news weekly

finally 4.7.0

2011-09-03T10:15:00.000+02:00

Weeks after we started, we finally managed to get out the KDE 4.7.0 release.Only after TheOneRing asked me several times about a new release (either a last 4.6 release or the 4.7.0 one), I finally gave in and told him what I know about the KDE on Windows release process... We needed quite a while to get most packages building again, very likely because our buildserver was stopped already some months ago due to lack of maintainance time. Also the splitting of the kdeedu & kdegraphics packages had not been done when we did our last release (KDE SC 4.5). But now we added new buildscripts and fixed our packaging scripts so now we welcome more packages to be split up (kdesdk or kdegames perhaps?).

Since I couldn't put everything into the release announcement, I want to add some more stuff over here:

Our release contains the latest version of Digikam (which is 2.0.0)
Also, there are now both skrooge and kmymoney available.
besides the kdepim package, we also ship a beta version of zanshin, a todo application based on akonadi.
a small but still nice scanning application is skanlite, which just works...
also contained are Amarok 2.4.3, Kile, Quassel, Konversation, KRegExpEditor and KRecipes.

If you want to have other packages available, ask us and we will try to make that possible. Also, if you are maintainer of an application and you would like to see your application available on windows, we can surely make that happen.

Desktop summit midtime summary

2011-08-08T14:10:00.003+02:00

Ok, the first 3 days of desktop summit have passed, I met a lot of old friends, met some new people, looked into some issues in several projects, went to the parties....

One of the things that comes to my mind from time to time is software accessibility, so I heart both the talks of Frederik Gladhorn about Qt accessibility and Peter Grasch about simon, a voice recognition software. He already provides a windows installer (based on KDE on Windows), so now I am trying to integrate simon into emerge so that it can be distributed both within the KDE on Windows installer and with a self contained NSIS installer.

The second thing I looked at was skrooge, I fixed some build errors and so I expect that skrooge will be in the next KDE on Windows release. Which actually also brings me to the next point:

The next binary release is near, at the moment we are preparing the release, update the 3rdparty libraries, cleaning up our buildserver etc. (well, it is mostly TheOneRing doing it - a big thank you over here). In a couple of days we will start again the builds, so binaries will be there in some weeks time too. We are not yet sure which software we package, I will probably announce this again, if you have special wishes, please let us know on our mailing list: kde-windows@kde.org or here in the comments.

update

2011-06-23T20:00:00.000+02:00

Nearly half a year after my last blog post I just thought I would share some news with you.
First of all I became father of a cute boy in february - which limits my time (especially for KDE) quite a lot. Because of this I thought about stopping my work for KDE on Windows completely but I couldn't really live without it ;-).
This also means that our build server slowly stopped working in the past months. This is partly due to size constraints (one of the buildprocesses filled its quantum again) and due to a bug in jom which will only happen after quite some time.

One of the questions that comes up quite often is when we will have another binary release. The current plan is to release KDE 4.7.0 more or less together as all the Linux distributions and maybe add another release of KDE 4.7.X later this year.

Another big issue for us is the transition of our emerge build scripts to git. This brings multiple things with it that are no easy-to-solve questions:
At the moment we recommend that you install a svn client (e.g. TortoiseSVN is my personal choice) and checkout emerge. One of the ideas that came up were that we could easily distribute our scripts from now on as a tarballed git repository (and maybe bundle it with git & python executables).

At the moment emerge uses different categories for different minor versions of KDE, e.g. kde-4.X/kdelibs etc. With Git, we want to move that (at least in the future) into branches of emerge; This would make it possible to easily build & develop older versions of KDE without interfering with more up to date KDE builds.

Together with PovAddict, I already started some tests for the git transition (he ran the scripts etc, and I tested it ;-)) but we came across a problem that is probably singular to us:
KDE git repositories do not allow crlf files inside the repo so we need to translate all of our files to lf EOLs on the server. In our checkout, we need to have some files as crlf (think of batch files and patches) and some files as lf only (the python stuff). My guess at the moment is that we should turn

core.autocrlf=false

(which we already do) and at the same time add a .gitattributes file which contains

*.cmd eol=crlf

or something like that (if you have more ideas, please let me hear them).

So far for now, more information, especially on our google summer of code project this year (which is about the kdewin-installer). hopefully later.

a new compiler error

2010-12-08T01:20:00.004+01:00

While I am currently trying to get KDE on Windows up to a releasable state again (nearly done ;-)), I found an interesting compiler error with the new Visual Studio version (2010):


...
class Andere;

class Klasse {
    public:
        Klasse() : bc(NULL, NULL){
        }
    private:
        std::pair<Andere*, Andere*> bc;
};
...

Why could the above fail? Right, because NULL is not of type class Andere. (That works on the other compilers we have...)

sprint

2010-06-05T16:38:00.005+02:00

Ok, long time no blogpost, but now that we speak about it at our KDE Windows sprint in Osnabrück, I'll try to make up a new blogpost.
Lots of discussions are going on here since a lot of time has passed since the last meeting in 2007, I will try to sum them up in a later point in a dot story.
As you can see from the picture below, the very minute we started the sprint, the sun came out.
Finally after bad preparation from my point we still managed to find together:

back: Patrick Spendrin, Ilie Halip, André Heinecke
middle: Patrick von Reth, Ralf Habacker, Romain Pokrzywka
front: Bernhard Reiter, Andreas Holzammer

2010-01-07T01:20:00.007+01:00

Well, since Aaron raised one or two issues, I'll take the time to blog again.

Our primary goal for KDE on Windows is easy installability and a complete and stable KDE on the Windows platform. So the question is - where do we start?

Aaron mentions that our installer seems to be way more complicated than installing Linux and that a simple fire and forget installer is far better for a broader audience.

This is probably true and was already part of some discussions. The task of rewriting the packaging format is also not the biggest part. More tricky is the problem of updating the core package, which would then contain quite a lot of smaller libraries which are now handled by the installer. And the second point is: If you want to install more than one package, you might find a package manager far more convenient (on a side note: it is near to impossible to use the .exe installers as packages from inside the kdewin-installer). This part of course gets less important if you want to install just Amarok or just Digikam.

The second point Aaron brings up is how we see ourselves. Aaron says that it could bring a lot more for KDE if we see ourselves as the ones to deliver the libraries for other application developers and at the same time be our own consumers (in our role as the ones who deliver the applications).

The equivalent model would be the java runtime environment vs. java applications. I have been thinking about this model already for quite a while and it never really has vanished. On the other hand I must say that I think the priority is wrong. Until recently an external KDE application was not compilable out of the box on top of our packages (thanks go to Alex Neundorf for fixing it). A whole lot of shiny new KDE technology has no working backends under Windows (think of solid) or is really unstable (phonon). There are really basic bugs like you cannot copy files from one drive to another (recently fixed in kio_file), and last but not least on a lot of corners you don't have any system integration for your applications (this is somewhat similar problem to the missing backends). Personally I consider those issues far more pressing because I benefit from fixing those issues when using KDE applications.

