Troy Unrau: a Gearhead's Blog

A couple of bumps on the road

2009-11-25T05:41:49Z

Well, I guess I'll bump some of the great responses to the branding strategy with this, but I thought it was worth blogging a little.

First, I'd like to thank the KDE marketing and promotion team for making this all actually come together. We're still working on things, like updating websites (hopefully done by the time 4.4 is out, at least that's the plan). We can use some help though, if you're interested in contributing to KDE, by updating various pieces of documentation to use the new terminology. The wikis are a good place to start (community.kde.org, userbase.kde.org, techbase.kde.org). Just follow the outline from the dot and start fixing sentences.

Second topic: Camp KDE. We're trying to get as many people at this event as we can, and our registration numbers are growing. However, we're also running a contest that includes a free flight to the event. Sadly, unless they are disappearing into the aether, we're receiving very few submissions. On the converse, a lot of people have been registering for the event recently. Yay!

Lastly: Not KDE related, except in the sense that I'm a dot editor and my experiences with drupal there led me to use drupal for a new project: I've been running a new website on behalf of the Centre of Planetary Science and Exploration (CPSX) called the CPSX Digest. It is essentially styled after my experiences working on the dot, but instead of amalgamating KDE news, we're amalgamating Planetary Science news. Think of it as space.com less their exclusive content and annoying ads, but written by people involved in the field of planetary science at CPSX. I would love it if folks here could help me spread the word over the interblags. Getting people to find a new site like this is hard.

KDE is dead! Long live KDE!

Camp KDE contest

2009-11-22T22:57:22Z

Just in case some people are only reading planetKDE, and not the dot, I thought that I'd reproduce this article here (in order to boost the number of submissions, which is currently zero after three days, as far as I can tell - good odds for submitters):

Do you have a special story about how you or your organization has used KDE to break free from proprietary software? If so, enter the Camp KDE "Be Free" Contest and tell us your story!

Camp KDE, in conjunction with the KDE e.V., will be flying one lucky individual to Camp KDE 2010 in San Diego. Camp KDE attendees can meet the KDE community, participate in KDE talks, take free Qt developer training (normally not free), and join our hacking and planning sessions.

To qualify, we (the Camp KDE event organizers) are looking for a 300 word essay which demonstrates how using KDE Software has increased your freedom to get more done with your computers. At the event the winner will get to present a 5 minute talk about their winning submission, and will meet with KDE writers to document their story.

Send submissions to campkde-organizers@kde.org and be sure to include contact information. Contest closes December 15th. Camp KDE 2010 will be held at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) from January 15-21st. Registration is free to all attendees, and regional travel sponsorships may be available for those that require it (sponsorship must normally be preapproved by the KDE e.V. and attendees will be reimbursed after confirmation of event participation if preapproved).

Note: while we will gladly accept contest submissions from any part of the world, those from North and South America may take priority due to the intended regional scope of Camp KDE.

Marketing Sprint: The Juggernaut Strikes Back

2009-11-14T18:00:16Z

Blog is a funny word. If you repeat it fast enough while speaking aloud, you make a noise previously only known to the muppets. Blogblogblogblog... The people at the table here are looking at me strange.

Anyway, day 2 was, for the most part, slower than the first. This was possibly due to the German beer consumed last night by a number of our party. Nevertheless, Cornelius arrived and took us to task on choosing names for things that are now needing a name. More to be announced once we give the affected internal community some chance for feedback.

Also, the kde.org web remake is underway, with my hand-wavy mockups somehow being accepted, but for no good reason that I can tell. I'm not an artist, but I can draw boxes on a whiteboard with the best of them :P Hopefully we can get a few mockups up and available soon, coinciding with the new branding efforts. This meeting has essentially become branding central, and we're getting into hard core marketing mode.

We had some conversations about things we can do to convert users to contributors, as well as some vocabulary lessons courtesy of Kenny. Generally speaking, we will be using contributor in place of developer in all official outreach and documentation (where reasonable) in order to emphasize that we are a wider community than just coders. I mean, not everyone needs to be a clone of David Faure in order to contribute to KDE. We have some good ideas for this, which I'll write up more officially in the next few days for the dot.

Additionally, we will likely be using the html 5 video tag in places on the website update, with reasonable fallbacks to a static image with the link to the videos for those browsers not supporting video. The good news is that the KDE Software Compilation (TM) will likely support the video tag in Konqueror with 4.4.

Anyway, need to run for food. I flew half-way around the world for this meeting, and I'm spending most of my time in Germany in a fairly generic board room :P Time for some sausages!

Cheers

Marketing Sprint Day 0; 1

2009-11-13T17:56:31Z

Alright folks, so the KDE marketing juggernaut (subtle laughter) is meeting this weekend in Stuttgart. All 15 of us present are hard at work, bikeshedding with the best of them. Fortunately, when we take a break from discussion what shade of blue the bikeshed should be (because, obviously, it must be blue), we're actually getting some decent work done.

First and foremost, we had some food, providing a venue for pre-sprint arguments (purpose of marketing, targets for promotion materials, etc.) and learning of some Gerglish.

After a good night's sleep, and recovery from jet lag, we set to work this morning at 9AM, starting with some boilerplate work, like scheduling our work schedule for the sprint. Then the fun began:

First topic: branding meeting this morning, including the future nomenclature for KDE. More on this will be announced on the dot as soon as we discover a word that we like enough to describe the current state of affairs. Essentially, KDE will be defined as follows in official marketing materials:

"KDE is an international team co-operating on development and distribution of Free, Open Source Software for desktop and portable computing. Our community has developed a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment. We have a strong focus on finding innovative solutions to old and new problems, creating a vibrant, open atmosphere for experimentation."

Notice how we don't describe KDE as an application, or a software package, or similar. We've been doing this transparently in the release announcements for a while, but we'll be moving even further down this road. KDE is the organization, and the software we produce as a community are the products. So KDE makes software -- it isn't the software.

