Puslingblog|golbgnilsuP

3 interesting small things happened in the weekend.

Due to the hard work of mostly Florian Reinhard and George Kiagiadakis, Bluedevil is now available. Bluedevil is a new and improved bluetooth handling thing targetted the KDE Workspaces.

The Debconf people have uploaded the Qt Debconf frontend that I blogged about a while ago, so now it should be available.

Last, but not least, applications now has more accurate data for if they are online or not, by using the ntrack library. This was especially problematic for people having some interfaces defined in /etc/network/interfaces, and other interfaces managed by NetworkManager.
This feature will be committed to upstream KDE whenever Will gets around to do it.

As a added bonus, KDEBindings in Debian has seen a release critical bugfix (python plugins, e.g. plasma widgets, related), and the brokenness of Konsole (libkpty) on the kFreeBSD-arches have been tracked down to a libc issue and a patch has been made.

All of this is expected to be part of next stable Debian release, codename Squeeze.

I wrote another blog post a while back talking about Debconf kde frontend.

I spend some days at akademy looking at it, and then refined it a bit when I got home.
Results:

• perlqt is in unstable and soon in testing.
• debconf kde frontend works.
• object oriented perl is weird

hopefully, the debconf people will accept it soon.

I wrote a bit ago a blog post about what debian kde is missing of distribution specific things

Some of the more important things includes:

• A Qt based debian installer
• Tools to manage 3rd party modules and firmware and such
• Debconf frontend that fits in
• Report bug interface

Installer
I don’t think it is the most important thing. Wether or not the graphical installer is using gtk or qt is not that important. I would love to see it happen, but it is not something I feel like putting my time in. Others are most welcome.
It will give the advantage of giving the installer the possibility to use the framebuffer directly.

Modules and firmwares and such
Someone is saying that ubuntu has something called jockey that does this exact thing, with a KDE and a Gnome frontend. Unfortunately, it is python, so it is something I will really avoid. I’m hoping that me mentioning it here will make someone into python&debian pick it up and bring it to debian.
It is apparantly some nice magic around discover-data.

Debconf frontend that fits
A lot of work has been put into proper perl-qt bindings and they will hopefully be ready for kde4.5, which is unfortunately a series too late for Squeeze :/. But when that has happened, we just need some perl guy to adapt the old frontend to debconf.

Reportbug interface
There is already a tool called reportbug-ng that is a qt interface to reporting bugs.

All in all, it looks like we are quite far already. We just need to get the last bits put together. Someone: pickup jockey.

And note that the comment field isn’t a place to report bugs. They will be removed.

So. I was wondering, which nice distro specific tools do exist in debian/gnome or in $other/kde that debian/kde is missing?

We have kalternatives for managing alternatives, we have a update notifier frontend in progress and after google summer of code, hopefully a package management frontend, aptitude-qt. (Made by Piotr).

But what other distribution specific tools are we missing for Debian-KDE ?

A while ago, something happened to the bugs reported against KDE in debian. It is best illustrated like this:

I’ve chosen to name it Eckhart slope. Thanks.

For full graphs, see http://alioth.debian.org/~pusling-guest/pkg-kde-buggraphs/

I’m currently trying to convince (and hopefully succeeding) Daniel Burrows to co-mentor a Qt frontend for aptitude.

But for that a student is needed. http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2010/Aptitude-Qt for first draft of project.

http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc for information about GSoC and debian
and #debian-soc on irc.debian.org if you prefer that communication media.

-!- You’re now known as svuorela

Over the last months, I have been asking people in KDE irc channels and in Debian KDE channels wether they have heard from Matthew Rosewarne, on irc known as Mukidohime. No one had.

Very recently, I uploaded one of his packages with the following changelog entry:

* Switch Maintainer field to krap team and remove Matthew, he seems absent.
We hope he comes back.

Apparantly he was absent. Permanently. Elizabeth Krumbach writes some nice words in his memory.

I remember Matthew for his work on several KDE related packages in Debian, always doing a job that was better than I expected. And I especially remember him at Akademy 2008 where he to much joy brought a black horse whip for the chairman of a talkroom. And he even brouht a spare pink horse whip for when the black one broke. Especially Adriaan had a good use of that.

And at last, I will bring a image of Matthew showing off his equipment to Aaron Seigo.

Matthew Rosewarne

Condolences to his family. Matthew will be missed.

Most of it now available in a debian/experimental near you.
Special thanks to George Kiagiadakis for doing much of the hard work. Also thanks to Martin Alfke.

I do now also claim that we have the best packaged and best working CLI bindings for Qt and KDE. Thanks to Mirco for polishing it.

KDE4.3 seems to have a bit more bling than kde 4.2, but there isn’t anything major I have noticed yet.

Some parts of kde4.3 is not yet packaged though, and might not happen until 4.3 final. Those vacation things you know.

Det er BLÅ SOMMER og vi ved her kommer alle med og dyrker et venskab der vil bestå