KDE.news

KDE Applications 19.08 Brings New Features to Konsole, Dolphin, Kdenlive, Okular and Dozens of Other Apps

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Can you believe we've already passed the half-year mark? That means it's just the right time for a new release of KDE Applications! Our developers have worked hard on resolving bugs and introducing features that will help you be more productive as you get back to school, or return to work after your summer vacation.

The KDE Applications 19.08 release brings several improvements that truly elevate your favorite KDE apps to the next level. Take Konsole, our powerful terminal emulator, which has seen major improvements to its tiling abilities. We've made tiling a bit more advanced, so now you can split your tabs as many times as you want, both horizontally and vertically. The layout is completely customizable, so feel free to drag and drop the panes inside Konsole to achieve the perfect workspace for your needs.

Dolphin, KDE's file explorer, introduces features that will help you step up your file management game. Let's start with bookmarks, a feature that allows you to create a quick-access link to a folder, or save a group of specific tabs for future reference. We've also made tab management smarter to help you declutter your desktop. Dolphin will now automatically open folders from other apps in new tabs of an existing window, instead of in their own separate windows. Other improvements include a more usable information panel and a new global shortcut for launching Dolphin - press Meta + E to try it out!

Okular, our document viewer, continues with a steady stream of usability improvements for your document-viewing pleasure. In Applications 19.08, we have made annotations easier to configure, customize, and manage. Okular's ePub support has also greatly improved in this release, so Okular is now more stable and works better when previewing large files.

All this sounds exciting for those who read and sort through documents, but what about those who write a lot of text or emails? They will be glad to hear we've made Kate, our advanced text editor, better at sorting recent files. Similar to Dolphin, Kate will now focus on an existing window when opening files from other apps. Your email-writing experience also receives a boost with the new version of Kontact, or more specifically, KMail. After updating to Applications 19.08, you'll be able to write your emails in Markdown, and insert - wait for it - emoji into them! The new integration with grammar-checking tools like LanguageTool and Grammalecte will help you prevent embarrassing mistakes and typos that always seem to creep into the most important business emails.

Photographers and other creatives will appreciate changes to Gwenview, KDE's image viewer. Gwenview can now display extended EXIF metadata for RAW images, share photos and access remote files more easily, and generate better thumbnails. If you are pressed for system resources, Gwenview has your back with the "Low usage resource mode" that you can enable at will. In the video-editing department, Kdenlive shines with a new set of keyboard+mouse combinations and improved 3-point editing operations.

We should also mention Spectacle, KDE's screenshot application. The new version lets you open the screenshot (or its containing folder) right after you've saved it. Our developers introduced a number of nice and useful touches to the Delay functionality. For example, you may notice a progress bar in the panel, indicating the remaining time until the screenshot is done. Sometimes, it's the small details that make using KDE Applications and Plasma so enjoyable.

Speaking of details, to find out more about other changes in KDE Applications 19.08, make sure to read the official announcement.

Happy updating!

If you happen to be in or close to Milan, Italy this September, come and join us at Akademy, our annual conference. It's a great opportunity to meet the creators of your favorite KDE apps in person, and get an early sneak peek at all the things we have in store for the future of KDE.

Powered by Plasma: ALBA Synchrotron in Barcelona, Spain

Fri, 19 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As you go about your daily tasks, you’re probably unaware that Plasma runs on the computers in one of Europe’s largest research facilities. We were also oblivious – until we met Sergi Blanch-Torné at FOSDEM 2019.

We’re always looking for interesting stories from people who use KDE software at their workplace, in school, or in government institutions. You can imagine our delight, then, when we met Sergi Blanch-Torné at this year’s FOSDEM.

Sergi is a Controls Software Engineer at ALBA, a KDE user, and a Free software advocate and contributor. Not only was he willing to tell us about his favorite KDE apps, but he also works at one of the most amazing places on Earth! In this interview, he tells us what it’s like to work at ALBA, and answers the burning question: “what even is a synchrotron?”.

ALBA is a third-generation synchrotron radiation facility in the Barcelona Synchrotron Park, in Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain. Managed by the Consortium for the Construction, Equipping and Exploitation of the Synchrotron Light Source (CELLS), it is jointly funded by the Spanish and the Catalonian Administration.

Aerial view of the ALBA facility. Source: CELLS media gallery.