These results end up affecting much of our other work: we're currently updating the kde.org website source materials (and a prototype version will be online in the next few days), and Jos and friends in the next room are working on a multipage brochure for use at conferences and elsewhere (FOSS.in comes to mind).

By the end of this event, we hope to have most of the website materials fixed (even if they aren't live yet) and have some concise booth materials designed (lacking artwork to be added), as well as a number of other docs written, such as the 4.4 release announcement (freeze is soon!)

Anyway, more updates to follow (here, and more formally via the dot.)

Cheers folks

Upcoming marketing, promotion, and booth sprint; rebranding

2009-11-05T18:20:26Z

Hey folks, just a little heads up about what's happening internally within the KDE marketing juggernaut. (Seriously, I've seen comments referring to us in such a fashion... do they know we're about 15 volunteers?)

Anyway, since we need to compete with Microsoft's marketing budget, which is on the order of 3 billion USD, we've done really well without spending much money at all. I mean, we have estimates of around 50-100 million KDE software users worldwide, which is quite substantial.

Note, that is "Users", not installations. In Brazil, for example, Free Software by KDE is used in the school system, where we include all students exposed to KDE software as a 'user', even though the total number of installs is likely lower. The converse applies to people like me who have multiple installs of the KDE workspace. I mean, the software is free, so what does it really matter if we're counting users versus installations -- we don't have to answer to a budget :)

Anyway, next week a bunch of KDE promotion folks are meeting in Stuttgart for a marketing sprint/meeting where a couple of things need to be worked out. We have an agenda! :)

Possibly the most important topic will be a potential branding shift for KDE 4. This is the type of topic that leads to bikeshedding on mailing lists, so we'll discuss it in person where we can arm-wrestle to a conclusion, however it may go something like as follows:

KDE becomes the term referring to the group/organization/community that is producing the products.

Projects made by KDE will be referred to as "Made by KDE", or based on Cornelius' suggestion: "Free Software by KDE", in the case of projects that are associated with KDE (like Amarok, KOffice, etc.)... so one could say "Amarok, by KDE", or "KOffice, Free Software by KDE" or similar in promotional materials.

Separate the Platform and Workspace into their own identities, so that people wanting to run certain apps don't feel like they need to install all of KDE, and vice versa.

Although we'll announce final decisions via the dot or elsewhere, and most of the discussion will be happening internally within the KDE community, it'd be interesting to get some user feedback (yay or nay) on this.

We have other topics to discuss too, such as how to revitalize the websites, how to present a more consistent presence at trade shows, what to do to fill the void left by the commit digest, how to position ourselves in press surrounding the Gnome 3.0 launch (as they are probably going to go through much of what we did with 4.0, but we want to make sure that the press/comments know that KDE and Gnome are friends fighting for a common goal against a much larger market share), etc.

So, our team of 15 or so volunteer promotion peeps will be in a room for a few days to hammer these things out. The sprint is sponsored by the KDE e.V. (our non-profit legal body), which is spending a few thousand euros on the event. Not much compared to the 3 billion MS spends on marketing, and hopefully money well spent on behalf of the donors that keep the e.V. running.

Onlinux Wrapup

2009-10-26T00:28:17Z

Well, I don't have a copy of my presentation video yet to share with people, it is coming. This weekend, KDE was quite busy, with presences in at least three places: Toronto, Phoenix, and somewhere in Brazil. I had my hands full in Toronto for the one day Ontario Linux Fest. For the most part, the attendees were users or project reps from a number of open source endeavours, and at least some local hardware integrators.

The talk was well attended, with users representing a number of different levels of KDE 4 familiarity. Since my talk was entitled, An Introduction to KDE 4, I made the goal to be the most broad of introduction to our main product, KDE 4. After my usual stand-up comedy routine (and subsequent rotten fruiting), I got down to demonstrating a number of things about KDE to the audience, showing some day to day activities that one would do with KDE 4. For example, simple things like launching apps, changing the desktop or adding applets to the panel were used to demonstrate the KDE 4 Workspace. I showed KDE 4 behaviours when inserting a flash drive, and how to safely remove it. I also showed the weather features off, since our own Mr. Starr of weather applet fame was in attendance.

For applications, I briefly showed off our productivity programs, like Patience, Dolphin, Konqueror, Okular, Gwenview and Marble (OSM rules!). I also then showed a number of other applications that ship separately from KDE 4, including Amarok and KOffice, taking care to set reasonable expectations for KOffice users on the current state of the project.

I even showed a screenshot of KDE 4 on Windows, with a number of programs running there. Afterward I talked a little about KDE itself, and the work we put into KDE 4. Cornelius, I stole your lines of code graph for this, and I also snagged a developer stats graph from the dot.

During the rest of the event, Eugene, Shawn and I hung out at the KDE table and answered questions from curious users, including a number who were excited to try KDE 4 for the first time after going to the talk. A few users came with questions about features and bugs in the KDE 4 series - many were using older distro releases, so I let them play around in a blank user account on my laptop, which I used for the presentation. My laptop was running Slackware64 with KDE 4.3.2 packages, and is pretty close to the unmolested KDE 4 as shipped from upstream. This causes bugs due to distro modifications to become easily apparent for some user complaints. For the rest of the complaints, many of the users left the booth happy, waiting patiently for the releases of Linux distros that will be happening in the next few months complete with KDE 4.3.x.

Generally though, there was a trend at this event to users being either completely new to Linux, or those that were involved with server-side work. KDE was the only project that seems to have any desktop presence.

This Saturday in Toronto

2009-10-22T13:16:49Z

Hi guys,

Just a reminder, if you live in the Toronto area, I'm speaking at onlinux.ca this Saturday about KDE 4. If you're in town, this is the largest open source event in the immediate region, so come on down.

A video will likely be posted afterward as Charles from archive.org is filming.

Cheers

Speaking at Ontario Linux Fest, October 24th.

2009-10-09T01:37:01Z

Now with name change to the Ontario GNU Linux Fest (RMS wins this round of childish naming nonsense).

