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Deeper Plasma integration

The fork of Nextcloud from ownCloud has brought about new questions regarding this topic: Will the Plasma team have to support two different systems? It would obviously be vastly preferable if both cloud implementations could be supported with one client, which would require collaboration between ownCloud and Nextcloud. The Plasma team has communicated this requirement for both parties. From an implementation point of view, at least Nextcloud features a key-value store which could be used to store client settings.

Who's new to Akademy?

Sascha Meinrath keynote

One of Sascha's projects is X-Lab, a future-focused technology policy and innovation effort that is building an alternative infrastructure. The issue they are addressing is not just about wireless access. Sascha asks, "What if we could repurpose unused TV frequencies for broadband? Less than 10% of available bandwidth is used." GNURadio and other projects make it possible for more of this unused capacity to be used. Distributed infrastructure for a variety of technologies is awesome; open hardware allows for participatory technology.

Guy Maurel is French, almost 67 and retired. Having studied electrical engineering, he has seen the first coax cables forming an intranet and later managed DNS, mail and router systems following the growth of the IT industry. He's been using Linux for a while and when a student told him he should be contributing to Open Source, he decided to join KDE PIM.

• the state of KWin and Akonadi,
• an argument for collecting data on KDE usage,
• the work involved in moving GCompris to QtQuick,
• release management,
• and automated testing.

In the afternoon, there are two tracks of longer, more traditional talks, with a stronger-than-usual in-depth focus. The goal of these sessions is to share knowledge and experience, to learn from each other. In these sessions, you can explore:

Do not publish. Probably never. Just used this to upload the images to the dot and prepare the html. Use from https://community.kde.org/Promo/graphics.

The dot has always been a place where content came first. But it is 2014 and articles without images don't do well. We don't always have images with articles, unfortunately. Sprints have group photo's, much coding work comes with screenshots but sometimes you're just not able to find something fitting to spice up the article.

KDE is People

Meanwhile, the KDE applications have gone beyond simple clocks and calculators – we have a full office suite, mail and calendaring, video and image editors and much more. Not only that, KDE applications are being ported to multiple platforms - not just Windows and Mac, but also Android and other mobile operating systems. And our libraries (being renamed to Frameworks 5) are going modular, making them freely available to a far wider audience than just KDE developers.

KDE Applications 4.13 Benefit From The New Semantic Search, Introduce New Features

KDE Development Platform 4.13 Introduces Improved Semantic Search

Development of the next generation KDE Development Platform—called KDE Frameworks 5—is in beta stage. Read this article to find out what is coming and see here for the latest announcements.

Welcome to the Bodega store!

What is Bodega?

First off, let’s find out what Bodega is all about. Aaron explains:

Frameworks 5 Porting Aids

Currently, the following Frameworks belong to this group:

Last week, the first beta of Applications and Platform 4.13 was released. This week, beta 2 is coming. The openSUSE team has already asked its users to start the testing engines and that request extends to the entire community of KDE users!

Frameworks 5 based apps on Wayland

See the announcement on kde.org for more information and links to downloads. For information about Frameworks 5, see this earlier article on the dot.

Today we proudly feature an interview with Bernard Gray from De Bortoli Wines, an Australian winemaking company.

Hot and Dry in Australia

We spoke with Bernard Gray who has worked for the company for over 10 years in an IT project management and development role. He is, in his own words: "a tertiary qualified programmer, and has been involved in either core development or supporting development with a few Open Source distros/projects over the years".

See the announcement on kde.org for more information and links to downloads. For information about Frameworks 5, see this earlier article on the dot.

What is Frameworks 5?

The KDE Frameworks—designed as drop-in Qt Addon libraries—will enrich Qt as a development environment with functions that simplify, accelerate and reduce the cost of Qt development. Frameworks eliminate the need to reinvent key functions.

The KDE Community is proud to announce the latest major updates to the Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform delivering new features and fixes while readying the platform for further evolution. The Plasma Workspaces 4.11 will receive long term support as the team focuses on the technical transition to Frameworks 5. This then presents the last combined release of the Workspaces, Applications and Platform under the same version number.

The Pimsters (names here)

Friday beginnings

Work started and fun as well. In the hallway, the fussball tables were busy. With over 30 participants, the hacking room couldn't hold everyone comfortably. David, coming late, even had to bring his own table to the meeting and Ingo arrived just in time for dinner at 19:00. We had our evening meal at an Asian place. There was a little trouble fitting in so many people but it was fun. A Spaniard had to tell the Indian guy what to eat ... We'll leave the results to your imagination.

Lydia Pintscher on being a board member

Why did you choose to volunteer for the KDE e.V. Board of Directors? I stepped up because it is a role that needs to be filled and is important for KDE as a whole. By doing this I want to free up people's time so they can do great work in other areas of KDE and don't have to spend their time on administration and politics.

