Recently, a new version of Gnash was uploaded to Debian by Miriam Ruiz.
The most important thing in the changelog from my point of view is the following:
So I kind of had to test how the KDE 4 thingies works.
Youtube: The “videos being watched right now”-animation works, but I can’t actually watch the movies.
Random flash advertisements plays nicely. Unfortunately. I was happy to avoid those.
Conclusion: Some things works, but mostly the annoying things.
/me++
Or in a bit longer words, today is my birthday and I got a nice present from Debian – a release sent from Samoa.
For all the KDE/Debian users, this is also the beginning of something special: Pushing KDE4 slowly to unstable and testing/squeeze.
If you are in the group of KDE-users-against-change, then please stay with the just released version of Debian, Debian Lenny, as this is where KDE3 desktop will be. From Debian unstable, it will dissapear soon.
Or Is distro’s backporting of features a good thing or Distro A is much better than Distro B because of the cool features
So. Advantages when backporting features
Disadvantages:
In KDE4, several distros backports loads of features (Plasma panel autohide, plasma tooltips, kwin “cube” effect and other things).
Several distros include mandriva, suse, kubuntu and fedora.
So should we in Debian follow the other distros? Should KDE change policies? Should distros stop backporting features? Something else? Sharing the patches among the distributions is of course easy.
(Please note: I’m only talking about features, not bugfixes
Gathering
I spent this weekend at a Skolelinux/Debian-edu gathering in Oslo. 8.5 hours by bus each way.
I got to meet some of the people shipping a customized Debian for schools. As it was a gathering related to educational software, looking at the KDE4 kdeedu packages seemed most appropriate.
I’ve tested step packaging and hopefully it is going to end up on your local debian archive one day, along with some fixes to where kvtml files are packaged, much awaited by Annma and others.
Apparantly, in Brazil, they have their own debian based kde distribution and 130 GB of free as in public domain free educational movies. Some people discussed an application to view, tag and search the movies. I quickly thought of a mixup of nepomuk and phonon in a nice userinterface. So if anyone feels like implementing that, you are more than welcome.
Gnash
The gathering was together with a Gnash hackathon, and apart from gnash getting more and more usable, the gnash people are also thinking about integration with the desktop environments. For KDE 4 they have plans of a KPart easy embeddable anywhere, including in KHTML. (Maybe another use of the KPartLoader dfaure wrote recently).
The gnash team are unfortunately quite short on KDE knowledge and they asked for help.
I’m probably not myself the right one to help here, but maybe some of you out there feel like helping. There is already a patch set around that some people claims works, but others haven’t figured out to make it work. Feel free to comment here and I will forward to the Gnash people – or just contact them directly on the gnash-dev@gnu.org maillist.
Trolls
I left the gathering a bit early to get to a Troll picnic in a Oslo park and got stuffed with pølse and lompar. (sausages and pancake like bread)
I was by bus all night back home and then a shower and straight to work. After work, I slept for 14 hours or so.
Looking at KDE4 and related technologies, a few things about data storage hit me. Not that I know anything about it, but that does usually not prevent me from trying to be clever about it.
Several parts needs to either index, cache or store data.
Among these, there is probably many other, but these I just noticed.
As the smart reader has guessed, all these uses different storage methods.
Indexes your data and store it in a clucene on disk format. If you remove your strigi indexes, all you lose is the cpu time used to generate it.
Strigi is not a KDE thing, but the KDE libraries depends on it.
Caches your PIM data and make it available easily for applications. Akonadi does not itself keep the data. Akonadi people has evaluated SQLite, but found it insufficient. Akonadi people also evaluated MySQL/Embedded, but did also have issues with that, so they ended up using a full MySQL server.
Akonadi is not a KDE thing, but it originates from KDE and is used by the KDE Pim libraries.
Handles and stores metadata and tags on files, emails and other data. The nepomuk data is all in RDF format. Nepomuk uses Soprano for storage and soprano has pluggable backends.
One Soprano backend, probably the most used, is a Redland backend, which too slow for effective nepomuk usage, but is a C++ thing. Redland internally can use Berkeley DB or MySQL. The usage in Soprano is Berkeley DB format.
The other Soprano backend is using Sesame2, a java rdf storage. Quite some people are against this because it is java. Internally, it seems that it is using its own ondisk format, but is much more effective than the Redland/BDB backend, and the recommended one to use.
Indexes and plays your music and does statistics over it. The amarok people have evaluated SQLite and found it not good enough for the job. The amarok people are going for MySQL/Embedded for now.
All in all, we have a clucene index, a full MySQL server, a BerkelyDB or custom format and a MySQL/Embedded used. I wonder how much communication between these projects there have been regarding the choice of storages.
Now that I already in the beginning said that I didn’t know enough about what I was talking about, I also feel well suited to make suggestions for the future.
What if …
That’s it for now, next up, maybe, interesting places to use plasma.
maemo sdk seems to come with a cdbs, debhelper and dpkg-dev too old to make it easy to build several debian unstable packages like kde4.
maemo seems to come with glibc2.5 and debian/armel kde4 packages depends on 2.7 or greater.
trying to build a newer dpkg in maemo environment requires several perl modules not available – and when buildling those, a circular build dependency is quickly reached.
So – dear lazyweb, what does smart man do now?
I ended up skipping the akademy keysigning, although I was signed up and looking forward to it.
I think the organizers should have kicked people that didn’t bring their own copy of the list instead of providing spare copies and trying to naively verify them.
If anyone on akademy is up for a key signature, please locate me and bring a snippet of paper with your key fingerprint and your full name. I’m hard to overlook.
The following is not a joke:
more precise, soprano, used by nepomuk (semantic desktop thingie), has a sesame backend (java) and a redland backend (c++). According to upstream and others, the sesame backend is way faster than the redland backend.
In the soprano svn dir (and in the pristine tarball), there are a few jars put in precompiled:
This isn’t completely beautiful, but as they all are bsd licensed, it is at least legal.
But it isn’t good enough for debian, as we ship sources and build them. (I think I have heard at least fedora mumble something similar)
The two last jar files, the slf4j ones, are available packaged in debian in the libslf4j-java package. but openrdf-sesame is not available.
If some persons out there has java knowledge, debian packaging knowledge, preferably knowledge of debian java policy and some spare time, packaging openrdf-sesame would be much apprecaited.
And after that, getting the soprano sesame backend built is next goal.
Thanks in advance. applications welcome.
Ana guessed slightly wrong when trying to guess next update of kde4.1 in debian, but her howto still works. Give it a bit for the autobuliders to catch up though.
But I guess I should find a rich uncle to give me newer hardware – my computer was only idle a few hours since friday evening.
I do hope that plasma people soon reaches a stable ABI.
And by the way:
Thanks to frisoftware.dk
Fathi blogged a reply to Peter in where he kind of “tagged” me to also reply. So I will.
You can as Fathi writes, but it is … a bit well hidden.
My encrypted IMAP accounts works without any problems on 3 seperate machines. (home workstation, laptop, work workstation). There is a slight packaging issue here though, not all shlibs were proper bumped, so make sure you have 4.0.80-something of all packages.
You have moon applet and fifteen puzzle in extragear-plasma. Eyes-widget seems gone though. Not a big loss. (Or which ones are you talking about?)
– and yes, I do see kde4 in Lenny.