Anyway, the event is on Saturday, October 24th at the Days Hotel near the craziness that is the highway 400 and 401 intersection. See the website for maps. There are a few KDE hackers and related personalities in the area, and we'll likely try to arrange some beers (for lack of Irn-Bru). If you're a KDE user or contributor in the Toronto, Buffalo, Detroit, Ottawa, Montreal [...] area, let's meet in person!

My submitted talk abstract follows:

An Introduction to KDE 4
KDE 4.3 was released in August, 2009, the most recent update to the KDE 4 series. It is a community effort geared towards daily computer users and developers and comes complete with a set of software packages including those for graphics, multimedia, programming, networking, education and gaming. KDE 4 and a wide variety of additional applications are available for Linux, Unix, MacOS X, and Windows under Free Software licenses. KDE 4 will be introduced with a live demonstration of many of the features of KDE on Linux, starting at the basic elements of the KDE Plasma desktop and using KDE to do file management and web surfing. This is followed by a whirlwind tour of many of the applications that are unique to KDE. Emphasis will be placed on introducing the concepts and features of KDE that will be foreign to users coming from other operating systems, and demonstrating the wide ecosystem of available KDE software.

P.s.: Zonker's keynote is entitled "A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux" :P

Fall cleaning

2009-09-03T17:41:43Z

One of the problems with an ever growing, ever evolving project like KDE is that we leave a lot of crumbs all over the internet from started and aborted projects. These take the form of websites, mailing lists, svn subdirectories, wiki entries, etc. which may have little or no relevance to the current project. Some of these are indeed, very old, but still provide misdirection to users (and developers) who are looking for more relevant information. We promo people are often to blame for some of this due to overzealous content creation without thinking about the administration and upkeep that is required down the road.

Now along comes a new face on the kde-promo list (Hi Justin!) who is the type of person who cares less about talking about doing things, and cares more about doing things. A few months back, he asks "What can I do to help?", and we all sort-of half-respond with a list of useful junior jobs, which we usually do to a newcomer, and which usually scares most people away. Well, surprisingly, he actually started to do these things, which is a huge plus.

In the next few days, if you get an email from Justin about abandoned or disused mailing lists, that is just him helping the sysadmin team to clear up some old cruft. In a few weeks, we'll be submitting to them a list of mailing lists that can be nuked based on inactivity (6 months or higher without a single non-spam message), moderator responses (no, this list is still needed/yes, nuke it/no moderator response after a while), and common sense (eg: campkde only happens once a year, but the list gets reused. Inactivity during the rest of the year does not mean the list is dead).

So, as luck would have it, I have a few days free, and rather than falling into my usual routine (reading slashdot, arguing with people on irc about stories I read on slashdot, etc...), I figured I'd take a quick look at the current status of the KDE websites. Now I know that the high-traffic websites are usually in good shape since they are, well, high traffic, but it is the often forgotten side-websites that are left to gather cobwebs after an age of neglect. A good place to start for such as task is kde.org/family, which can point people to all sort of dead, underused, outdated, or plainly incorrect websites with information about KDE. A lot of this content could/should be migrated to techbase or userbase where administration becomes easier. Some should just be nuked altogether.

I know that website cleaning is a thankless job, and one that can never be completed, but I'll give it my best try. I might need to enlist some help in migrating/updating a few pages, but if people like Justin, who are new to contributing to KDE, are willing to lend a hand, then we just might pull it off.

Anyone new to KDE looking for a way to help, please email kde-promo@kde.org and we'll get you connected.

Continued Amazement

2009-09-02T21:27:14Z

One of the common things that happens in the open source world are things that do not work. I've been using Linux/FreeBSD for ages, and KDE for just as long, and my general expectations for things working are still pretty low for a lot of things. I guess being dumped at a console the first time installing Linux will give you that perspective.

Anyway, I've recently done some upgrading: Slackware64 13.0 on my HP TX2500 series laptop. It's a pretty shiny laptop with a lot of built-in peripherals. I haven't previously gotten a copy of any distro to work well enough on it to be considered useful, so I've been using Linux through VirtualBox with the pre-installed Windows Vista. That worked reasonably, but is not the same as having a real system.

So here are a few of the things that have amazed me in the last two days:

Slackware is still as much of a pain to install as it has always been. However, once installed, it has a lot less that needs configuring than in the old days. I typed "init 4" and was happily presented with a working kdm.

Xorg 7.4 is pretty nice. Without an /etc/X11/xorg.conf even existing, it simply starts by itself with some sane defaults, detects some peripherals, and even has some of my multimedia keys working out of the box. This used to be like pulling teeth on any distro, nevermind slackware.

My built-in Broadcom 4328 wifi mostly works with ndiswrapper. Admittedly, this was more stable on Mandriva on this machine, as it sometimes fails to register wlan0 upon reboot. If you use this machine and you can't find 64bit wifi drivers, email me and I'll help you out.

Once I added the wacom kernel module, it automatically started working in X. It's not perfect (non-stylus touch isn't turned on, and I haven't tested pressure sensitivity yet), but it works well enough to use without having to screw with X. Speaking of which, the scroll functions on my Synaptics touchpad work automatically as well. That would be unheard-of a few years ago.

The built-in webcam works without doing a thing. Tested it with kopete.

The x86_64 fglrx 9.8 drivers install and work perfectly. Kwin effects work, and everything flies. Good job folks. (This has not worked on any other distro I've tried on the laptop. Cheers to the slackware team.)

Konqueror, when set to report a firefox 2.0.x user agent string, renders and uses the full version of gmail, including chat. I've never been able to get this to work before, so kudos to the Konq/khtml/etc. teams.

I'm checking out KDE trunk (the machine has 4.2.4 by default) and subversion asked if I wanted to store my password in my kwallet! Wow! I'm not sure how it's doing this (dbus?), but it's the first time I've had a console-based application ask this. I know that KDE is migrating to git soon, but still, I'm impressed.

That's it. Basically, I'm really happy about the small amounts of configuration that is required these days, and the high level of integration. I'll buy everyone a virtual beer (KDE, slackware, Xorg, kernel, etc.) which may turn into a real beer when I see you.

