest in BDS and allowed the program committee to pick high quality presentations for the program. Knowing this was the case, and since we already have several others who will be presenting great talks on Plasma and related technology, I decided to submit a presentation on a different topic ... one that I felt needed attention but which gets far too little.

That topic is leadership. There is a lot of mythology and misinformation around the idea of leadership in Free software. (I would assert: in the broader world as well.)

For instance, leadership is not the same as community management, which is a related topic that probably recieves more than its useful share of coverage these days, driven by the number of community managers we have in Free software circles and that their job is communication focused to begin with.

Leadership is not something one is either born with or without. It is a set of skills that nearly anyone can learn. In fact, they can be learned to the point where they can be usefully applied without dedicating one's life to the topic of leadership. This means that every Free software project can end up with effective leadership.

Leadership is also not relegated to the two most popular archetypes in Free software: the (benevolent) dictator and the charismatic individual. These styles of leadership can and do work (with their own challenges, of course), but are more difficult to achieve for many and are also often liabilities in the wrong circumstances.

So it is that many of our communities and teams drift without clear leadership. For small projects, either in terms of team size or project scope, this is not a big issue and even without identifiable leadership such teams can and do thrive. However, more and more of our projects have crossed over that critical threshhold where leadership becomes a necessity, and without it they end up losing direction, underachieving, becoming contentious and even failing.

Given that leadership is learnable and can be easily put into practice, this is a shame. This was my motivation for submitting a talk on leadership. I will be presenting on one style of leadership, which I call "Navigators and Explorers", which I feel anyone in our community can easily pick up and have great success with. My goal is to bring down some of the misconceptions around leadership and hopefully describe an achievable, positive path that those who attend may choose to travel down with the goal of becoming effective leaders themselves.

If you are in a Free software project that could use leadership but lacks it, if you are in a project that does have leadership but which is increasingly disfunctional, if you are just interested in the idea of leadership in general, I invite you to join me for half an hour on Day 1 in the Audimax at 14:40 for an exploration of the topic.

I hope to see you there :)

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shout out to dolphin

Peter Penz blogged this morning about the new views in Dolphin, dubbed "Dolphin 2.0". The big push: speed. The code is now in master, so I figured I should try it out and see what this very new code can do. I expected regressions and bugs given that this is the first drop of a huge bunch of code, but was hoping for the performance improvements Peter was talking about.

It just so happens that less than two weeks ago I did some rough measurements of file listing performance in Dolphin (and Konqueror; they share the code for this) after reading a posting about how bad file listing times in popular Linux file managers were. The writer had asserted that unlike say, on Microsoft Windows where large directories list almost instantly, both KDE's and GNOME's file managers were very slow on directories with a lot of entries.

Indeed, with previews on Dolphin would take up to 15 seconds to list directories with 3000-5000 entries in them, as /usr/bin and /usr/lib on my laptop do. Ugh. Certainly not great.

After pulling the new code from git and trying it out: I'm now getting between 1 and 2 second load times for these same directories. That means the difference between horrifically unusable and beautiful. It also means that Dolphin and Konqueror are now faster at listing directories than the file dialog, which now takes about twice as long on these larger directories.

Peter: my hat is off to you!

There are some regressions in the current code drop: no rubber banding, clicking on white space then release on an icon will activate it, no drag and drop, no icon overlays, scrolling with the mouse wheel or track pad (I die a little inside without my two-finger scrolling :) is very slow. So if you go to use it now, expect some steps backwards in the functionality department, but these should all be resolved before 4.8 comes out with this new view engine.

Also important is that Peter paid a lot of attention to making the code much easier for people to understand and contribute to. So if things like "awesomely faster and clearer code" turn you on and you'd like to help make KDE's filemanager rock like Freddy Mercury with a mic in his hands, now is a perfect opportunity to get in there.

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