Fast, faster, solid.

Our last KDE on Windows release is already a month old, but still we have tons of bugfixes that result in updated packages (to be true, this hasn't been the case for all releases).
Today I just finished uploading several new packages again, including a new kdelibs package which contains a new solid backend. This doesn't really sound to interesting in the first place, so why should you care? Solid works completely in the background and gives your applications the system information it needs, whether this is the number of DVD-Drives and its read speeds, or your battery status or ... This also shows the problem: there is a call to solid each and every time you open a file dialog and in case your solid backend is slow and/or crashes sometimes you can easily see how bad the situation can be.

At the bottom left in dolphin you can see the device list (Geräte) directly taken from solid.

Already since quite some time we thought about improving our current solid backend, but only november Patrick von Reth (TheOneRing) actually started to work on a new backend implementation. Work continued for quite a while, I went to the solid sprint in Brno, and now the biggest part of work is done. So I decided to integrate that work already now, even though we haven't even started to bring this upstream. This will follow soon but given that this might count as a new feature, we might need to wait a while ;-). If you are curious, work has been done in the git branch win-solid-next.

But not only that has happened lately.
Andrius Ribas (Xiluembo) is trying to build KDE on Windows with yet another compiler, the Intel one. Of course this is not to easy, each compiler has a specific behaviour, and of course, specific bugs. A new compiler might not be to interesting for everybody, but it helps us understand how our compilers work, and specifically we are interested in producing OpenMP-code (parallel execution code) which the msvc compiler does not support.

But there is more going on, Ananta Palani (notedible) is fixing bugs for the digikam package (and sometimes has to fight the once I introduced) and I am trying to fix smaller bugs in all KDE applications, I even became top bug killer in commit digest once :-D.

tl;dr: Please update your KDE on Windows packages regularly and get tons of bugs fixes :-D

new release

Hi everybody, after over a year of silence, I have something new to announce: I will make a new release available of the KDE SC on Windows tomorrow. There have been several problems in the past year that spoiled new release attempts, beginning with a build server leaving together with Nokia and ending with our web server which hosts the original binary releases. But these problems have been solved and so there we are. I hope this will make it also more obvious that KDE on Windows isn't dead yet ;-).

In the next weeks I also want to blog about several features I worked on in the last year:

• improvements/bug fixes for kate
• improvements in our emerge build scripts, especially for packaging and building collections of software
• making nepomuk (at least partly) available

stay tuned.

transqript v0.0.1

Today I want to announce a new Qt application called transqript.
Transqript can be used to bring interviews etc. that have been recorded as an audio file into written text.
Originally I wrote it as a christmas present for my wife since the free-as-in-beer application that was recommended for this task before was only available for Windows (and my wife uses Linux of course). The second point was of course to try out some classes in Qt and have a real life test application for that. Since my wife got a lot of questions regarding transqript I decided to clean the code, add some features and make a real windows installer too. You can download the installer or the sources required to build transqript from the sourceforge page.
Please be aware that transqript is still in a pre-alpha state, that means it looks really ugly and there are bugs in it!.
If you use transqript and you find some bugs, please enter them in the bug tracker. I will try to fix those bugs and I plan to release a new version every 2-3 months.

Have fun with transqript!


Heute möchte ich transqript vorstellen.
Transqript ist gedacht um insbesondere Interviews zu transkribieren die vorher als Audio-Datei vorliegen.
Ursprünglich habe ich es als Weihnachtsgeschenk für meine Frau geschrieben, da die dafür empfohlene Anwendung leider nicht unter Linux verfügbar ist. Da uns viele Fragen nach dieser Anwendung erreicht haben, habe ich sie nun ein bisschen aufgeräumt und stelle sie nun der Allgemeinheit zur Verfügung.
Da transqript noch sehr neu ist, enthält es bestimmt noch einige Fehler die ich aber in kommenden Versionen ausräumen möchte. Falls jemandem Fehler auffallen oder neue Funktionen einfallen, einfach in der Fehlerdatenbank eintragen.

Viel Spaß mit transqript!

finally 4.7.0

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.

update

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.

KDE 4.3rc1

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.

pre-release sprint

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...