Cheers

Political bent.

2009-08-27T05:45:24Z

Yeah, I know, not a KDE related blog. Not really anyway. I got bored monitoring Google Blogsearch for "KDE" for long enough to distract myself with another project. I think I've gone and gotten myself mixed up with politics again. While KDE has, in itself, nothing to do with politics, I've discovered that many of the skills that I've picked up while doing marketing and related activities for KDE can transfer into that realm relatively easily. For example, conference planning, public speaking, writing, promoting, etc. And it isn't that I have political aspirations either, at least not in the power-hungry sense. It's just that when I see something that I don't like, I have two options: complain about it from the peanut gallery, or actually take part in the due process of democracy and try to effect the improvements I think are needed. I usually choose the latter.

So now it seems I've finally found a party that somewhat meshes with my own political leanings. This is actually somewhat of a major event for me, as I've floated all over the spectrum, and never settled on any particular dogma. Anyway, I've discovered the Canadian Libertarian party, which is almost a non-entity. I've never really described myself as a Libertarian, as these people always bring up shades of Ron Paul, or similar US digg celebrities; nonetheless, the philosophy seems to fit, and as the tale says, "If shoe fits, wear it." (Say this with Chekov's accent - you know, Star Trek 6)

The party is so small right now that they won't be able to field a candidate in all the ridings nationally, but these things have to start somewhere. I'll be bringing my KDE marketing skills to the table, for whatever they're worth, and plying them to a new task. It might be some ugly guerrilla marketing stuff, but then, like KDE, it's all volunteer, so that's the budget. Maybe I buy some artwork from Nuno.

Anyway, whatever happened to Tom Chance? He used to talk about the UK Green Party on here all the time, and how he was working on free software and party policy...

Cheers folks, and happy hacking.

Going to Toronto, need bed...

2009-07-30T04:20:42Z

Hey, so I've elected myself to give a speech (if approved) and help guard a KDE table (approved) at the Ontario Linux Fest, Oct. 24th (2009). One of the post-docs that works in my lab has kindly offered a ride into Toronto on a Thursday night, returning Sunday. If I take him up on this offer, I'd need to find a place to stay in Toronto for three nights. Being a student, I try to avoid shelling out hotel money when I know peeps in the area, so I'm wondering if there's anyone in TO that'd be willing to lend a couch to a gearhead for a few nights :)

Additionally, we'll be looking for help manning the table, and while I've had at least two peeps pipe up the kde-promo mailing list that they will be attending the conference, we can always use more. If nothing else, it gives us all a chance to meet one another.

So anyone in southern Ontario, western Quebec, northern New York, or even Detroit that wants to come lend a hand? Email troy(at)kde.org or kde-promo(at)kde.org. I promise to buy everyone that helps a beer. :)

Cheers folks

Dear Lazyweb: Reading Recommendation

2009-07-16T01:29:30Z

I'm looking for a book to read but along a certain line of reading. Think Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers or Ayn Rand's Atlus Shrugged. Books that strongly expose a philosophy through narrative. I don't particularly care what philosophy, but I enjoy reading these sorts of things in this fashion. Any suggestions?

KDE 4 Rough Edges

2009-07-15T02:48:05Z

Well, after being back in the saddle for a bit, I've drawn a few conclusions, good or bad, about the current status of KDE and KDE 4 more specifically. This is derived from my interactions with users, and monitoring of KDE related feedback on the net.

1) KDE 4.2.4 is a good release, and while some people still find ways to complain about it, that doesn't take away from it being a really good release.

2) Some applications from KDE 3 are still not fully usable for KDE 4, or not yet released. For example, k3b or konversation. This is holding some people back still, and causing some distros to ship the kde3 libs so that their users can keep using these apps.

3) Some apps, like KOffice 2, are stable for KDE 4, but feature incomplete. This prevents them from being used for day-to-day activities for some users.

4) There are a few missing or incomplete features in KDE 4 that should receive high priority, according to the users: these include, for example, the Print dialog, the Mac-style menubar, and the Network Manager plasmoid.

I know that KDE 4.3 is waiting in the wings, and if KDE 4.2.4 is any indication, it should be a solid release. However, there are a few things we can do (as above) that can ensure that KDE 4 rocks the world. So we could use some help:

Users: please test k3b, konversation, koffice, etc. when you have the chance, even though they are still in varying states of development. k3b and konversation are in alpha status right now, so you might need to build from source to lend a hand. KOffice 2 on the other hand should be available on many distros for testing. File helpful bug reports and the developers will love you.

BugSqaud: I haven't talked to bugsquad yet, but if there's a chance that some time could be devoted to helping these projects out, it would be well spent.

Developers: well, you know what to do. Happy hacking. :)

/me goes back to fighting QThreads in PyQt4... does anyone know how to signal across threads so that I can shut off a timer? QThreads doesn't like that...

Potentially Rhetorical Question: Does KDE 4 have fewer options?

2009-07-08T18:01:08Z

So, a question that stems from my previous post: There seems to be a perception that KDE 4 has less options than KDE 3. Where does this perception come from, and can examples be provided either way? I provide some possible answers from my own experiences, but please feel free to append this list in the comments.

Possible source 1: Kcontrol->system settings migration: by removing the tree view, less things are exposed simultaneous, thereby presenting the appearance of having less configuration options.

Possible source 2: Kickoff style menu: by only allowing the user to see one level of the menu at a time, there appears to be less items to choose from.

Possible source 3: Plasma: options for display are given directly in the user interface rather than in the standard KDE config dialogs, which produces fewer overcrowded dialogs when compared to kicker/kdesktop.

Possible source 4: Konqueror -> Konqueror + Dolphin: by splitting the file management out, at least by default, the apps appear to have less imposing configuration dialogs.

Possible source 5: Application porting delays: not all apps are ported yet, so inter-app integration is missing in places. For example, Amarok 2 lacks integration with k3b while k3b is being ported.

Possible source 6: The defaults for KDE are such that users don't feel the need to configure things as much.