With its eight operational beamlines (and additional four in construction), ALBA has been serving more than 2000 researchers every year since first opening for experiments in 2010. It comprises a complex of electron accelerators that produce synchrotron light – electromagnetic radiation covering a continuum of wavelengths, ranging from infrared to hard X rays (including visible light). Synchrotron light is millions of times brighter than the surface of the Sun, which allows scientists to visualize atomic structures in extremely high resolutions.

ALBA also happens to be the place where Plasma powers the majority of desktop computers in the controls department. Read more on this, plus a bunch of fascinating details on how synchrotrons work, in our interview with Sergi.

Ivana Devcic: Sergi, thank you for accepting our invitation to the interview, and for taking the time out of your day to do this! Our story begins at this year's FOSDEM, where you met with developers from the KDE community, is that right?

Sergi Blanch-Torné: That's right. I'm pretty much a regular at FOSDEM at this point. I think I attended it for the first time in 2004. One day at work, we had some trouble with Plasma. Conveniently, it was a few weeks before FOSDEM. I told my boss that there will surely be KDE people to ask for help, and there really were! And it was fun to find out they are from Catalonia too.

So we arranged a visit with Aleix Pol and Albert Astals. They looked at the issue and found the right configuration that solved it.

Ivana: Glad to hear you solved the issue! It would make for an awkward start to our interview otherwise. Could you please introduce yourself a bit to our readers?

Sergi: Of course. I'm from Juneda, a small village in the west of Catalonia. Just 20 km away from the province capital Lleida. An hour and a half from the capital, Barcelona. I studied computer science at the University of Lleida. It was there that I started using KDE software, back in 1998. They are Linux evangelists at my university, and KDE's desktop environment was (and still is) the default desktop on the computers running Linux. I still contribute to my university with a yearly talk on how a computer scientist can end up in a weirder job than expected.

After getting my Bachelor's degree, I went to an Erasmus project to the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands. That's where I improved my English a lot. When I came back from Erasmus, I tried moving to another country, but ended up in Barcelona.

The final project for my Bachelor's degree was related to Free software. I've had a great relationship with the Mathematics department, and there is a research group that works on cryptography. We thought of doing something practical that could be used by the Free Software community. At the time, the elliptic curve crypto wasn't really known to the general public, so we decided to prepare an implementation for GnuPG. I still maintain the website of our project.

Sadly, I don't have the time to contribute with code any more, but I like to be in contact with the community. That's why every year at FOSDEM, we meet with Werner Koch, the project leader of GnuPG.

Ivana: You've been involved with Free Software for quite a while. How did this lead to working at ALBA?

Sergi: When I was looking for a job abroad after returning from Erasmus, I heard about the ESRF (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility), the biggest synchrotron in Europe. I applied for a position there, and in one of the interviews in the hiring process they told me that a synchrotron was in construction near Barcelona. So I also applied there. Many of my current supervisors at ALBA were working at ESRF before.

General view inside the facility. Photo by Sergi Blanch-Torné.

Here at ALBA, I got a position in the controls section. We're part of the computing division that has different sections. One is called the Management Information System. That's where engineers who work mainly with the web and administrative applications. Then there are the people from infrastructure systems. And the sections for electronics and controls, that we have a lot in common with.

Ivana: The controls section... Sounds exciting. But what exactly do you control from there?

Sergi: To help you understand how it all works, maybe I should abstract first what a synchrotron is. A synchrotron is a kind of particle accelerator. In our case, it is an electron accelerator. You've probably heard about the LHC in CERN -- that's a collider, a very different facility, but also an accelerator.

The difference is in the scale and in the purpose. At the LHC they have 27 kilometers in the circumference perimeter. We have about 400 meters. Colliders are made to produce those collisions we read about in the press, for discovering particles like the Higgs Boson. When those electrons in the accelerator are bent to maintain the circumference, they produce photons - basically, they generate light. In the LHC or other colliders, they like to set this light generation to the minimum. But in the synchrotrons, it is the light that is actually used.

We could say that the accelerator itself is a bulb that generates an incredibly brilliant light. And it is because of this brilliance that those facilities are used, instead of other alternatives such as X-rays. There are experiments that require this kind of facility, because with a normal X-ray generator researchers would not be able to see what the experiment requires. In essence, you could also say that this is a big machine we use to see small things. We could even simplify it to the point of saying a synchrotron is like a huge microscope.

