Escrúpulos Una piedra en la conciencia del software libre, calidad y la vida misma

I am glad to announce the third bugfix release for Muon Suite 1.2. The Muon Suite is a set of package management utilities for Debian-based Linux distributions built on KDE technologies.

The third bugfix release fixes several crashes found with previous versions of the Muon Suite, including a rather severe crash in the Muon Software Center caused by default repository changes in Kubuntu. Additionally, hangs experienced during long/large upgrades have been fixed, and issues with the update notifier not always notifying of updates have been fixed. All fixes have been included in the recently-released release candidate of the Muon Suite 1.3.

Packages for Kubuntu 11.10 are from the QApt repository. I will try to get 1.2.3 pushed as an official update for Kubuntu 11.10 over the next week or so using the Ubuntu Stable Release Update process. Since this has a more rigorous testing process than my unofficial PPA, regression testing from users will be required. Stay tuned for more info about that if you’d like to help! This did not happen with the 1.2.2 release due to a severe lack of time on my part due to final exams and work, but I will try to make it happen this time as this release does fix several serious issues.

Further technical information about the release, including source tarball downloads and a detailed changelog, can be found at the project pages here and here.

Yes, I could not resist to associate Blender with "will it blend" my favourite way to use an iPhone (check out this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S8sxpK4_iA).

Some days ago, I asked some questions to Ton Roosendaal and he, really nicely, found the time to answer. As you all may know, he is the creator of Blender and the head of the Blender Institute. Anyway, for me, the most important idea he developed is the "open movie" project. It introduces a completely new concept of creating an artistic opera, where the public can be an active part during the production and expecially after it, possibly improving the opera itself or creating another version (if it's a movie, you can create your own final). Basically, it's the power of free open source software ported to art, expecially cinematographic art.
Tra l'altro: se siete italiani, potrete leggere una traduzione dell'intervista con presentazione nel prossimo numero di GNU/Linux Magazine Italia.

-So, this will be the first Blender "open movie" with real actors: is there a particular reason for which you decided this or it's just a director's choice?
Each time I've picked a main theme connected to technical targets for Blender. The whole concept of our open movies is to get focus for a longer period on bigger targets, and have these targets well tested and validated immediate. That mimics the process how most (bigger) animation studios work with their in-house software. If there's one thing we stand out among the competition it's Blender's open source nature, which really makes it your own in-house software!
After doing one game project and three animation films, doing a vfx based project was a very obvious choice. Modern film making happens with 3d software you know!

-Can you tell us, briefly, the plot of Mango (obiously without spoilering)?
In the distant future they find out that the nearing destruction of the World has been caused by a break-up in Amsterdam long ago. They then desperately send a fleet of space ships and robots back to the past to prevent this break-up to happen.
(Also see blog post about this on mango.blender.org + Ian's reaction)

-Since the open movie is also a way to let developers improve some Blender features, collaborating with the artists, the Mango team wrote some "development targets". Can you explain us, practically, what those targets are?
Just 2 days ago we posted a very long article on our blog about the development targets. It's actually quite a too long list now, we will need to narrow it down still.
Some techniques are impossible to avoid though; and the main one is camera tracking. That's an artist's tool in Blender that allows you to extract the 3D camera position, orientation and motion from shots. With that info you can then seamlessly merge artificial 3d rendered objects with the real footage. You can even take it steps further and use it to track bodies, faces or even do full motion capture of humans. All in Blender - without need of special equipment.
Basic but good quality camera tracking is Blender already, released last month.

-Now a technical question: do you use GNU/Linux distributions for producing this movie? Which free open source programs do you use, mainly, for the production?
In the studio we use Ubuntu for the workstations and Debian for the render farm nodes. Exclusively free/open source tools are being used for the complete visual pipeline here. Apart from Blender that's of course the GIMP, MyPaint, Krita and Inkscape.
An exception is for example the camera data itself - files from Red Epic cartridges require closed software to convert to regular readable image files. Also the sound editing and mix we don't do ourselves, we just accept the best offer from a composer or sound studio.