Possible source 7: KDE 4 actually has less to configure! (Is this even possible?)

So, my friends, I'd like to know the opinions of PlanetKDE readers. The public perception that KDE 4 has less configuration to do that KDE 3 had to originate somewhere, but the question is, "Where?".

KDE Media Pulse

2009-07-08T03:30:27Z

So, I'm getting my Marketing hat back, Wade promised...

I'm a little rusty, so in order to get back into the swing of things, I thought I'd start with a quick overview of the current state of KDE in the press, including public sentiments in comments far and wide. To begin with, most of what follows is from Google's various services, Google News, Google Blogsearch, etc. I excluded all items that were already published in the KDE world in some way (Dot, planetKDE syndicated, etc.) as well as those not published in English.

Speaking of which, I don't know if many planetKDE contributors know this, but there are quite a few blog entries that get unofficial translations to other languages and reposted on the internet, usually with a link back to the original. For planetKDE authors, try picking some keywords from one of your more popular articles and running it through Google Blogsearch about a week later.

So what follows is a (somewhat) organized list of KDE's internet media presence in the last 7-10 days, with an occasional comment for things I find interesting from a Marketing POV.

Yakuake (for KDE 4) Review (TuxArena)
Krusader 2.0.0 (for KDE 4) Review (TuxArena)
TuxArena is a little late on this one, as it was released three months earlier, however anytime KDE applications get print is important to the greater KDE application ecosystem. And I'm not talking about kde-apps.org, which is great (thanks, Frank), but wider exposure is great for showing the world that KDE is more than just the set of default apps that you find on most distros.
Best Linux PIM: Kontact or Evolution? (Byfield)
Newly Cooked: KRecipes for KDE 4 (Linux Magazine)
Article about the porting status to KDE 4.
KOffice 2.0 Reivew (Tech Radar)
Some quotes: "KOffice's launch speed is comparable with that of OpenOffice.org 3.1, and its rendering is beautifully smooth, even when shifting around large blended objects." and "[...] the new KOffice isn't ready for the masses just yet. However, many of the elements in KOffice 2.0 show great promise and we look forward to testing the suite once more when it's ready."
Sidux 2009-2 Preview 1
Release notes state: "While KDE4 is certainly a work in progress, both upstream and in terms of making it viable for a release, this marks the first milestone release for sidux. Be aware that the KDE-lite flavours avoid KDE3/ qt3 packages, which means that k3b, kaffeine and umtsmon are not preinstalled. These packages will be part of the KDE-full flavours and are still installable."

This is interesting as it relays a few pieces of information. 1) They consider KDE 4 upstream to be "a work in progress", 2) They don't want to install both KDE4 and KDE3 concurrently in lightweight installs (understandably), and 3) the applications they are waiting for (from KDE) are k3b and kaffeine. Interestingly, Slackware 13.0 will ship KDE 3 libs as part of the extras package in order to support k3b as well. It appears that k3b is the killer app from KDE 3 that hasn't made the full transition yet. We should perhaps focus on this as a community somewhat. Bugsquad, is there anything you can do to help?
PCLinuxOS 2009.2 KDE
This edition ships with KDE 3.5.10. The Release announcement, however, details that 2009.3 will use KDE 4.
openSUSE 11.2 M3
OpenSUSE is testing KDE 4.3 to be included with 11.2. Interesting comment to the announcement: "Seems like a trivial complaint but you don’t want your sporty car to just say Chevrolet, you want it to say Corvette. Likewise I would like the System to say 'openSuSE 11.2 Milestone 3 and KDE4.3 Beta 2' and not something else."

This brings us back to Aaron's co-branding idea. There's a lot of work to be done.
KDE 4.3 RC Review, Kubuntu Jaunty (TuxArena)
The same site also has instructions on how to install the RC.
Ubuntu 9.04 Review
"Strangely, Kubuntu users have to do without Firefox and GIMP, and the KDE package manager is less user- friendly."

This is a mixed problem. Kubuntu tends to ship with all the KDE apps enabled as defaults, which I think is great for KDE and the visibility of our apps, however, it seems that certain apps are ubiquitous and users expect them to be there.
Yellow Dog 6.2
Uses E17 as default, but also ships KDE, Gnome, XFCE. The interesting thing is that is runs on PPC and Cell processors. Has anyone tried getting KDE up and running on their PS3? This could be a good opportunity for Plasma media centre development.
Mandriva 2009.0 KDE
Shipping with KDE 4.2.2, and some praise for their Artwork in one of the comments: "However, now they’ve really nailed it. It’s the best looking KDE 4 implementation I’ve seen anywhere! Other distros need to take note." I still wish Mandriva KDE shipped a few more KDE apps, even if they aren't set as defaults. Krita is pretty good, but nowhere to be found, for instance. They should also be a strong candidate for some co-branding initiatives.
PC-BSD 7.1.1
Shipping KDE 4.2.4.
Sabayon 4.2 KDE
Shipping KDE 4.2.4. Can anyone tell me how Sabayon's implementation of KDE is?
GCDS: KDE and Gnome Fortulate Common Goals
Or, as one of the blogs that linked to this article said: "Pigs can Fly!"
Linux Desktop Market Share (CertCities)
The interesting/relevant quote: "I think it's finally time to throw in the towel. The latest numbers are out, and even with Ubuntu and other distributions doing such a fantastic job, after almost 20 years Linux still has only about 1 percent of the desktop market. This is after Novell's strong attempts to take the operating system into the classroom (bringing the price of student PCs down substantially), after GNOME and KDE both offered a better interface than anything coming from Redmond, and after hardware vendors started offering PCs without an operating system pre-installed. The cold hard fact is that users just don't want to run Linux."