On a more personal level now as it is already getting late:
One of the funny things is the usage of the word 'we' in and around KDE on Windows. This can have multiple different meanings: All the folks working on Windows (which excludes people not working on Windows), the people that distribute their software via the installer (excluding KDAB which uses a single installer for kontact), and not to forget the 'we' Aaron uses where he includes himself. That there is a difference between the first two has been made obvious here but I think those issues have been solved now more or less. The third 'we' is a general KDE one and sometimes also looks from outside: If 'we' have to change our way of thinking, then it is of course not the 'we' including Aaron who has to do something but the other two 'we'.

Enough ranting for now.

KDE Imaging Sprint

2009-11-16T13:51:00.002+01:00

I just wanted to say that I returned home from KDE imaging sprint now and want to say thank you again to our host and the organizer of the event Marcel Wiesweg. We got quite a lot of coding done, some errors in Digikam and the kipi plugins have been fixed on Windows, so it was a really positive sprint. Some fixes are still waiting to be committed. I met some people I didn't knew in person before, which was really interesting too.
So all in all, a good sprint and I am looking forward to next years imaging sprint in France ;-).

yokadi on windows

2009-11-04T23:35:00.004+01:00

While reading planet KDE a bit I somehow got caught by Aurélien's release announcement for Yokadi, "the command-line driven, geek friendly, sqlite backed TODO list". I was in need of such a tool already for quite some time, and so began to look at it.
First of all Yokadi is written in python using an sqlite database, which is basically the size I was looking for. Also it makes it possible to run also on windows... In the README it says that Mac OS X and Windows should work but haven't been tested and so I started my way through it.

To make it possible for more people to use this application I want to document what I needed to do to get yokadi working on Windows:

Install the python setuptools if you haven't done so yet. After the installation you might need to adjust your PATH to include the Scripts folder of your python installation so that the easy_install.exe is included.

get pyreadline, sqlobject and dateutils by simply running easy_install[PACKAGENAME]. Make sure you have svn.exe in your path for pyreadline. Except for this requirement, everything went smooth so far.

Now get the yokadi sources with git. I needed to add a patch, so make sure this patch is already contained in your yokadi sources. I send this patch to the mailing list and hope it gets committed soon.

After you made sure about the patch, run setup.py install from the commandline. This will install yokadi as a python site-package.

Set the EDITOR variable if you don't have vi.exe in your path. I installed the commandline version of vim for that: set EDITOR="C:\Program Files\vim\vim72\vim.exe".

To not add a HOME variable to my local environment, I made a yokadi.bat which basically sets the environment variable HOME to the directory where I want to store the database (and the history file) and then calls the yokadi python script in the scripts folder.

I haven't tried the yokadid daemon which is supposed to notify you about due dates: both because I don't like such notifications and as well because at least the master version looks suspiciously Unix-only ;-).
So far I am really pleased by yokadi, it matches my way to work (yes I use the windows cmd.exe a lot!) and I hope I can get rid of all those .todo files now :-D.

git web

2009-10-21T02:19:00.004+02:00

As you might know I also work on Linux machines from time to time and so I tried to set up a git server on a local machine. After two hours trying to set up gitweb I simply gave up (That costed me a lot of nerdpoints as casper pointed out correctly!). Today I invested another hour into gitweb until I finally came to the conclusion that whoever writes such a bad documentation, doesn't want any users. So I decided to search again for something else:
There are various pages where alternative projects are listed, and after having tried git-php which is either not accessible (probably a self hosted git server) or which doesn't work as well, I finally came across viewgit. ViewGit's claim is 'to be easy to set up and upgrade, light on dependencies, and comfortable to use.'. Which it really is. The point is not only that there exists a rather good documentation in the source code (as you would like to have it), there is a readable README which also tells you what to do and if you try to access it before it redirects you to the README. All in all this is what I wanted & needed - it took me less than 10 minutes to set up. Kudos to the developers.

This is what I expect from open source software. Why is the rest so crappy?

build server web

2009-10-09T16:17:00.005+02:00

It is not new anymore that we got a build server which runs windows and regularly builds KDE on Windows. But from now on we have a webinterface for the build server which for now can be found under http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/dashboard/ . This means that build results can now be tracked more easily. This goes as far as having the complete logfile for the build available, basically the same you would have if you'd build on your own.

The advent of the web interface also means a second feature I will hopefully set online this weekend: nightly packages which always return the latest state of KDE. And I also have planned some more features: rss feeds for each package & for all packages, a history for each package (so you can check when an error has been introduced, etc.) and of course an improved error searching algorithm (it currently only uses the last 20 lines from the complete log as summary).

And last some pictures: Some of the stuff that doesn't build on the right side is my fault, but of course not everything:

new windows nightly builds and a question about nepomuk on windows

2009-09-24T04:00:00.006+02:00

I don't want to make a big announcement out of it, just so you know: I just set up a nightly build server for KDE on Windows in the last days, which is supposed to build all our KDE packages on a regular schedule. Thanks to Qt Development Frameworks for providing the server and especially to Maurice and Danimo.

The server currently comes with a mailing list where broken packages are announced (kde-winbuild) and I hope I can provide a web page soon similar to this one. I hope this will make it easier to see build errors early and will make the life easier here on windows.

One other thing I fell upon is nepomuk and its companions soprano and strigi. Since I was asked about it and I couldn't answer (because I never came accross it!) I decided to take a look at it. The problem I found is that under windows, the indexing part (strigi) is nearly completely disabled - this also makes clear why no errors occur. Which in turn makes also clear that soprano and nepomuk might work, but since there is no index at all, the two do not really seem to make any sense.

So what can we do?

we could try and fix strigi. This seems like a lot of work, since a lot of the strigi code is written without Qt support - using fork, sockets and some more non-portable stuff.

we could disable nepomuk and rely on the build-in Windows search - this minimizes the work, which can be spend on other targets (solid, plasma etc.) then.

If by chance the windows developer base increases by a high percentage, we could reenable nepomuk then - or if we have nothing else to do anymore.

Personally I tend to fix strigi, but what do you think?

No more hungry evenings!

2009-09-20T05:16:00.005+02:00

Just some minutes ago I got krecipes compiling here under windows - after just a few changes (What else would you expect!). Ok, it crashed because our mysql packages are not the best, I might have to improve those, but with sqlite it worked quite well (though a bit slow).

Just to give a small impression:

To say the truth, I was never really hungry, but perhaps this program makes me cook a bit more often? - Lets see.

Summertime

2009-08-24T22:23:00.003+02:00

For those of you who haven't seen it yet, KDE on Windows made another release (only some days after the official release date - it is just me who needed nearly two weeks to blog about it ;-)). We introduced two "new" compilers, first of all Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0 Express Edition and second MinGW gcc 4.4.0. There are still some drawbacks when using MinGW 4, but we hope that we can fix those soon and then we can drop the old gcc 3 series (probably together with KDE 4.4).