It has applications in biology, chemistry, pharmacology... also in paleontology, or even art. Here at ALBA we did experiments on how a virus passes the membrane of a cell. We looked at the mechanisms of how the cell is invaded, and took pictures of that. We can also take a fossil and see inside - without having to crack it open and break it, we are able to see the remaining structure inside. Or we can stress a plastic to know how it will degrade under certain conditions. Sometimes famous artists used layers of paint to draw over something. We can see what's under the paint without destroying the layers.

Beamline 24 end station, where the experiments happen. Photo by Sergi Blanch-Torné.

Ivana: Fascinating!

Sergi: It really is. And my job is to have the instruments under control and integrated to allow an experiment to be carried out. We provide the researchers with the tools they need, but we are rarely there when they're using the synchrotron.

To make sure an accelerator works correctly, many elements need to work together seamlessly. The electron beam is like, say, a train with its carriages. There is not a single electron, but a bunch revolving around in a circle. They are packed in bunches, and those bunches are separated from each other by 2 nanoseconds. So an extremely high level of precision is needed.

First, there is a linear accelerator, with an electron gun that generates those bunches of electrons. We call it linac for short. This linac produces electron beams that travel at speeds close to the speed of light. Then they are passed through a booster ring, where they are accelerated even more. Even closer to the speed of light, but never reaching its physical bound. This acceleration process is repeated 3 times per second, and the beam is stored in a ring that is designed to generate this extremely brilliant light.

For this whole process, there are hundreds or even thousands of elements to control. They have to work together, they have to be prepared to act just in that one precise moment. There are stepper motors, encoders, detectors, cameras, oscilloscopes, and even other weirder elements that need to work together. And we make sure they work properly.

Ivana: Do you use any specialized software in your work?

Sergi: Currently, the control room is running Debian 9 with Plasma. Almost everything in the controls section runs Linux. There are a few computers that require Windows because some manufacturers didn't provide the drivers for Linux...

Computers in the control room, powered by Plasma. Photo by Sergi Blanch-Torné.

As for the tools we use, the ESRF has been publishing the controls system as Free Software for decades now. There is a community of synchrotrons in Europe and many institutions and research facilities participate in this community. It's all about collaboration of several institutions and engineers like me in other facilities. In a way, it's exactly like in FOSS communities: we work on solving something that others can benefit from, and vice versa. To be more specific in terms of software, the distributed control system we use is called Tango.

Ivana: It really does sound like your work has a lot in common with FOSS communities and their principles. After all, science and software freedom have always been intertwined. If I understood you correctly, you also write your own software at ALBA?

Sergi: Yes, we make Free Software, and it's one of the reasons why I work here. I'm happy to have a job that produces Free Software.

We are a public institution and, even though we make Free Software, there are things we still don't publish. That's why we have to keep pushing in this direction. Some of us have also participated in the FSFE “Public Money? Public Code!” campaign. It's an incredibly important initiative.

Ivana: Can you share an example of what kind of software you produce?

Sergi: Sure! From the control room, the people in charge of the facility need to have precise control of all the elements to ensure the stable control of the beam. They are not close to those elements, so it's necessary to be able to control everything remotely, from the network. And those people like graphical interfaces, so, a long time ago, we started a project based on Qt to build a framework that would make it easier to build those graphical interfaces.

We called it Taurus. This is a LGPL framework, and since the latest release (4.5 at the time of writing), it supports Plasma 5.

Screenshot of the Taurus software, courtesy of Sergi Blanch-Torné.

Ivana: It’s nice to hear that. :) Apart from using Plasma as the desktop environment on your computers, do you use any other KDE apps at ALBA?

Sergi: We are a scientific paper factory, so we use Kile and Okular all the time. In the controls section, we use Kate and KWrite quite often. Of course, there are also the Emacs people and the Vim users...

Personally, I use KMail, Amarok, digiKam, and for my astronomy hobby, KStars. Whenever I show someone new how to start playing with a (domestic) telescope, KStars is the perfect application to learn everything you need to know.

Ivana: We’ll make sure to forward the praise to the KStars team. Do you have any advice for young scientists who would like to work at ALBA or similar institutions? What kinds of skills should they have? Any particular programming languages that would be good to know?

Sergi: For sure! The important thing is to apply. Apply to any job you think will make you happy. If there's a nice work opportunity, don't pass up on it.

At ALBA, we work with C/C++ and Python. Sometimes, but rarely in Java. I use Cython very often.