What I read from this: if the product is superior, and the price is unbeatable, and we're still "losing", then what remains is Marketing.
Gran Canaria Desktop Summit: a Study in Contrasts (Computer World UK)
Glyn Moody covers the keynotes from GCDS. On page two is something interesting: "However, even I must disagree with Stallman on one thing he said. He noted that it was rather inefficient having two rival desktop projects, and suggested that it would be good if one day they might be merged – two alternative versions of the same underlying code." and "[...] I think it's vitally important that they continue to go their separate ways, each convinced that their approach is best, but each ready to be stimulated by – and learn from – what their colleagues and rivals are up to." I agree. Gnome need to be strong, as it drives KDE. Our target is not the 1% of the Desktop that Linux currently sits at. It should be the other 99%.
Links Aaron's Plasma Screencast (TechWorld AU)
This is one of many sites that picked up Aaron's Plasma Screencast. Quote: "Despite all the doubts about the initial direction of the KDE 4 series, the project is moving ahead well and, at the very least, 4.3 should finally dispel any claims that it is not ready for general consumption."

Well, there will be the circular logic folks that will claim that because claims are made that 4.3 is ready for general consumption, that means exactly that it isn't, so they won't even try it. Well, whatever, I didn't write that quote. Fighting logic like that is like trying to push water uphill holding only a mop.
KHTML/Webkit (OSNews)
Never one to pass up some dirty laundry, OSNews covers planetKDE better than many other online news sources. They are one of the few sites that appears to take an active interest in developer blog posts, rather than simply skimming off the top of the dot.
Akademy Awards (The H)
Coverage of the Akademy Awards spread far and wide very quickly over the internet. Peter Penz, did you know you're famous? Try searching for yourself on Google News.
Akgregator Mentioned (ghacks)
Maemo to use Qt
Well, this story is everywhere, and pretty much always mentions KDE. Google News shows that this popped up in dozens of places in English alone. Good press for the Trolls. Interestingly, KDE is usually mentioned as the prime example of something written in Qt in many of these articles. It's interesting that KDE's reknown gives a frame of reference to talking about Qt for many audiences.
Nokia Android Rumours
One of the better examples of Qt being introduced with KDE as a frame of reference.
Timeline (Press Release)
This one is not interesting for what it's advertising, so much as how it does it. It's a product based on Subversion, which is introduced in the article with respect to KDE, since KDE is more well known that Subversion. It appears that KDE's use of SVN is worthy of commercial press releases.
Koala will be 'a definitive shift' for Ubuntu Linux (Tech Radar)
Okay, this one is fun, the article is about Ubuntu, but in the opening, Shuttleworth is introduces as "first patron of KDE" as this will aparently give the audience a frame of reference. More interesting though is the comment: "Please stop mentioning that title until Kubuntu is treated as an equal and no the red headed stepchild of the Bubuntu family."
KDE 4 on Ubuntu
Well, one user was suitably impressed with KDE 4 after installing it on Ubuntu to become a convert. "The result was very pretty, quite slick. I even noticed an improvement in screen refresh speed when switching desktops in Virtual Box (notably Gnome-terminal always seemed a bit slow to repaint and Konsole feels a bit snappier)."
Symbian Article
Again, the content isn't as important as one of the comments: "Case in point: kde 4 and amarok. These two (and myriad other kde apps) lost quite a substantial userbase when they were reinvented from smart brunette heels to rather dumb but beautiful blondes (no offense to blondes meant, really). Yes, they're getting back on track but the symbian foundation may not have that chance."

Insulting metaphor notwithstanding, this comment appears to be by one of our typical "KDE 4 detractors", but shows signs of promise. The user claims "we're getting back on track", and I know a lot of that has to do with the code quality of KDE 4.2.x, as can be seen by the number of distro shipping it. (Slackware!)

Conclusion: KDE is a blonde, but used to be a brunette, but due to trick of the light is also redheaded. And here I thought blue was the colour :P.

That's all folks. Comment on anything you think would be useful as feedback to the marketing and promo folks, or email kde-promo@kde.org. If this media digest is useful to the KDE project as a whole, let me know and I will take the pulse more often. Cheers.

More than just code...

2009-07-05T21:33:53Z

Well, there was this comment on my previous posting, which I will quote, and reply to in its entry. I think this is important, so I'm bumping it.
"Stop it.
Yup, another highly relevant KDE posting on KDE planet."

KDE is about more than simply software and technology. While pondering KDE marketing over the last several years, I've often thought about the definition of KDE. Of course, there's the classical definition, referring to the Desktop Environment, or even a commonly accepted alternative referring to the Development Environment. However, KDE is much more than that.

KDE is the also infrastructure that enables the project to exist, such as svn servers and build clusters, the dot and planetkde, the forums and mailinglists, the wikis and irc channels...
KDE is the also community, including the programmers and artists, the marketing team and translation team, bugsquad and the beta testers, the KDE e.V. and the forum moderators...

While, for many users, KDE is solely a Desktop Environment, and no thought is given to the people of KDE.

PlanetKDE exists, and has existed, as an amalgamation of people. These are all people who are in some way connected to KDE. These people are real people, who have lives, jobs, loves, dreams. These are people who eat, cook, program, travel, draw, stargaze, and occasionally build their own kernels.

The KDE community is made of people, not of code. This is very important as it keeps the people within KDE communicating, and working well together. Building a sense of community is something that is important to the long term health of KDE as a project, for without the people, there is no code. To this effect, KDE has been somewhat successful, via conferences like Akademy, or the occasional focused developer sprint which have introduced faces to people that had previously been known as an irc nick or an email address. If you ask members of the KDE community who have had the privilege of attending these events, they will to-a-man (or woman) tell you how useful it is to get to know the people you are working with on a personal level.

PlanetKDE is not just some official mouthpiece of the KDE Marketing Team. It is a place for KDE developers to showcase themselves, as people, to the rest of the KDE community. If they are working on something neat, they'll blog about it. If they lost their luggage on the way to the Canaries, they'll blog about it. If they've accomplished something personal, like obtaining a degree, well, that's important to the KDE community, and to their friends within the community. I want to hear about it.

Given the function of PlanetKDE is not that of an official mouthpiece, and never has been, perhaps then my posting about an internet connection might not be so bad. For example, I talked about my connection being "pretty shoddy anyway" which might help explain why I haven't been able to sign into the #kde* irc channels from home (only at work when I'm, well, working...).