Personally I am currently slacking off a bit. Last week I helped my sister to move her flat and at the end of this week I will go back to Iceland for one and a half weeks meeting some friends again. If you're around there, just drop me a note here.

Some days ago I decided to start a long term project of mine and with the help of my mother who is an oracle consultant I installed a small oracle 10g express edition database on my computer. So far we could get it running via both the OCI and the odbc sql-database plugin of Qt and everything seems to be as easy as I can think of. Look forward to some interesting news concerning Marble... ;-).

KDE 4.3rc1

2009-07-07T19:40:00.003+02:00

Just some minutes ago I uploaded the first patches for windows packages for the first KDE 4.3 release candidate.
If you start the installer, you might find that the list of packages has grown quite a bit. This is for two reasons: first of all Ralf and I currently try out splitting the kde modules into subpackages, so that you can simply install e.g. Okular, without having to install kolourpaint (nothing against kolourpaint!). This will make it more obvious which applications you install and close a long waiting wish in KDE's bugzilla.
The second reason is that the number of packages has really grown: I added a (rather dirty) patch so that konsole can be build under windows, and this of course leads to some new features: kate, konversation, yakuake and kdevelop use the konsolepart to embed konsole into their applications. This is a long awaited feature I wanted to have, and I am pretty sure both code quality (so that I can commit the changes) and the number of windows specific bugs in it will improve in the next months.
Besides the packaging process, Ralf is also working on some improvements to our 'emerge' build scripts. He has nearly finished restructuring them completely. This will greatly improve the overall quality and will make those scripts more extensible and easier to fix in the future.

KDE on Windows is not dead yet

2009-06-08T18:21:00.004+02:00

First of all, I want to say something about an article that has been released on the Linux Magazin - about the step down of Christian Ehrlicher as a developer for KDE on Windows.
This is not easy for us as Christian has done quite a lot of work in the background as making packages and fixing builderrors and bugs. This doesn't mean though that he has been the only one to do those tasks. The Amarok Nightlies have been done nearly totally independent of the rest by Björn Schröder and Oluf Lorenzen; in between the releases Christian made, I made some of them too, and also Ralf Habacker and Holger Schröder are able to build packages (those are the ones that currently are allowed to upload, this list can of course be extended). So packages will be provided in the future as they have been in the past.

The second point I want to address is the criticism made by Christian in his post. Although Till has corrected it here and here I do remember that the feelings we had back when kdab joined KDE on Windows development were far more optimistic than what was achieved in the time. I think this is normal and can happen in other places too. I think though that we have to look further and always check what possibilities we do have to work together and how we can achieve the best together. Due to the pure nature of the different intents that companies and private persons do have if they develop on KDE we will never have the exact same opinion on some issues (the packaging is such an issue here). The same applies to probably all companies in this area, just think of Qt Software & Qt.

And last I want to mention something that has struck me again when reading the comments both in Linux Magazin and below Christians blog post: I never want to read again those comments along the line "good that you have found back to the free OS and you no longer waste time". All those of you out there thinking like that, just try to switch on your brain at least once and think why it is called "free" software. It is not free as in beer, it is free as in freedom, and I reclaim hereby the freedom to develop for Windows. And for Linux. And for BSD. And for Solaris. And for Mac. And for all those other OSs I don't even know but which might run KDE one day.

4.2.2

2009-04-09T11:25:00.004+02:00

For those of you who haven't yet been aware of it: Christian made new 4.2.2 packages. I added packages for digikam (0.10.0 release), kipi-plugins (0.2.0 release), konversation4 (yet unreleased snapshot) and thanks to Ralf's porting also k3b (another yet unreleased snapshot). Please do not file bugs against k3b and konversation4 yet, we want to fix the obvious errors first.
Those packages are all built against Qt 4.4.3, meaning that you can't build current amarok and the koffice release candidate against it. I am planning to make some trunk packages(against Qt 4.5) though to fix this problem.
In marble I just recently could merge my geodata-nt branch which took a great burden off of me. Now all GeoDataObjects can be copied around, some of them are implicitly shared even. As this comes together with changing the (not-yet stable) API from Pointers to references, some work is still needed (it currently is far to slow to be released...). "please do not hit me for marble being a bit slower now!" ;-)

Context & Trash

2009-03-08T20:00:00.003+01:00

It has been a long time since my last blog post and this has been due to me having exams and starting to work for some weeks in Darmstadt. This also explains why package delivery is rather slow at the moment since only Christian is working on it.

He also made some other progress - he worked on the windows implementation of the KDE trash bin. So now if you look at the KDE trash bin on windows, it contains all the files you find in the windows trash bin and reversed. And best is that features like undelete work too (Christian has spend two days only to make this one feature work!).

Myself I have started a great thing too: the explorer context menu that Carlo Segato committed into svn is supposed to work for all KDE applications in the best way: clicking on a pdf document would make it display "Open with Okular", clicking on ogg files would make it use "Open with Amarok" and so on, all depending on the preferred application you set in your KDE install.

I am already pretty far with this feature but at the moment I have a severe problem: When I try to link the contextmenu plugin against kdecore library, it can't be registered with regsvr32 anymore - I get an error message stating: "LoadLibrary('D:\\KDE\\bin\\kdecm.dll') failed - invalid access to memory location". Registering it by hand does work though. So now I wonder what might be the problem at all because this already happens if I just put in a tiny KUrl which does not do anything in the default constructor. I don't seem to find what is the problem there - so if anybody knows where the problem is...

konsolidated

2009-02-01T22:57:00.007+01:00

After a long time of waiting for it, I finally tried to port konsole. This was a long awaited application which is supposed to be rather useful for developers (which are currently our main target users). I am still trying to cleanup the patch and getting it into a usable shape to be committed into KDE svn. Also there are still some more problems that will stay for now:

for cmd.exe many keys do not work, especially delete, backspace and the arrow keys (so no command history yet). I am not sure how to do this yet, probably this needs some more internal changes.

for sh.exe it seems that at least the backspace key is working, but there is no output of the prompt and ls has some strange output too.

For both there is no colored output available yet.
The biggest problem though is that the konsole window can't be made transparent ;-).

To prove it, here is a screen shot:

Just another great application has been added in a porting branch into svn recently: konversation. And as _Brandon_ hasn't been lazy altogether, konversation4 already works like a charm here. You should be aware that although konversation does more or less work and it gets better and better every hour thanks to a number of people, it should not be used yet and no bug reports should be filed yet.
Some more screenshots here for those who don't believe:

pre-release sprint

2009-01-12T01:58:00.007+01:00

As KDE 4.2 release is also coming near on windows, I need to give a short overview of what we have planned for the release so far:

the KDE systemsettings will come to windows; they can be integrated into Microsoft Windows Control Panel as well.

