Friday on LinuxTag

As some of you might know, I attended the LinuxTag in my parents' town Berlin.
I arrived on thursday to meet some people from KDAB and Intevation who announced the first release of Kontact on Windows as well.
I have been meeting a lot of new people from all over KDE project, but especially three people I was rather surprised about:
First was of course Aaron who was the party bundle all day but fell asleep just one minute before we had to leave the S-Bahn-train ;-) -
then of course the new employee from KDE e.V. Claudia who is really a win for KDE community -
and Alexander Neundorf (yes the one who always rejects the cmake macros;-)). Alexander really will look into every detail for you and I think that besides that cmake improves our productivity a lot I think that Alex is doing a great job as well.

Ok, and as usual to give a small impression:

MarbleTalk: How to build Marble on Windows

As you all might know I am a marblehead since some time now. As I am working most of my time on windows and I have put quite some effort into improving the build system I will now give a short introduction of how to build Marble here.

1) Set up the build environment according to the techbase wiki page. This needs some thoughts and a bit of free space (measuring in GB!!!).
2) If you're ready just emerge one of the three packages "kdeedu", "marble-kde" or "marble-qt" e.g.

emerge marble-kde

The emerge scripts will take care of all the dependencies for you. If you only need the qt-only version, just use the "marble-qt" package.
3) Look at Marble, look into the far remotest parts of the world and of course have a look at the OpenStreetMap maps in Marble (go into the Map View part on the right side and switch to OpenStreetMap).

KOffice the second

As I have not thought about linking the way to get KOffice on Windows in the last post, I will change that now:
First get the kdewin-installer from winkde.org, then choose the package KOffice and all its dependencies will be installed automatically. As I haven't checked the install location of the libraries (thanks Jarosław for fixing that) you have to set your PATH to both the bin\ and the lib\ folder of your install directory (or you copy over all the dll's to the bin folder).
So far for now, for all other questions I am available on irc and on the mailing list of course.

KOffice Alpha

A bit late but together with the new 4.0.74 snapshot Christian built the KOffice alpha 7 package for the first time now.
This is especially important to me as I was working on that part already for a longer time now. And because the KOffice release is still some time ahead, I think we can get ready to build every release of KOffice from now on - Windows is going to be just another platform and become more and more supported (and of course less and less buggy;-)).
Amarok will be the next hard case but I hope I can fix that maybe until akademy too.

One step beyond(*)

Ok, after roughly one week out in the countryside again I came home yesterday and today I started my efforts again to bring KDE to compile with the brand new mingw-gcc 4.3 alpha version. Even though it has been feared that mingw-gcc might lag even further behind, the new maintainer Aaron William LaFramboise brought out a rather new release. As Aaron is a GSoC-student as I am, we can work together even better.
But now towards the facts that might interest the KDE on Windows Community:
I could build Qt with two patches and I had to disable webkit.
This first patch was due to a missing extern declaration in one sourcefile, the second one was a bit strange since it required using uint instead of quint32. The errors with webkit were not easily solveable so I will investigate them further especially as strigi fails on a similar error too. Currently I think that this is a more a mingw error but I might be wrong in the end.

To give you a more general outline:
I plan to work on mingw4 from time to time so that I will have a running KDE from mingw4 by the time KDE 4.1 gets released. KDE 4.2 should be buildable with mingw4 too and probably for KDE 4.3 we will switch completely away from mingw 3.*.

Right now I will start my GSoC project on marble so most of my time will be coding again.

So long for now, new posts will probably come in more regularly.


(*) 'One step beyond' is a song by the british ska formation Madness and just came to my mind after I got Qt building.