Just because it's not relevant to you, as a single individual reading planetkde, does not mean that it isn't relevant to some other member of the KDE community at large.

Cheers, and thanks for reading the planet.

ISP DNS hijacking (or Rogers, I vote against you with my wallet)

2009-07-05T18:49:38Z

Well, as I'm surfing the net this fine Sunday and reading all about the comings and goings at GCDS, slowing adjusting my hugh to an envious green, I happened to click on a dead link. Wow! I got a search page from the local ISP that provides blanket wireless to my apartment building. Roger's Cable, one of the largest ISP's in Canada, is DNS hijacking!

The problem is that I'm not the customer, the apartment block owner is, so I can't even complain. But here's the thing - with some 20 suites using the same pipe, the internet connection here is pretty shoddy anyway. I was thinking of spending the money to buy my own dedicated connection, and have been shopping around. Roger's has been advertising fairly extensively to me via snail-mail, and there's a kiosk in the strip mall across the street. Pretty convenient, and I was even considering their service. The more I read about it, however, the less likely I am to become a Roger's customer. Deep Packet Inspection, closed ports, inserting frames into websites, and now DNS hijacking! No thank you, Rogers. I think I'll vote with my wallet - I wonder how much dry-loop DSL is going for these days...

*green*

KDEslackindowsboxen

2009-06-24T06:23:02Z

Well, today I installed KDE again. Only to make a long story short*, I used VirtualBox on Vista32 to host Slackware64 and KDE. The results should show to anyone that KDE 4 does not look like Vista... (the proof that Windows 7 does not look like KDE 4 is left as an exercise to the reader.)

* the long version of the short story:
I had Mandriva installed on a second partition on this laptop alongside the factory installed Vista Home Premium. It mostly worked, but after months of occasional tweaking, many drivers were still not working fully. This included the wireless, which was sometimes working under ndiswrapper, but flaky, the touchpad, which didn't work at all, the touch screen, which didn't work at all, the built-in wacom digitizer on the screen, the fingerprint scanner, the webcam, double-layer burning, composite drivers, external display, printer, and so forth. Due to these and many related issues, I spent most of my time in Vista, occasionally playing with KDE/Windows to my occasional fancy. For the record, KDE/Windows works fairly well for many things, but for others, you simply cannot beat a good-old-fashioned unix system. The final straw was that fish:// didn't work for me under windows, and I was wanting to use Kate/Windows to edit files over the wireless network. So! I decided it was time to try a virtual machine. VirtualBox has the license that makes me happiest, and generally works with a higher level of quality than I've come to expect from the average Sun product, so I tried it. It was then that I realized that my Vista partition was approaching full, so I decided to reformat my Linux partition to NTFS. OOps, bootloader stored files there. Okay, don't panic. Vista won't boot. Install Linux again as I can't find a LiveCD and my Mandriva USB key from Glasgow wasn't booting for some reason. Make a backup of my important docs to an external drive. Try using fdisk from a Win98 install CD to fix the MBR: No dice. Try using the HP rescue stuff that came with the Laptop: it tells me it failed to recover the boot thingy. Okay, forcing my hand, do a full system restore from the factory. Ouch - several hours later - remove 2/3rds of the items from Add/Remove programs. I don't know why HP doesn't give the option on install to skip all the 3rd party shit. Finally, install VirtualBox. I have a Slackware64-current disk on hand from a few weeks ago when I reloaded my desktop machine, so I try booting that: it says that although I have a 64-bit processor, I have to go to my BIOS and enable the hardware virtualization stuff to use a 64-bit guest OS under a 32-bit host. After doing that, I can install slackware. Yay! Last but not least, since KDE takes down the system about 20 seconds after loading, I figure out that I need to install the VirtualBoxAdditions stuff that lets the linux kernel/X/etc. run smoothly under the Virtual Machine. Whoa! this works great! I now have a real linux install of KDE that can more-or-less seamlessly integrate with Vista. On the upside, I get to piggy-back off of vista's drivers. If Vista is online, so is Slackware. My touchscreen works (mostly, the touchscreen events are translated to X mouse events, so no pressure sensing), my touchpad works great, including scrolling, and the VirtualBox X drivers even allow access to 3D accelleration through my Windows drivers. Neat. The only slowdowns I've noticed in Slackware are when it's using heavy disk io, and Windows always gets one CPU to itself. Whew! Now that was a mouthfull...

One degree down...

2009-06-02T02:23:33Z

Well folks, it's been a while since I've had time to do anything KDE related. Fortunately, I've now emerged from the smoke mostly intact and with a few extra letters behind my name. The road doesn't end here, however, and as the figure of speech goes: "out of the smoke and into the fire". I start my M.Sc. program in Planetary Sciences (Geophysics) as of September 1st. In the meantime, I get to work for my thesis advisor for the summer and, I guess, get a head start on whatever I'll end up working on...

This means I actually get to spend a minute or two on KDE once in a while again! Whee! First up, getting my desktop box running again. It's been out of commission for a few months now, ever since I tried to install PC-BSD on it. Now, don't get me wrong, I love PC-BSD - it's a sweet system, which runs fast and stable, with a good KDE implementation. My box just doesn't like PC-BSD, and will randomly hard-lock. I think it has to do with the ATI RS-480 chipset and FreeBSD just not getting along. Works fine in linux though...

So that brings me to the next order of business. Reinstalling linux to resurrect that box. I did some poking around, after having been out of the loop a bit, at some distros, and their status (statuses, statusi, stati? what's the plural of status?). To my pleasant surprise, Slackware now has an official 64 bit variety, although unreleased, which seems promising. I used to run Fred's Slamd64, which was very nice (thanks Fred), but because of it's 64-bit status, I'd end up having to modify all sorts of things to get them to build. Fun, but time consuming. Slackware64-current comes with KDE 4 (yay!), and flash is now available in 64 bit too. Tomorrow I will attempt to install this to get my box back up and running.