KDE/Oxygen Wallpapers and Cursors will be available for Windows as well.

all platform related settings can be made in a new KCModule called 'Platform'. It can be found in the systemsettings and is made by Eduard Sukharev (kraplax).

there is some support for spellchecking

many improvements especially about security and download checking have been made to the kdewin-installer, thanks to Ralf again for it

A very unstable part but yet really interesting is plasma. We managed to replace the existing windows shell with plasma (these settings will go into the Platform kcm as well but will be disabled for now) but since some more important plasmoids (especially systray and tasklist) are still missing, that is really experimental ;-). Most work on Plasma is done by _Brandon_ and zbenjamin.

On the Marble side we also have some fine features to release. Maps can now load up custom kml files at the start, the map painting got even more efficient and startup times have been lowered as much as we could.
If you use the marblewidget in your application, you can have multiple marble widgets and they can safely work together. Even though digikam already does this for quite some time I just recently found out that the implications are bigger than expected - but these issues should be fixed now.
The rest of the marble related changes will hopefully be within a proper change log or in a new post of Torsten Rahn.

This blog post is also in memoriam of my old desktop which served me quite some years now and in the last months served as my build computer for KDE packages. He is now pining for the fjords, pushing up the daisies, he is an ex-buildserver (scnr). The release packages are done by Christian though, so you don't have to fear about the release. If some other packages will need a bit longer, please excuse me though - I am already searching for a new solution...

Okular

2008-12-18T02:55:00.003+01:00

As I already said, I wanted to work a bit on okular again and I am nearly done now.
Today and yesterday I added support for djvu-files and for Microsoft's Compressed HTML Help (chm) to okular. For both libraries there are now two patches for making them build with CMake ;-).
The library of djvu seems to work fine, chm has some problems with zooming though. I am not sure whose problem this is, but definitely that will need a clear head so I won't look at it now.

Another new feature will follow tomorrow: I asked my distro to package libopenjpeg for me and that guy was really nice and will make the openjpeg packages available tomorrow. Right after that I will follow with new poppler packages I think.
For all those waiting already, I am planning to make up a tutorial of how you can easily build a custom CD with your favourite KDE on Windows applications so that they are installable on their own.

Why Google will not achieve world domination (and why marble will do so instead)

2008-12-16T00:48:00.003+01:00

Just some seconds ago I realized fully that this very blog was not listed in any search engine. This was due to Google's blogspot team being incapable of writing the correct description to a button. Instead of hiding my blog on the front page, the button simply set the NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW tags, which made it impossible for me to google myself!!!!11!!1

This of course doesn't happen in Marble, which can only lead to the correct conclusion that Marble will dominate the world instead.

Besides searching for my own blog I am not idle: I tried to get some opensuse packages for libepub, the library hidden in the ebook-tools which, as the name says, is used to read ebook file formats. There is some support for that in Okular, that's why I decided to make packages for everybody.
Since I am working on some more Okular-related stuff, you will probably hear more about that soon.

Amarok 2.0

2008-12-12T15:41:00.003+01:00

With a certain delay due to my Iceland visit, the Amarok 2.0 release packages are out now. There are some more bug fixes in it which will hopefully also work under windows;-). Packages are available for both 4.1.3 and 4.1.80.
Packages can be installed in the usual way via the installer.

xmas

2008-12-12T01:57:00.001+01:00

just today I got told that boost libraries now use cmake.
There is hope for others too, the world is not that bad.

binaries and a trip to Reykjavik

2008-12-02T22:48:00.004+01:00

Right before I will fly for 4 days to Iceland, I finished building recent Amarok and digikam packages and uploaded them to our mirrors. This wouldn't be possible without Christian who devoted more than a complete weekend to fix most of our packages again and now it is there - we reopened the "unstable" releases again with KDE 4.2 beta1 (version 4.1.80).

As a decision, we will from now on try to provide pre-release snapshots of software solely for the unstable part (as some software might be in need of newer versions of libraries anyway), so we currently have digikam beta6 only in 4.1.80 and Amarok in both (for a last time I think).

So if anybody is in Reykjavik area in the coming days (and likes to have a presentation of KDE on Windows or Marble) simply leave a comment...

<update>I didn't say what I wanted to say: Amarok now contains lastfm support in the msvc builds and digikam hopefully can show pictures in the msvc binaries as well.</update>

some updates

2008-11-30T19:35:00.004+01:00

As you might know, I have been working on digikam a lot lately and today I uploaded the new beta6 packages for the 4.1.X release series; included are of course kipi-plugins beta4. Now Digikam on msvc should not crash anymore and both mingw and msvc builds should be able to add images to albums.

To improve digikam even more, I am trying to lower the start up time needed, and of course I know the marble widget best. So I can now tell you (even though this was a rather easy task) that I cut down the startup time needed by the two marblewidgets by about 19%. This is not the end yet, and until the release, tackat and I hope to get this even further down.

One thing that is rather fresh from my desk is that I succeeded to compile kile (and fixed some builderrors). This means that you can look at this wonderful latex-editor, but of course this doesn't mean anything: As I have no latex environment and neither to much time & space nor to much knowledge of latex itself, I search for somebody interested in these topics and who could try to build kile on windows as well, look how to get all things needed to run kile decently and write some tutorials and file some bugs. Somebody interested?

crashfixing

2008-11-22T03:07:00.004+01:00

As I was working on digikam porting recently I made some first packages - and of course those were not even starting up. Well, to be a bit clearer: the packages build with msvc (Microsoft Visual Studio) crashed both in

png_read_info

for png images and in

jpeg_read_header

for libjpeg. This seemed to be rather odd I thought, as there seemed to be a lot of applications using these libraries for image i/o. But as I found out, most don't use our dll but instead a static version of it. That wasn't an option for me though.

To understand the crashes a bit more I found a good explanation here. Basically the problem is that msvc will link to different runtime environments (our libpng/libjpeg dll against msvcrt and our digikam binaries against msvcr80) and each of those runtimes has a different idea of what a FILE pointer is. When trying to actually do something with your FILE pointer, you will get the crash.

The solution to the png problem I found in a french forum, I did what they said and now it works (diff). The solution to the jpeg problem is a bit harder as it requires some rewrite/addition. You might have to replace my QByteArray with whatever you use to store the complete file content but essentially it is everywhere the same (changes): I got it from here.

It is tall! not great...

2008-11-13T23:45:00.004+01:00

I am back already since sunday evening from the KOffice meeting; I have to say it was a rather great success. The KOffice folks could get two of my koffice errors fixed, one even in qt-copy (patch 0258), and while looking we even found a crash which got fixed too. So all in all a rather good amount for a weekend.

Yesterday I formulated some bugfixes and features I would like to see in KDE 4.2 release on Windows. The first one I basically fixed myself right away, and today I tried out something new with plasma. As you all might know there is this concept of desktop shells, where plasma seems to fit into really well - and now I can say that it is true and it works on windows too. Still we have tons of stuff to do before it is slightly usable: we have no list of tasks (in progress), we have no system tray, there is no integration of the native windows menu into the plasma menus(planned). Even worse is that if you start explorer.exe while running plasma as shell, the default shell will appear again(to be fixed soon).