-Italy has been, from the beginning of the 20th century, a very active country in cinematographic art, and the public is really interested in new movie ideas. Do you think to present Mango also in Italy, for example at the Venice festival (september 2012, it's about when you plan to complete your movie)?
Yep, I'm a big fan of Italian cinema! But we make a humble short low-budget film, just 5-7 minutes, I don't think that would be a big event for the Venice festival. For sure I'll try to get it in of course :) We have two Italian artists working here on Mango, they would love to see this happen!

-Which features would you like to see in a future version of Blender?
For next year and later? I don't think we need so much new features specifically, what we need mostly is quality and good maintenance of features. With Blender being compared to the big commercial programs, we somehow have to organize our developer community to keep improving too. The only way to keep growing is to organize small/medium studios to get involved with development as well; to hire people to work on Blender and together work on a tool we all can use far more efficiently than any closed program.
Once that's done we obviously have to make a big feature film together. And then add loads of new features again!

Post Scriptum: If you don't know what camera tracking is, watch this:
Digital Makeup in Blender from Sebastian König on Vimeo.

Edit: Ton suggested me to put here some pictures from mango authors, so I have choosen these (click to see them  bigger):

I meant to release a new version of Notably on Friday, but I got sidetracked with some stuff. Plus, I've been spending a lot of time on designing the UI for this release, which I think isn't a good idea. Notably is still not quite mature, and I think right now features are more important than polish.

Last week, I showcased some tagging UIs. They aren't yet ready to be deployed in KDE, as they need to be polished quite a bit. Plus, there is a lot scope for collaboration when designing UIs.

Changes Revamped UI

I've gotten rid of most of the custom KWin code. I'd initially wanted my application to look quite different, with a blurred background and fixed size. But that would be locking the user into a fixed interface.

Notably now looks and behaves more like a KDE application. (No more blurred background)

Better Sidebar

Most of the code improvements have been in the sidebar, which now acts as a proper menu and allows navigation.

Experimental Widgets

Some brand new widgets;

Tag Widget

I showcased the new Tag Widget I was working on a couple of days ago. Since then, I've improved the code to make it more maintainable, unfortunately it still needs a lot of work.

Tag Cloud

Creating a Tag Cloud turned out to be a greater challenge than I expected. Right now it's implement with some basic HTML in a QTextBrowser. I'm still experimenting with some custom layout code. Lets see how it goes.

Tag Browsing

You can browse your notes based on the tags they have been given. This will eventually have to be expanded to allow multiple facets - like tags, dates and so on. Implementing it on the Nepomuk side is fairly simple, but I'm not sure about the interface.

After a couple of more releases when I've gotten most of the main features down, I'll start on polishing it up and moving it to extragear :)

Source Code: kde:notably

Today Phoronix published (again) test results comparing the Game Rendering Performance on various desktop environments. As it “seems” like the performance of Game Rendering under KWin got worse in comparison to last year I want to point out a few things.

First of all: keep in mind that this is a test of Game Rendering Performance and doesn’t tell anything about the performance of tasks that matter. The development focus of KWin is clearly not on being great for games. We want to be (and are) the best composited window manager for desktop systems. That is what matters that is what we fine tune the system for.

Another important fact to know is that last years test was seriously flawed and I think this years test is flawed in a similar way. Last year KWin used by default unredirection of fullscreen windows while no other composited window manager in the test did that. With 4.7 we adjusted the default and turned unredirection off. But at the same time Mutter received to my knowledge unredirection of fullscreen windows. In case it is enabled in Mutter we have the explanation for last years bad results and this years good results.

If I would perform such a test, I would not benchmark KWin once but once for OpenGL 2.x backend, once for OpenGL ES 2.0 backend, once for OpenGL 1.x backend, once for XRender backend, the same set with unredirection of fullscreen windows turned on and once without compositing at all. We see there are so many things that would influence the game rendering performance that just one run of the benchmark is not enough.

But still we would recommend to turn compositing off when playing games. At least that is what I would do. A window manager is mostly just in the way of games and that is one of the reasons why gaming on desktop is by far not as good as playing on a gaming console. So if you want to game with KWin use the feature to specify a window specific rule to block compositing as long as the game is running. This will yield the best game rendering performance.

