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.

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.

show barcode option in klipper menu

Mobile barcode in klipper

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

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

debconf kde frontend in action.

hopefully, the debconf people will accept it soon.

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.

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 ?

Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers bugs

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

eckhart slope

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

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

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.

for my irc fans

-!- You’re now known as svuorela

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:

maemomainwindow.cpp:

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

Maemo-udvikling og nokiakonkurrencer

Nokia har startet en konkurrence i at lave gode maemo-applikationer, hvor man kan vinde op til 15000 kroner. Mere herom på http://NokiaOpen2010.RockingMaemo.dk. Det ser ganske interessant ud.

Jeg har lige for sjovs skyld leget lidt med at skrive en medieafspillerapplikation til min n900. Bare for at lege lidt med Phonon og for at se hvordan det var at arbejde med. Kildeteksten kan findes her: maemoplayer-0.1.
En prekompileret eksekverbar (ikke en pakke) kan findes her: player. Den kræver at libqt4-maemo5-maemo5 og libqt4-maemo5-phonon er installeret. Og vær opmærksom på at store dele af /home/user er mounted noexec.
Og det er mest interessant at bruge ‘run-standalone.sh‘ til at starte den med. Så bliver den Maemo-temaet. Ellers kører applikationen med Qt’s standardtema.

Min medieafspiller er primitiv, men virker. Den bruger også Maemo’s banner-funktionalitet, ligesom den er i vandret modus når telefonen er på siden, og i lodret modus når telefonen er på højkant. Derudover bruger den også Qt’s multimedieframework, phonon, og Qt’s model-view framework.

Hvis man ønsker sit eget udviklingsmiljø, så har jeg fundet det lettest at følge denne
guide på KDE’s wiki.

Dog måtte jeg lige i gennem et par ændringer.

  1. Når installationen af alarmd fejler, så åbn /var/lib/dpkg/info/alarmd.postinst inde i scratchbox og tilføj ||true til den fejlende linje (linje 47).
  2. Når en masse gconf-ting fejler, så inde i scratchbox, så kan man lige køre dpkg-divert --rename --divert /usr/sbin/gconf-schemas.real --add /usr/sbin/gconf-schemas og oprette en ny /usr/sbin/gconf-schemas fil med følgende indhold:
    #! /bin/sh
    /usr/sbin/gconf-schemas.real $@ || true

    (husk x-bit)
  3. og sidst men ikke mindst, resolv.conf inde i scratchbox skal fixes

Disse trin skal gennemføres både for ARMEL og X86-udgaverne.

Til NokiaOpen2010 kan man også vinde n900-telefoner og få gratis deltagelse i et OpenSource event i starten af marts.

Jeg håber på at rigtig mange deltager i NokiaOpen2010 og generelt skriver endnu flere gode programmer til n900.

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