As you can see, there is still a lot of work to do, we are open to all new people and if you want to lend a hand, simply drop by on irc or have a look at our mailing list kde-windows[at]kde[dot]org.

KOffice Meeting Day 1

2008-11-08T00:14:00.003+01:00

After I missed slangkamp at Berlin Hbf. due to my train being 40 minutes late on a 1 hour trip, I arrived at KDAB Berlin Office and started to look around a bit. After some minutes I got jaham and slangkamp interested into a special KOffice bug which only existed on windows: one of the color choosers simply was showing a black rectangle instead of painting the color gradient it should show. So we started to investigate this, first within KOffice (KoColorSlider) - it was no KOffice bug. Then in KDE (KSelector) and it was no KDE bug as well. But at least we could have worked around it in KSelector. But then again Jaham had the idea to look into the Qt sources - and there we found the bug. It was simple, 3 additional lines in qtgui4 and this was one of the points where you can definitely see why it is pretty important to have open source software: we could really fix the bug instead of working around it and hoping that the implementation will stay the same for future Qt versions...
The downtime was: 3-4 people were looking for this bug for roughly 3 hours - so much work for such a "small" issue.

graphics week again

2008-10-28T00:43:00.008+01:00

Just as a short note:
Today I fixed both a small bug in gwenview where the jpeg-thumbnails would crash gwenview on windows due to some strange issues and I build digikam and its kipi-plugins and made binary packages of it. So these can be used now (they reside in the 4.1.2 stable branch). Also in some days the 4.1.3 packages will have a whole lot of windows related bug fixes (I will blog about those later as all the people need to be mentioned). For now I just want you to point to digikam, find the bugs that are still within it (Gilles Caulier and I can try to fix the bugs, as he is brave enough to fight the demons of windows) and lets make it better and better.

Another thing I have to mention is that Torsten Rahn, Magnus Valle and Henry DeValence made some new quite awesome maps for Marble and none of them did blog about the results yet. This gives me the possibility to leak those pictures to all planetkde readers:

The Earth in Marble in 1689 (made by Magnus(wiscados) and Torsten(tackat)):

The moon of the earth (made by Torsten):

and "that's no moon!" (well it is the moon mimas of saturn done by Henry (hdevalence)):

portability

2008-10-20T15:07:00.002+02:00

This is a short rant about how portable code shouldn't look like:


        else if (not defaultServerList.contains(server))

.
Those C99 boolean operator keywords(not, or, and) break here on windows and are not worth the annoyance.
I already had discussions about that once and I am not keen on doing that again. Thus I beg you to use the standardized operators !,||,&& from now on, so that I will never have to complain about that again.

I will add another post about the second biggest annoyance (export macros) soon, but this requires a longer post.

graphics week

2008-10-04T02:23:00.006+02:00

Recently I looked over our packages again and I just remembered that KDE on Windows still misses some good picture viewers (No, Marble is not yet good for that task ;-) ). So I decided to look at kdegraphics a bit more as gwenview was still not building. I just recently wiped out most errors out of my exiv2 cmake buildsystem patch and now I wanted to try that out. And so I did - the result is that along the windows 4.1.2 packages you will find gwenview.

If I find some time in the coming days, I will try to work on digikam; we won't be able to get the gphoto support on windows in the near future, but I hope I can get that part optional so that we can have at least a starting point.
p.s.: The packages won't be ready before sunday evening I guess.
p.p.s.: Here is the proof:

Dependencies

2008-09-18T03:56:00.004+02:00

You might have heard me complaining about that issue already, but it is still an issue.
Every once in a while I come around checking the dependencies of a KDE package and then I find out that they are 1) either available, 2) available but not buildable (a lot of foss software on windows is hacked together, a.k.a. patched heavily) or 3) not even available. Availability means available for both of our compiler flavors (we currently use mingw 3.4.5 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2003/2005/2008). If the library builds and if it is not to much messed up we normally fix this case by finding a CMake patch for it. The latest library that took this way is exiv2 and I am glad to say that this patch will go upstreams for version 0.18. This is the good side.

Another dependency I have come across was mysql. It is used in several places throughout KDE, on of its use cases is as an embedded database for amarok. As a nice packager I made myself on the way to find this stuff. If you look at the MySQL page and you search for embedded, you will find "Thinking about using MySQL as an Embedded Database? Contact us online." with a link to the sales department. Ok, no money for that over here, so maybe they provide it somewhere else. Searching through the download section I found the rpms for red hat for the embedded db but the windows packages don't contain anything resembling the embedded library. And after searching a bit more I found the confirmation: Mysql doesn't provide the embedded library.
Hm, since it would benefit multiple packages, I thought, why not try to compile it myself. Ok, I downloaded the package and on the Build Instructions page they spoke about cmake which made me happy at that point. Even though I need to build the stuff myself, I just need to run

cmake && nmake && nmake install

and then I have my library. But it should get even more painful:
Before running cmake you need to run a javascript configure file.
Then you get a batch script which copies the CMakeCache.txt and then runs cmake for you - nothing more.
Then you have a Visual Studio project file.
Going through all available targets I couldn't find libmysqld.
There was no libmysqld. Ok, searching through CMakeLists.txt files gave me - nothing.
Their CMake build system doesn't contain that library. Only the autotools stuff as I found out - so autotools for Linux, a crippled CMake for Windows.

Is it really so hard to find somebody which knows enough cmake (or can read enough to understand the cmake help) to get a decent CMake buildsystem for mysql? Or is this simply a way to sell even if mysql is GPL?
I am pretty sure I will fix this in the future, but this is the point where I definitely will not contribute to GPL licensed code without a paycheck.

What this means:
- Gwenview will be hopefully enabled in the next windows packages for trunk and 4.1
- Amarok's mysql collection plugin will have to wait.
- All other users of mysql embedded will simply have to use the client with a server.

MarbleTalk: The result of my summer of code

2008-09-08T17:29:00.005+02:00

I have never really written about my Google Summer of Code project, but now that I got the first really cool and visible feature in, I can't wait anymore.

As you might know Marble is not only a Qt/KDE application but also a widget that you can use in your application to provide the user with geographical data.
You can simply generate a KML document with QDomDocument and then use the addPlaceMarkData to load this file into the widget. You can check the implementation of digikam which has been the first application using this.