That reminds me - that box no longer has a monitor attached to it - instead, I've been running it through my 1080p HDTV, which at 42" and 1920x1080 is just a really big monitor. I've set up a wireless keyboard and mouse, and use the computer from across the living room. KDE and plasma actually fare very well for this task, after some font-size tweaking. There are a few glitches here and there, so once I've reinstalled everything and have an up-to-date KDE, I'll start filing bug reports for this use case. SVG graphics really help here, and so does kwin's effects. Nuno, your artwork is fantastic! Everyone who's seen KDE running on the screen has been left breathless. Good job everyone.

Who knows, maybe I'll have some time to actually contribute more than bug reports this summer. Looking forward to 4.3, and very envious of everyone heading to the Canaries.

Cheers

Milestone release

2009-03-11T16:23:33Z

KDE 4.2.1 is now offically replaced 3.5.x in slackware

[End transmission]

KHTML->Webkit->MS killer

2008-09-03T19:46:54Z

Google Chrome beta web-browser.

Official Build 1583
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Maybe MS starts now to get afraid of open source. They have a FAQ about licensing here up as well. Sadly (once again) webkit only references Apple, but at least we're in the browser id string.

The well traveled KDE hat

2008-08-07T22:47:26Z

So not only has my bright blue KDE hat been to several conferences and presentations made in the name of KDE, but it is now being worn in the field to do geophysics.

That's me, in a place where I get no cell phone service - the pic is taken by my assistant on my cell phone which I brought along nonetheless.

Cheers folks

Psst. For those that haven't tried the koffice 2 alphas yet, it rocks :)

User experiences with Vista

2008-07-26T23:08:03Z

Well, I've got a few new things to report afa user experiences go. First, I just bought my first laptop. I've had second-hand laptops in the past, but this is the first time I've bought a new one.

I walked into Staples (sort of a box-store for office supplies/etc.) and the sales guys immediately started to hver around me. To the first guy, I said, I'm willing to buy a new laptop immediately if you can show me one that will provide a good linux experience. He almost cried, but commission can make people do strange things. So he got the manager, and the manager started to deal with me personally as no one else had even heard of linux. Manager says: I haven't tried linux on any of these laptops, but we have this EEe thing here with linux on it. After informing him that I wanted a higher end computer, he decided to do whatever was required to make me happy.

So he logged one of the laptops onto the internal network, and asked me for the model numbers I was interested in - he started using google to find out what was supported. The Acer laptops, and some Dells, were 100% supported, so I knew that I'd have at least a few good options. However, there was this shiny, smallish (maybe 12 inch screen) HP sitting there with a touch screen, which could be used as a tablet PC. If I could get this thing running linux, I'd be in business.

After sitting on Google with the manager for a while, we discovered what devices in the HP tx2500 series were and were not support, and which ones I might get working if I'm willing to do some old-school kernel patching. In other words, support for the thing is not "out of the box", unlike some of the other laptops... still...

So I bought the thing - paid cash - and brought it home. Unpacked the thing to find Windows Vista Home Premium. Other than being very slow on a reasonably fast machine, my first real Vista experience hasn't been that bad - after I removed Norton, yahoo toolbar, HP's marketing bullshit, and so forth. The thing didn't come with recovery disks, sadly, so I had to create them after unpacking the thing - ah well, I guess that means my Vista install better live forever, or else it'll be impossible to recover later (it'd probably want to nuke my linux partitions).

It didn't come with any sane way to burn the Mandriva 2009 Alpha 2 DVD iso, so I had to install a toy to do it. Works well enough. As far as ease of use goes, once installing the toy, I could right click on the iso to burn it. I wonder if k3b does this?

Anyway, thanks to the help of parada on irc, I'm pretty comfortable with trying to install linux on this and to have all the devices work, including the wacom touch screen. Can someone tell me how the hell the wacom screen can sense the pen before I touch it?

Next update: post linux install. Cheers folks.

Edit: Oh, also installed KDE/Windows on it - other than knotify4 crashing when trying to use phonon.dll, it works swimmingly. (just no notifications)

Creative use of folderview

2008-07-12T22:11:06Z

So I think I've got a funny story.

I was recompiling trunk to see how things are moving along, and I tend to live dangerously when I do this. More so than the average user, since I'm pretty familiar with the workings of the KDE build system, and what I can get away with.

When I rebuild KDE 4, I first delete my active installation -- while it's still running. The apps that were loaded at the time of deletion *usually* keep working long enough for me to finish my system recompile. I generally load firefox during this time as konq doesn't like to have the ioslaves deleted while it's running. :) I know, I'm just asking for trouble, and today I got some interesting trouble.

So, I was done surfing for a while in firefox, and I click the close button. Instead of closing, or rather, in addition to closing, it takes out KWin. Well, since I've actually deleted kwin from the filesystem in the meantime, it cannot recover from its crash. Not only that, but I now cannot switch windows in any way (since I have no running window manager), and kwin managed to make plasma the active window before dying, hiding my konsole window and so forth.

Well, after trying to use the Run dialog from the keyboard shortcut, and failing, I started to think of ways to recover from this, so I can continue to monitor irc, and my build process without nuking X and those KDE programs that are still able to run. Upon inspection of my plasma desktop, I see I have only one applet running: the folderview. That's very fortunate for me though. I unlock the widgets, go to the folderview properties. Fortunately this shows up *above* the plasma desktop, so I can use the properties widget. The downside is that I cannot use the keyboard to interact with it, only my mouse. Fortunately I can navigate to a custom directory using the mouse. I set it to "/usr/bin", and let the folderview redraw. There's tons of entries here, so I resize the thing to make finding stuff easier. I decide there's too many icons, so I set a filter on "twm". I then get my folderview with one icon, twm. I click it, and I get twm! sweet, now I don't have to restart X, and can change windows again through creative use of the plasma taskbar.

Well folks, there you have it. Best mis-use of the folderview applet of the day :)

Now that I don't have to worry about marketing anymore, I get to write more fun KDE blogs as a user, wheee!