kde – Page 6 – Blog :: Sune Vuorela

Barcodes, Weather and other nice things

Long time no blogging.

Earlier, I wrote a blog post about transporting data to mobile phones. I have since then extracted the Data Matrix code I wrote there into a separate library, prison and added support for QR Code as well. So from KDE’s next feature release, versioned 4.7 arriving around first of august, you have DataMatrix and QRCode support in Klipper.

While on a barcode spree, I also added barcode support to the KDE Addressbooks for easy transfer of contacts. Also using libprison. Also available from 4.7 onwards.

Few minutes ago, libprison 1.0 was tagged and hopefully soon, the KDE Sysadmins will publish my tarball.

And about the weather. Some nice people wrote Debian Weather which in simple ways shows if it is unsafe to upgrade. Quite recently there have been thunderstorms and heavy rain in Debian Unstable. Perl rain.
I have recently added support for Debian Weather in the Plasma Dataengine for weather. Also available from 4.7 onwards.

Last but not least, after spending a couple of hours on trying to understand Q3PtrList and how it was used in KHelpCenter, it is now, as the last component in KDE-Runtime, free of Qt3Support.

All for now. Next up. Platform_11

2011-05-10

Previous weekend in Debian KDE land

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.

2010-08-10

Transport data easily to mobile phones

I guess we all have the challenge of how to easily get a link or a phone number or some other strings of data from the computer to the mobile phone.

With the help of mobile barcodes and klipper, this is now possible in KDE Trunk to do easily. Place some data in clipboard, click on klipper and select Show barcode.

To read it, open the barcode app in your phone (mBarcode on n900 for example) and point it to your monitor.

2010-07-29

debconf kde frontend

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.

2010-07-24

The Debian-KDE specific things II

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.

2010-05-18

The Debian-KDE specific things ?

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 ?

2010-05-11

Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers bugs

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/

2010-04-07

A Qt frontend to aptitude as a GSoC project?

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.

2010-04-04

for my irc fans

-!- You’re now known as svuorela

2010-03-02

Toying with maemo and rotating apps

I have been playing a bit around with Maemo and writing Qt apps for n900. I ended up needing a rotation aware QMainWindow a couple of times, so I ended up abstracting it away in my own MaemoMainWindow, which I just wanted to share. It has enough ifdefs to also build against ‘normal’ Qt, outside Maemo.

Have fun. Available under any license.

maemomainwindow.h:

#ifndef MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H                                          
#define MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H                                          

#include <QMainWindow>

class MaemoMainWindow : public QMainWindow
{                                         
  Q_OBJECT                                
  public:                                 
    MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent = 0, Qt::WindowFlags flags = 0);
    virtual ~MaemoMainWindow();                                      
  protected:                                                         
    virtual bool event (QEvent* event);                              
  Q_SIGNALS:                                                         
    void orientationChanged(Qt::Orientation newOrientation);         
  private Q_SLOTS:                                                   
    void orientationChangedSlot(const QString& newOrientation);      
  private:                                                           
    Qt::Orientation m_orientation;                                   
};                                                                   

#endif // MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H

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#ifndef MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H

#define MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H

#include <QMainWindow>

class MaemoMainWindow : public QMainWindow

{

Q_OBJECT

public:

MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent = 0, Qt::WindowFlags flags = 0);

virtual ~MaemoMainWindow();

protected:

virtual bool event (QEvent* event);

Q_SIGNALS:

void orientationChanged(Qt::Orientation newOrientation);

private Q_SLOTS:

void orientationChangedSlot(const QString& newOrientation);

private:

Qt::Orientation m_orientation;

};

#endif // MAEMOMAINWINDOW_H

maemomainwindow.cpp:

#include “maemomainwindow.h”                                         

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
#include <mce/mode-names.h>
#include <mce/dbus-names.h>
#endif                     

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
#include <QDBusConnection>
#include <QDBusMessage>
#include <QEvent>
#endif



MaemoMainWindow::MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent, Qt::WindowFlags flags) : QMainWindow (parent, flags) {
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  QDBusConnection::systemBus().connect(QString(), MCE_SIGNAL_PATH, MCE_SIGNAL_IF,
                                       MCE_DEVICE_ORIENTATION_SIG,
                                       this,
                                       SLOT(orientationChangedSlot(QString)));
#endif
}


MaemoMainWindow::~MaemoMainWindow() {

}


void MaemoMainWindow::orientationChangedSlot (const QString& newOrientation) {
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  if (newOrientation == QLatin1String(MCE_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT)) {
    setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForcePortraitOrientation, true);
    emit orientationChanged(Qt::Vertical);
  } else {
    setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForceLandscapeOrientation, true);
    emit orientationChanged(Qt::Horizontal);
  }
#else
Q_UNUSED(newOrientation);
#endif

}




bool MaemoMainWindow::event (QEvent* event) {
#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5
  switch (event->type()) {
    case QEvent::WindowActivate:
      QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(
           QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,
                                          MCE_REQUEST_IF,
                                          MCE_ACCELEROMETER_ENABLE_REQ));
      break;
    case QEvent::WindowDeactivate:
      QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(
           QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,
                                          MCE_REQUEST_IF,
                                          MCE_ACCELEROMETER_DISABLE_REQ));
      break;
    default:
      break;
  }
#endif
  return QMainWindow::event (event);
}

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#include “maemomainwindow.h”

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5

#include <mce/mode-names.h>

#include <mce/dbus-names.h>

#endif

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5

#include <QDBusConnection>

#include <QDBusMessage>

#include <QEvent>

#endif

MaemoMainWindow::MaemoMainWindow (QWidget* parent, Qt::WindowFlags flags) : QMainWindow (parent, flags) {

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5

QDBusConnection::systemBus().connect(QString(), MCE_SIGNAL_PATH, MCE_SIGNAL_IF,

MCE_DEVICE_ORIENTATION_SIG,

this,

SLOT(orientationChangedSlot(QString)));

#endif

}

MaemoMainWindow::~MaemoMainWindow() {

}

void MaemoMainWindow::orientationChangedSlot (const QString& newOrientation) {

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5

if (newOrientation == QLatin1String(MCE_ORIENTATION_PORTRAIT)) {

setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForcePortraitOrientation, true);

emit orientationChanged(Qt::Vertical);

} else {

setAttribute(Qt::WA_Maemo5ForceLandscapeOrientation, true);

emit orientationChanged(Qt::Horizontal);

}

#else

Q_UNUSED(newOrientation);

#endif

}

bool MaemoMainWindow::event (QEvent* event) {

#ifdef Q_WS_MAEMO_5

switch (event->type()) {

case QEvent::WindowActivate:

QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(

QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,

MCE_REQUEST_IF,

MCE_ACCELEROMETER_ENABLE_REQ));

break;

case QEvent::WindowDeactivate:

QDBusConnection::systemBus().call(

QDBusMessage::createMethodCall(MCE_SERVICE, MCE_REQUEST_PATH,

MCE_REQUEST_IF,

MCE_ACCELEROMETER_DISABLE_REQ));

break;

default:

break;

}

#endif

return QMainWindow::event (event);

}

Update: reformatted code. Thought wordpres and <code> was smart. Thanks Ken.

2010-02-01

Category: kde