This part is not new, it was possible to load and display Placemarks (simple Points which contain a name and a location) before. But in my Summer of Code I reworked the KML parsing so that any KML file could be parsed and saved in an internal data structure and at the very end I made a model and a view for that. This view now went into a plugin (the geodata plugin), the model is now integrated into the structure and thus if you go within Marble to File->Open Map and you choose kdeedu/marble/src/plugins/marble/geodata/Marble writing.kml it will show you this now:

You can of course do a lot more with this, I am pretty sure. Here is a small draft of how to use the marbleWidget:


#include "marble/MarbleWidget.h"

using namespace Marble;
...
MarbleWidget *marble = new MarbleWidget( parent );
QString yourKmlData;
...
marble->addPlaceMarkData( yourKmlData );
...
delete marble;

But, you might ask, what has this todo with Vector Tiles for Marble? The basic idea of vector tiles is to render the data at the client rather than at the server side as it is done now. With the above said, we are ready to do this - rendering basically works and we now need to generate the data, implement some caching algorithms, etc. So you might not see this for 4.2's version of marble, but there is a good chance that this will be ready for 4.3.
p.s.: This all wouldn't have been possible without my mentor Torsten Rahn (tackat), so I want to thank him for this too at this point.

Lubos made it true:

2008-08-09T10:35:00.001+02:00

For all people not in Belgium here is a picture of Seli with blue hair:
(Seli with blue hair).

Sweet Dreams

2008-07-21T20:00:00.001+02:00

After not having written for a longer time I can say that I spent the time on a very interesting and usefull matter:

In the beginning of the week I worked on some missing packages for our already some weeks old release 4.0.83 which still is the most recent release before the next major version 4.1. I rebuild kdegraphics and added new packages for kdeutils, kdemultimedia and kdepim. Especially interesting is kdemultimedia as I fixed phonon the weekend before and so KDE windows platform supports sound output now. Kdepim was really easy since KDAB has fixed nearly everything (except the packaging bugs that I introduced;-)).

Then somehow Carlo Segato (_Brandon_) came to the idea that he could take another look again at plasma. I tried this before but I didn't invest a lot of time and so it was still unknown which wonders were awaiting us there. After _Brandon_ came through really well and most of the problems I hit last time had magically vanished (thanks to aseigo probably) _Brandon_ showed me the first picture of the analog clock on windows:

This was just the start and after working for two more days, a lot of plasmoids have been built. The most interesting thing was that even the plasma desktop(the containment) was not very hard to fix and so only two days after we started the first efforts "the world's coolest geek toy(tm)" is available on Windows too:

There is still a lot to do as e.g. the panel is still not at the place where it should be and some of the classes have been simply disabled. Some obvious bugs are existing as well:
Rotating plasmoids doesn't work, some of your favourite plasmoids might be missing etc.
Nevertheless I put up some preview packages for kdebase-workspace(which contains plasma desktop), kdeplasma-addons and kdeplasma-playground (which both contain additional widgets). To get the desktop, simply run plasma.exe from kderoot\bin.

Please keep in mind that those packages are previews; Bug reports in bugs.kde.org are still unwanted!

As this was a really historic moment for me, I want to thank all those Persons that made this post possible for the one reason or the other!

(to be naming some that come to my mind: Aaron Seigo, Carlo Segato, Pau Garcia de Quiles, Christian Ehrlicher and Ralf Habacker, Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Jeremy Whiting, our users and all those of course that didn't came to my mind).

test the best!

2008-06-29T03:41:00.003+02:00

As you might know we're currently fixing all kinds of bugs until the release and this time we even fix the unit tests under windows.
This hasn't been a high priority for us but taking the new cdash-server (thanks Alex!) for kdelibs Christian started to submit some first reports for it. I will follow tonight hopefully and I hope more people will follow, especially on the "other platforms" ;-).

Next I fixed some tests in Marble here on windows and now they run fine at least here. I think I can go over to writing more tests and improving marble even more.

One of the bad things that happened to me is a bug in either subversion or putty: I generated a new ssh key with puttygen and asked sysadmin@ to change it. But commandline subversion doesn't want to use this key now and I am not sure what I am doing wrong. The special problem is that both logging in with putty to svn.kde.org and checkout with TortoiseSVN (with the new key) work. The problem about the key seems to be an irregular length of 2047 vs. 2048 Bits. But probably the only way to solve this issue is to ask sysadmins to change the key again.

The last thing is that slowly but steadily amarok on windows comes back: Pau (pgquiles) is currently investing quite some efforts on it and I hope for the best and for neverending success!

Python: subprocesses after all

2008-06-27T12:41:00.002+02:00

Back in September 2007 I was sitting with dipesh until late in the night on a very interesting problem:
We wanted to implement a "tee"-like class in python which would work as the same command under unix: get input via one stream, double the input and give it out into a file and into a stream (like sys.stdout). This shouldn't be a big problem but when you try to give this class to subprocess.Popen as one of the streams you will find out that Popen doesn't use the write function but instead uses the fileno() function of the fileobject. But there would be a workaround for that:
We use subprocess.PIPE for the wanted input stream, then we check regularly for any stuff within the pipe - that this will not work on windows one could expect.
The problem is that all available read processes will block execution if not enough bytes can be read.

The solution is called pywin32 and is a python package for windows. Mark Hammond from starship has made them and they include a function called PeekNamedPipe which does exactly what we need: peek into the pipe without blocking it. I should leave the rest as a homework to the reader, but for those who don't want to invest any more research, I'll give a first solution from where you can start (look at the class Popen).

Friday on LinuxTag

2008-05-31T00:37:00.004+02:00

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

2008-05-28T02:38:00.005+02:00

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

2008-05-19T12:16:00.003+02:00

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

2008-05-17T18:54:00.003+02:00

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(*)

2008-05-08T19:12:00.004+02:00

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.

far away

2008-04-10T14:10:00.003+02:00

I haven't posted for a longer time now, so here is the update. In the last weeks I have been working both on my summer of code applications (for marble) and on my university stuff. Kdegraphics is already within the KDE on windows stuff for some weeks - just some little problems in the fontconfig and poppler packages stay (the configuration files are not in the correct place).
Right now I am on an island at the Baltic Sea called Hiddensee in a small village called Vitte. I needed nearly two days to get my computer into the internet (I have written this post offline) since there is currently only one internet cafe (Sanddorneck) and one T-Online hotspot (Cafe Sundevit/Hotel Töwerland). Both are quite expensive so I always have to be quite fast.
On the other hand I have no stress and I can enjoy the beautiful landscape (and eat fish). Just to give you a small impression:

Who is first on the Planet?

2008-03-06T17:49:00.005+01:00

This is the KDE booth if no people are around:

we are playing now: who is first on the planet - it is so great!

UPDATE: since not everybody might know all the faces and since Dakon already said he doesn't know them - here the names in the first picture:
A visitor, Franz Keferböck, Rolf Eike Beer, Frederik Gladhorn (with the long hair), Andreas Hartmetz (part of the solution), Sven Krohlas and Manuel Nickschas from Amarok, above my free laptop, and again only from the back Eckhart Wörner.

CeBIT 2008: Intro

2008-03-04T15:50:00.003+01:00

This is the first post from CeBIT - We are here in the LinuxPark at the very end of hall 5. Currently we are 4 people - danimo, tackat, eckhart and /me.