There is a variety of skills that we, as a group, provide. One single person can't do everything alone, so the community aspect is crucial to us. Our work ranges from kernel drivers to graphical interfaces. Some of us are better in one area, some in another. The important thing is that in the end, the group is capable of working on the full stack. And the main driving force is that we're all contributing to science.

Ivana: We hope you know your contributions are very much appreciated. This has been a fantastic interview – we’ve learned so many things! Thank you, Sergi. It would make us all happy if you could come to Akademy, KDE’s annual conference, so please think about it. :)

Sergi: Thanks for having me! The next Akademy is in Italy, isn't it? I’ll be there.

Would you like to meet KDE developers, or learn how to use Plasma in your company? Come to Milan, Italy, from September 7th to 13th and join us at Akademy! Our community conference is free and open to everyone.

KDE Applications 18.12 Are Waiting for You

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It's that time of the year again. Everyone is in a festive mood and excited about all the new things they're going to get. It's only natural, since it's the season of the last KDE Applications release for this year!

With more than 140 issues resolved and dozens of feature improvements, KDE Applications 18.12 are now on its way to your operating system of choice. We've highlighted some changes you can look forward to.

Practical File Management with Dolphin

File management encompasses a lot of activities. There's renaming, copying, and moving files around. Perhaps you want to quickly preview a file to make sure it's the right one. You're in luck, because the thumbnail preview experience has been greatly improved in the new version of Dolphin. LibreOffice documents and AppImage applications can now be previewed as thumbnails, and icon thumbnails look much cleaner. If folder thumbnails are enabled, video files larger than 5 MB will be visible in them.

Of course, there is more to Dolphin than just thumbnails. The "Control" menu makes it easier to show hidden places and create new files and folders. After unmounting a storage volume in the Places panel, it can now be remounted. Those who still own audio CDs and use Dolphin to open them will be glad to hear it can now change the CBR bitrate for MP3 files and fix timestamps for FLAC files.

Some security measures have been implemented in Dolphin to prevent users from accidentally losing their data. It no longer allows attempts to unmount the active home directory and the disk where the active OS is installed. When renaming files, Dolphin will warn you if there's an extra dot in front of the filename, which would make the file hidden. Pretty neat, right?

Okular: Annotate ALL the Things

Okular with the new Typewriter tool

Okular has steadily grown from a document viewer into an indispensable assistant in activities such as studying, doing research, or collaborating on text in read-only file formats like PDF and EPUB. Its annotation capabilities were already powerful, but the new version introduces a new tool called Typewriter. With this annotation tool, you'll be able to write text literally anywhere in your files. Whether it's commenting on an image or highlighting a spelling mistake, your hands are now untied, and you can freely express yourself in Okular.

Other improvements in this release include better options to expand and collapse entries in the Table of Contents sidebar. If a file contains links, hovering over them will always display the full URL in a tooltip, regardless of the currently selected Okular mode.

Konsole, Now with More Emotion

Spending hours or even days working in the terminal can get monotonous. Cheer up - the new version of Konsole has full support for emoji! Add a cheeky smiling cat to your commit messages, or insert a facepalm emoji into your shell scripts.

If you're into more serious things, Konsole now makes it easier to reset the font size back to the default. When a bell is triggered in an inactive tab, the tab icon will be highlighted to visually alert you of the activity. Last but not least, if your mouse has back and forward buttons, Konsole is now able to recognize them, and you can use them to switch between tabs.

Usability Improvements for Everyone

If you have been keeping up with KDE-related news, you're probably aware of our community-wide Usability Improvement goal. After all, it's hard to miss the weekly updates from our awesome developers who are dedicated to making the KDE software more accessible and friendlier to everyone.

The KDE Applications 18.12 release integrates all those fruits of labor, and the result is a much more pleasant user experience across the board. KMail now supports a unified inbox display, and emails should now be readable regardless of your color scheme. A small improvement with a big impact is the ability to repeat the last calculation in KCalc multiple times.

Kate comes with new defaults that are meant to help you work more productively right from the start. Specifically, line numbers and the Text Filter plugin will be enabled by default. You can now change the focus of the embedded terminal in Kate by pressing the F4 key, and it will automatically synchronize the location in the terminal with the location of the currently active document.

in 18.12 Kate comes with better defaults

If you are using Gwenview to fix the wretched red-eye effect in your photos, it will now be even easier thanks to the improved Reduce Red Eye tool. When taking screenshots with Spectacle, their filenames will be sequentially numbered by default. You will also notice that saving options in Spectacle are now easier to access from the Save page.