This was my first FOSDEM without a predefined tight agenda, so I could enjoy more than ever the event. I had a lot of fun and could talk to many people with no stress.

I attended to several talks. I must say that I didn't like many of them. I'll mention the best ones, for different reasons:

• Wayland
• MER
• Qt5
• LibrePlan
• OpenAdvice
• OpenMoko Freerunner 
• Why the community should welcome Average Jane and Joe 

Obviously I didn't attend to most of the talks. There were more than 400 in one and a half day.

I spent most of the late Saturday and Sunday around KDE stand. Many KDE members where there and I could talk to most of them. I would like to mention Jonathan Riddell's work, specially in these hard times for him, Jonathan, you rock!

It was very cold in Brussels. We reached -14ºC the first night. Simply too much for a Canary Island guy. The beer was warmer than the weather. That was weird. Thanks to the Kolab guys, Paul and Georg, I could drink some very good beer and visit cool bars I've never been before.

As you know, we are having a hard time in Spain, specially if we talk about unemployment. Free Software sector is doing quiet good though. On our recent history, one of our structural problems have been exportation. Last two years, due to the internal the economic crisis, we have raised them by 30% and FLOSS companies are no exception. Many Spanish companies had presence in FOSDEM 2012.

On Sunday night I organized a networking dinner with some Spanish FLOSS companies and a representative of the Commercial Office of the Spanish Embassy in Brussels. KDE Spain, Zentyal, Gestiweb, Igalia, Carlos Sánchez and others (up to 24) were there.

The goal was that these representatives could know some entrepreneurs and how the FLOSS sector is doing in Spain. Next year, the day before FOSDEM 2013, we plan to organize in the Spanish Embassy in Brussels some networking activities between Spanish FLOSS companies and foreign corporations attending to the event.

FOSDEM has a great program, but networking is as relevant as talks. So don't don't miss it next year. See you there, hopefully, with better weather.

Agustin Benito Bethencourt (Toscalix) Spanish Blog: http://abenitobethencourt.blogspot.com Linkedin profile: http://es.linkedin.com/in/toscalix

Probably you know Chakra Project ! the one of most popular linux distros based on Arch Linux which come with latest KDE desktop. anyway… (more informations)

after more than 1 year, after Neda artwork set, in next release of chakra (will released 12 february 2012) you can see a big change in artwork section. our new artwork set called Ronak (a kurdish name for girls that means “Light”) which includes wallpaper, Plasma Theme, KDM, Ksplash. best news in this release is we have 2 version for Ronak Artwork, a Light version that comes with colorful artwork set and a Dark version for users who love dark desktop that the dark one is default after installation and also users can change that to light theme with accessible tools in “System Settings”.

 

Ronak is in Testing repository! you can install and use it before Chakra Archimedes (2012.2) release and report probably bugs.

In Artwork section of Chakra now we have 2 artist and 1 maintainer (me). special thanks to my best friend “Shahrzad” who design both of wallpapers in dark and light version and “David” who design Plasma Theme for Ronak. and it’s my proud to introduce Chakra Artwork Team with these guys. im glad to work with this team and we promise to you and users that we will be more active in next releases

P.S : We, me and Shahrzad present this package to all users who love Chakra and we present it to our people in Iran that love the world and wish the peace for all around the world…

Dear all digiKam fans and users!

digiKam team is proud to announce the 1st digiKam Software Collection 2.6.0 beta release!

With this release, digiKam include a lots of bugs fixes and new features introduced to last Coding Sprint from Genoa.

read more

Yesterday I woke up to the news that Canonical are no longer going to fund Riddell to work on Kubuntu. I've trying to figure out what that means for KDE and for community Linux generally.

Disclaimer: I work in the same role as Jonathan at SUSE, a competing Linux company that sponsors the openSUSE project. This is my personal opinion, not that of the openSUSE Board or SUSE Linux GmbH.