Today in the morning I entered the train and the first handouts were already given in the train. Then I meet tackat in front of the exhibition center and we got into our small booth. The booth box arrived at around 13:00 and danimo arrived only shortly after that ;-).
People really want to know a lot from the basics of FOSS to the features of KDE on Windows. We try to give as much as we need - since KDE is so cool...
Btw. kind regards of the amarok folks, they don't have network access;-)
Some more fotos will follow as soon as I get my camera back...

Okular on Windows

2008-02-22T23:51:00.003+01:00

We are shortly before the first distribution of the kdegraphics package from the snapshot sources 4.0.63 with support for pdf files using poppler.
I have worked most of my time on the buildsystems of poppler, freetype and fontconfig - since poppler is integrating the cmake buildsystem thanks to Pino Toscano (who wrote the cmake files) I got even more work as I have to merge the patches to their git repository. This brings a lot of fun when you do not have a native git (until now I haven't found a usable native git version) and some changes needed for msvc cannot easily be brought upstreams.
I have to admit that I have stopped providing new packages on my own server - this makes no sense in the moment since Dirk Mueller is providing snapshots of KDE roughly every week which makes my own packages not needed anymore.
I will probably set up the mirror again in the next weeks so that extra packages that are freshly available can be used with the last snapshots. Looking into my crystal ball I can see that even though koffice isn't in a good state yet, it has reached the state where it builds most of the time and where we can provide a package.

Btw: I will not attend Fosdem since it is over 1000km away - I will be at CeBit on tuesday and probably wednesday though. If you're there too, you want to see how good looking KDE on Windows is and want to chat a bit, just come around to the KDE booth.

kgpg: saroengels->beercounter++;

2008-02-01T09:41:00.000+01:00

First of all I have to tell all those that do not know it:
I come from Germany and I don't like beer.
I drink wine and most other 'alcoholic beverages' but I don't drink beer. That means it is only of theoretical value if you promise to give out a beer.
But if you do, I will take that as a sport - and hopefully find a way to do what you want:
I was asked how well kgpg of kdeutils worked and as it wasn't on my build list before, I added a script and tried it out: and it crashed.
So far I couldn't really get something useful out of kgpg so I took out gdb and tested a bit: and it turned out that right after running gpg through a QProcess kgpg segfault'ed. I didn't had gpg installed at that time, so I thought that a test for existance could be the problem. And yes - after I installed it, kgpg worked like a charm (although import of keys doesn't work).
I haven't yet made a patch, maybe the QProcess should be ported to KProcess and obviously the existance of gpg and the path of gpg should be searched for in advance. Maybe this is already within the code, I don't know.

But a beer I have earned anyway! ;-)

fontconfig and poppler

2008-01-29T01:40:00.001+01:00

As I already stated earlier, I was recently fixing the buildscripts for freetype, fontconfig and poppler. For all of them I have a patch now which gives them cmake based buildscripts instead of autotools+derivatives and which fixes some errors so that they compile on both compilers.
Of course there is plenty of room for improvement left - freetype and fontconfig should be able to use the system zlib as a dependency (that is disabled for now), fontconfig and poppler have a lot of if(MSVC) parts now and poppler is linking against kdewin32 - which should not be the case - according to Christian. Plus I want to integrate poppler-data into poppler-src - even if that is not the original intention of the author.
Note:
It seems there is a lack of communication sometimes - direct as well as indirect (via a blog e.g.).
I hope this improves within the next time.
SE

free type

2008-01-27T03:56:00.001+01:00

For Okular one needs more or less poppler, this requires again fontconfig and freetype.
Thanks to Pino, poppler has a cmake based buildsystem, fontconfig got one as well and today I finished freetype. So what should I say - fontconfig doesn't build yet under msvc, but I am currently at it.
Freetype works now though - and I think that was the major problem until now.
So look forward to a package release of kdegraphics soon.

good night
SE

kplato missing

2008-01-20T00:37:00.001+01:00

I haven't forgotten or disabled kplato of course - I only thought that those pictures are enough.
Wished by one reader, here comes kplato:

and here some more stuff:

Just some more answers:
kexi is just slightly different - and about looks one can argue (a free translation from german). I find the new look kexi introduces quite good - and it integrates far better to windows imho.

Koffice - kool and unstable

2008-01-19T10:03:00.001+01:00

Ok, here are the screenshots from my recent windows build of koffice (kdepim might follow).
Some notes:

kspread died when I entered '!' instead of '1'

kivio cannot delete objects - this probably doesn't work in other koffice apps too.

kexi looks wonderful, but is the only app from the kde project that does not detach from the cmd.exe window - why I don't know.

and last: kword does not like @ signs - this was fixed in kate already by chehrlic (function keyPressEvent) but I couldn't find it in koffice (I haven't looked a lot).

I will post the kdepim screenshots later - kmail isn't working anyway, kaddressbook has severe problems and kontact doesn't like me.

So far,
SE

Release Party

2008-01-19T09:45:00.000+01:00

I just came home from my clausura now, and I should have gone to the Release Party at KDAB - that would have given me more.
I haven't written in a longer time now; please forgive me.
After the release of KDE 4.0 the kde-windows project decided to stay in trunk - most applications like koffice, amarok and kdepim aren't released yet anyway so no need to make other releases of the branch. Be aware that this might decrease stability - people might work more and change the codebase again.
That said - I will hopefully restart releasing new packages for mingw on my server again on monday night. There is some new stuff that works now:
Finally kdepim works again - that means applications like akregator, kleopatra and kontact work now. Kmail is built but has a big error which isn't solved yet - the checking for a running application are useless under windows. There is just one small thing for users of emerge: you have to build kdepimlibs first and then install kdepimlibs-test (from testing) over it.
then you can build kdepim.
As I said, koffice is working too, after I fixed some minor problems with the export macros.
For those of you who like some screenshots, I will post some before I go.

2008-01-04T23:31:00.000+01:00

Truly, our responsibility to spread the Gospel of the Gnu is weighty.
Cleave to what is good. Remember the words the prophet Stallman
brought down from the Mount MIT, graved in Lisp on tablets of
crystalline lambda calculus.

Only this true: Emacs is pure.
All else is false.
Do not be misled by false gods like Vi, the Editor of the Beast.
Do not be seduced by Word, the Scarlet Woman of Babylon.
Do not be driven to madness by Xcode, the Blind Priest of the Children of Asherath.

When the wild winds of chaos blow, stay pure.
When the universe collapses in shards around you, stay holy.
When the gibbering hobgoblins of apostate Editors attack with shards
of broken syntax, seek the crystalline stillness within you.

Brethren, ensure that you (Meta-x-say-[[hallel]]-to-Emacs) daily for otherwise you will be lost.
When the Beast comes, only Emacs can save you.

This was brought to you as a public service by the Holy and Ineffable Church of The Mighty Emacs.
SUPPORT THIS CRUSADE WITH YOUR DONATIONS. EMAIL THE STILL BEATING
HEART OF A VILE VI USER TO emacs-highpriest@god-hates-vi-users

I prefer VI.