New Spectacle makes it easier to save screenshots

Ark has received support for tar.zst archives, and it's now much smarter when it comes to file previews. Instead of previewing document files as archives, Ark will now launch the appropriate application for the selected file format.

Apart from improving the standard set of applications, we have also made some of our specialized tools more usable. Lokalize, the translation and localization tool, now has a better search functionality that can recognize plural forms of words. If you keep a lot of tabs open in Lokalize, you will be able to navigate between them much faster.

Cantor, the advanced mathematical tool, now offers better visualizations and highlighting of command entries. You can also open multiple files in one Cantor shell. For users who need to draw mathematical functions, we have made Kmplot more stable and improved the SVG export functionality.

As always, check out the full list of changes in KDE Applications 18.12 to find out more.

Our work on KDE Applications continues, and we can't wait to show you what we've created in 2019. Until then, enjoy the Applications 18.12., and let us know which changes made you the happiest!

KEXI 3.1 Brings Database Application Building to Windows

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

After many months of hard work and more than 200 bugs fixed, KEXI is back with a new major release that will excite Windows and Linux users alike.

If you are looking for a Free and open source alternative to Microsoft Access, KEXI is the right tool for you.

KEXI offers an easy way
to design all kinds of databases.

As part of the Calligra suite, KEXI integrates with other office software, providing an easy, visual way to design tables, queries, and forms, build database applications, and export data into multiple formats. KEXI also offers rich data searching options, as well as support for parametrized queries, designing relational data, and storing object data (including images).

A new version of KEXI has just been released, so if you have never tried this powerful database designer application, now is the right time.

KEXI 3.1 is available for Linux and macOS, and after many years, for Windows as well.

KEXI Is Back on Windows

Business environments are often concerned about migrating to FOSS solutions because of compatibility issues with the proprietary software and formats they currently use. KEXI solves that problem with its Microsoft Access migration assistant that ensures database tables are preserved and editable between applications. Even better, KEXI works natively on the Windows operating system. In fact, KEXI was the first KDE application offered in full version on Windows.

After a long hiatus, the new version of KEXI offers convenient installers for Windows once again. Although it's a preview version, the users are invited to try it out, report bugs, and provide feedback.

Usability and Stability for Everyone

KProperty is included in the first
major release of KEXI Frameworks.

Similar to Plasma 5.12 LTS, the focus of KEXI 3.1 was to improve stability and (backward) compatibility. With more than 200 bugfixes and visibly improved integration with other desktop environments, the goal has definitely been achieved.

Usability improvements have also made their way into KEXI 3.1 dialogs. When using the Import Table Assistant, it is now possible to set character encoding for the source database. Property groups are now supported, and users can set custom sizes for report pages.

Great News for Developers

KEXI 3.1 marks the first official release of KEXI Frameworks - a powerful backend aimed at developers who want to simplify their codebase while making their Qt and C++ applications more featureful. KDb is a database connectivity and creation framework for various database vendors. In KEXI 3.1, KDb offers new debugging functions for SQL statements and comes with improved database schema caching.

KProperty is a property editing framework which now comes with improved support for measurement units and visual property grouping. Last but not least, KReport is a framework for building reports in various formats, offering similar functionality to the reports in MS Access, SAP Crystal or FileMaker. The most useful new feature in KEXI 3.1 is the ability to set custom page sizes for KReport.

New options in KReport allow you to
tweak the appearance of reports.

Alongside Frameworks, KEXI 3.1 offers greatly refined APIs and updated API documentation. According to the developers, “the frameworks are now guaranteed to be backward-compatible between minor versions”.

Translations have also been improved, and KEXI 3.1 is the first version where they are bundled with the Frameworks. This will make it easier for the developers using KEXI Frameworks, as they will be able to use translated messages in their apps.

Make KEXI Even Better

Even with all the excitement about the new release, KEXI developers are already working on new features and improving the existing ones. If you'd like to help make KEXI better, it's never too late to join the project! Take a look at the list of available coding and non-coding jobs.

Although the API documentation has been updated, the user documentation could use some love. If you're good at writing or teaching others, why not chip in?

Finally, if you know a business or an individual that's looking for a Microsoft Access replacement, tell them about KEXI. They just might be pleasantly surprised with what they'll discover.

Download the KEXI 3.1 source or install it from the repository of your distribution. For the full list of changes in the new version, take a look at the official changelog.