As bonus, we have for you a short video showing the KDE desktop progressing through the last 15+ years:

"We are a community of technologists, designers, writers and advocates who work to ensure freedom for all people through our software."

Since it began more than 15 years ago, the international KDE community has grown bigger and more diverse than could have been imagined at the beginning. These forces created a need for clarity about what pulls us together as a community. Over the last six months or so, we have examined this critical issue, moving beyond assumptions and what has been taken for granted. In a rigorous project led by Kévin Ottens, many thoughts were distilled down to essentials. Today, we present the result of that effort: the KDE Manifesto.

The KDE community is one of the largest and most influential Free Software communities world-wide with thousands of volunteer contributors and countless users. Most of the software written by KDE is based on the Qt toolkit. With the recent strategy changes within Nokia—the largest contributor to Qt, there is uncertainty about the future of Qt that concerns KDE. This is the position of the KDE community regarding the future of Qt:

Community Keynote
Agustín Benito Bethencourt

Some people kicked off the conference on Friday night at the pre-registration party sponsored by Intel or even arrived earlier in the week to explore Tallinn and sample Estonia's beers. During the first day of Akademy, there were sessions on release management, Plasma Active, and the future of KDE and Qt technologies.

The Desktop Summit 2011 is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities in Berlin, Germany from the 6th August 2011 to the 12th August 2011.

Bretzn - simple and quick tied together

The Issue

After you have written your application, you have to compile and package it for all operating systems you want to support. There is a wide variety of Linux distributions, and, of course, Windows and Mac too. Once you've built and packaged your software, you have to create a web site with information about the application, along with features such as commenting and bug reporting. Promotion comes next with social networking and conferences. Then you try to get it into distributions. Once the distributions ship your application, users turn up and start giving feedback, resulting in changes to the application. A new version is released, and you have to start all over again with the boring stuff.

Party time! by transloid

Mingling

It is hard to explain what exactly it is which makes Akademy so much fun, but quoting a few unsuspecting subjects might give a little insight.

Walking towards registration

This morning, the main conference will start with a keynote by Valtteri Halle, member of the MeeGo technical steering group and director of Nokia Meego Software. He will open the conference talking about one of the main tracks at Akademy this year, mobile computing interfaces and their influence on modern interfaces. Over the course of two days, over 40 other speakers will discuss topics as diverse as Cloud computing, speech recognition and our efforts on porting to MS Windows. Those talks will be recorded as much as possible so those who had to stay home will be able to see what is being discussed. The dot editors and the KDE promo team look forward to keeping you all informed on what is going on here and sharing a bit of this experience! Be sure to join the !Akademy group on identi.ca to follow the buzz.

KDE people @ Maemo

Dave Neary talking about documentation in the main hall

Cocktails from Skype!

There are people here from various KDE projects like Amarok and KOffice but also KDE related companies like KDAB and BasysKom. They mingle with the Maemo community, and the location is perfect for that. In the community area, but also in the main ("N900") hall you can find besides the usual tables and chairs beanbags, plenty of power outlets, wifi and plenty of food and drinks. The Westergasfabriek is certainly a very interesting location, especially the main hall - the photos below certainly don't do justice to the industrial environment. We're being taken care off very well, that's for sure.

Since KDE 4.3 has been released, various reviews have appeared on the web. The DOT had a look at some of them.

Polishlinux once again offers an extensive review with many screenshots showing what is new in KDE 4.3. According to Korneliusz Jarzębski, "Finally the day has come, when the curiosity about the KDE4.3 development branch took the better of me.". The result:

Not delivering a complete Free Desktop experience also led to dissatisfaction inside the community. Many vendors developed a custom set of desktop components without community input or support. The result was often not only a re-inventing of many wheels and little advancement for Free Software but also had severe limitations and unsatisfactory performance, consistency and stability.

The New Conference Location

At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit much cross-desktop work has been done. The days we have are being used for the Cross Desktop Tracks and during the talks there are KDE and Gnome developers mingling everywhere. Cross desktop sessions included bug triage, metadata sharing, instant messaging and sharing personal data cross-desktop with CouchDB. Read more about the results!

Robert Lefkowitz's Keynote

After the registration closed, a Canonical-sponsored party began. Hundreds of attendants gathered on the large area behind the conference building. The beach is just outside the auditorium, and during the day is full of people enjoying the heat. Many of us have been walking along the beach, enjoying the view, having some food there and even having a swim. At night, we had beer. There was supposed to be free beer from 9 to 11 but we obviously did not drink it fast enough and it lasted until after midnight. Still many were unhappy when the beer stopped flowing - luckily the bar continued to be open.

Our models doing their thing

Camp KDE, the KDE community event of North and South America, has finished. Similar to the European KDE meeting, Akademy, the first two days were based around a series of talks on various topics. After that we moved towards BOF sessions, local discussions and programming. We had a trip to the Appleton Estate, visited Rick's café and had a lot of fun. The following article details some of the things that kept us busy.