Get up Stand up

2007-12-20T02:37:00.000+01:00

As you all know there is an outstanding new application for document viewing coming together with KDE 4: okular. It is basically a modern replacement for kpdf, new from the beginning and it can support a variety of documents you wouldn't have a reader for normally: PDF, Postscript, DjVu, CHM are just parts of tons of picture formats follow.
As always there are lots of readers available on Windows already - some are free but most are probably closed source. So okular will have to compete against adobe reader e.g. at its home.
I think that the success of okular on windows will depend on the browser integration - so if somebody reads this and knows enough about firefox, opera or Internet Explorer to make okular(part) to a working plugin - just tell me.
I hopefully can integrate that into the new years packages (but I don't think I can add djvu, postscript or chm support right now) Okular is still missing an icon as do some more applications.

Ok, this picture is basically for Pino and Albert since they both helped me a lot to come to this point.

Update

2007-12-19T12:53:00.000+01:00

There were some packages that failed to build on monday: kdeedu and another one.
I worked a bit on it and after disabling the stuff (e.g. kdeedu docs) I finally have the packages building atm.
I will work further on the kdewin-menubuilder this week, although there might not be a lot of time left for that. And perhaps I can even integrate it into either the emerge scripts or into the installer itself. Both will have to be ready for the new years release.
In kdegraphics kolourpaint is still missing: I get some strange errors about unfound constructors (they are there but not found); basically the problem is that 'kpTransformDialogEnvironment*' is not equal to 'kpTransformDialogEnvironment**(*)()' and I cannot change it it seems.

But enough for problems, I am still missing some xmas presents so I will go and get some now.

Last pre-xmas packages

2007-12-18T02:33:00.000+01:00

Another week has gone by and I am sitting in front of two builds again. Ok, one is behaving nice and the other one tried to stop in between - and I have to restart it now, it will hopefully workout fast though (update: not working yet).
It is known already that trolltech put their phonon backends into the KDE-svn-repository and they promised to develop them over there. That meant that on monday morning shakes told me that his custom backend worked on mingw, on monday evening I made a package of a famous application and uploaded it to my server and on wednesday trolltech announced that they put their ds9 backend into the repo. So we started again and since the stuff was written for msvc only I wasn't sure I could ever get that working with mingw - but shakes did it himself (my way was right but I had again not enough patience) and so the build was ok now. It seems though that the backend doesn't want to work good enough for me. I'll see what the packages from the package mirror say, they might be better.
On the weekend jstaniek made me compile some strange libraries we'll possibly need in future but I gave up half way as well. To be honest I wanted to work on another issue (which isn't complete though yet): The automatic compilation of .lnk files out of the standard fd.o .desktop files. So I inserted a new tool into the kdewin-installer module (there are really some tools there already which are not needed for the installer itself). It is called kdewin-menuBuilder. The last remaining problem of the menuBuilder is the Categories entry: under *nix it should be a real category which is represented in the menu by a virtual folder in which the application entry will appear. Under windows it is unpossible to make virtual folders - and since I don't like the idea of duplicate entries, I decided that there has to be another way. Probably I will take KDE as the root (for now) then the fd.o "Main Category" as the second level and the first fd.o additional category (which is not called Qt or KDE) will be the third level. That should be easy todo.
Another work string I currently have in my hands are the application icons that need to be written in the cmake files - on the fly. Today I added those to the kdegames module(which has a lot of applications to build), I will hopefully be able to work on some others this week as well.

Announcement: Amarok to come

2007-12-12T02:31:00.000+01:00

I couldn't believe it - Amarok 2.0 is working on Windows - even though with some severe problems still. It went faster then I believed. So I made a big effort to make a package as fast as possible and now it uploads to my server.

The package isn't really for early adopters - it is just a developer preview.

I hope I can work a bit more on it, to bring at least the part windows uses, into a better shape. But at the same time I still have to do some stuff for university, the other applications are calling as well (I can hear kopete's voice very distinctively) and of course my wife needs more time - it is xmas in two weeks.

So far,
SE

Another star soon to arise

2007-12-11T01:09:00.000+01:00

After Konqueror made its step to be the new browser competition on windows, another famous KDE application is on its way: Amarok. Amarok isn't ready for linux as well, and it is supposed to be included in the KDE 4.1 release. However behind the scenes there is already some work done, and even a custom phonon backend exists.
So I started to work on the mingw version but until now, there is no output (according to shakes there is output on windows possible already, it requires the msvc build though). At this point I wanted to provide a link to a single installer package for amarok - I will have to postpone it now I think.
Okular works better now after pinotree reappeared in IRC; there was a pretty simple error - you have to run update-mime-database manually, it isn't run automatically anymore if you install with the DESTDIR option. There are some errors with pdf's still.
Right beside me, my other computer rebuilds the KDE packages for my mingw snapshot server - which got some review by Ralf some days ago.

So besides rebuilding my goal for next week will be the debug of amarok and to make some thoughts about single installers and making them available.
Another issue that is within my head for some weeks already is some kind of emerge binary package (the package could be then distributed within the installer) and probably the rest which is staying inside the svn as it already is. With a simple dependency on python and on subversion you can then install all needed dependencies for getting the newest KDE from SVN.

My second home switched its name from kde-edu to kns-ghns - fregl and jpwhiting are working quite hard to get KNewStuff make what they want. I think this is one of the most important projects for free software: you can provide user generated contents and the step from the simple user to the open-source developer gets smaller and smaller. That should be a good thing.

It is very very late again, I want to get up early tomorrow, so this is it for now.
hopefully next week with some interesting link;-)

back from Paris

2007-12-04T04:27:00.000+01:00

I just came back today from the first KDE-Edu Developer Meeting in Paris. After the windows meeting in september, this was my second meeting with other developers and until now, I was just meeting new people. Nevertheless it was really really useful since I am currently talking to them over irc all day. I met a whole bunch of people that are very actively developing the edu apps: like Annma, Jeremy, Albert and of course Mauricio. Since I had some problems with my kde installation I had to install everything again on saturday night and sunday morning. I held a short talk that hopefully gave some idea of my work and at last I got step, the physical simulator running.
In the week before that, I was renting some space on a webserver (1.5GB) and turned it into a snapshot server on wednesday. I hope to put the new packages online every week but I still have to work a bit on the installer, as well as on emerge since there is still an error with the name of the patch emerge script: Right now the script is called patch-2.5.9.7.py; the right name would be patch-2.5.9-7.py. When I eventually changed the name in svn last weekend, building with emerge got impossible. I changed it back in r743581 and r744619.
So basically the outlines of this weeks work are drawn, my build and upload server is running, my laptop rebuilds as well.
A good week and hopefully a new post next week.
SE

grand opening of the news weekly

2007-11-21T11:46:00.000+01:00

The idea is to collect all different personal news channels about my work and to post them in this blog. Basically a real diary.

I am currently 25 years old, studying physics and married since some months.

Nearly all my free time I am working on the KDE port to MS Windows.

I hope you'll get the informations you need, if not tell me.
SE