I'm sad for Jonathan personally. He has put a lot of his lifeblood into Kubuntu over the years, at no little cost to himself, and to be pulled off one's favourite project hurts. The same thing could happen to me if the powers that be decide, so I can easily empathise with him.

In the bigger picture, I have to say that this doesn't surprise me at all. For Canonical, Kubuntu fulfilled its purpose a few years ago already. Kubuntu, and the other official Ubuntu derivatives, have always been a spoiler move to tie up community contributors who believed in the early community-centric image of Ubuntu, but who didn't agree with the main Ubuntu's direction. Otherwise, there was the risk that Ubuntu design decisions would polarize the Linux community and send people towards Ubuntu's competitors. With the derivatives, they are safely occupied under the big tent of the Ubuntu brand.

If we look back at the Ubuntu game plan as history neatly lays it out for us, we have

1) Establish the Ubuntu brand amongst early adopters (check, by about 2005)
2) Expand it to the wider Linux user base (check, by about 2007)
3) Make Ubuntu the default Linux for non-technical users (2009)
4) Tie up a paying market. Initial targets have been enterprise desktop Linux (maybe next year ;)) or consumers in the massmarket netbook segment (but that was squashed by tablets and Microsoft rounding up the manufacturer back to the XP prison), and now they are aiming at embedding into consumer electronics (TVs) and will probably snare a tablet OEM as a cloud OS (hell, if KDE can do it...) or a bookseller or someone who wants a platform to digitally sell something else off of.
5) Profit
6) Buy more spaceflight (Probably. For some, 5) is enough)

Somewhere after 1), the massive demand for KDE on Ubuntu in KDE's main territories (Germany, via the ubuntu.de forums, which IIRC threatened an unofficial fork) caused Canonical to realise that it was better to control a large dissenting minority with some token gestures than to have them really doing their own thing. So Jonathan, at that point a KDE packager at Debian, was hired, and Mark Shuttleworth did his salesman job at a couple of KDE events making some insubstantial promises (If I had a dollar for every KDE eV board member at the time who told me "But Mark has promised to install and use Kubuntu on his workstation" multiplied by every Ubuntu developer overheard chuckling that "But they don't know that Mark *never* uses his workstation, he's always on a notebook"...), a few community people got flights to events, and Kubuntu was born, and legitimised by the then-leaders of the KDE community.

Once 2) was consolidated, Kubuntu was redundant to Canonical, but on the average professional Linux hacker's salary, Jonathan was an affordable luxury. Now, I suspect that with the trend at Canonical to develop more and more in-house to chase 4) rather than just distribute what the FLOSS community provides, putting paid man-hours on a mature product is no longer a good way to spend engineering budget.

By cheaply tying up competitors' resources, Kubuntu has hindered KDE's overall growth via other distributions and balkanized the KDE community. It can be argued that Kubuntu has brought users and contributors to KDE as part of the rapid initial growth of Ubuntu, and Kubuntu has been a success in focussing their developers on improving KDE, but this came at the price of cementing KDE in the role of a second class environment in the eyes of everyone who came to Linux via Ubuntu. I suspect that the GNOME community, which previously surfed the wave of Ubuntu's growth, will feel the pinch of necessity as Canonical moves towards its endgame, and having already been displaced as the default desktop for an inhouse development, will move further towards just being an anonymous organ donor to Unity and subsequent productisable UIs.

Why am I writing this? I don't want to be so crass as to just say 'come to my project instead'. I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest that you should have no illusions about what your community Linux distribution means to the businesses that sponsor it.

For openSUSE, it's some engineering contribution to and testing of SUSE enterprise products' codebase, and supporting the enterprise brand via a halo effect from the community brand. In setting up the openSUSE project, SUSE has been militant in giving the community complete control of the project and the distribution that comes out of it. Call it an insurance policy or a lifeboat, but by opening and freeing all the tools that create openSUSE (as well as the source code), we assure that the results of 20 years of work are indefinitely available. SUSE is secure enough in its business and believes strongly enough in free software to do this with the rootstock of its enterprise products, because the modular, federated Open Build Service allows SUSE to derive enterprise products from openSUSE without having to steer it.

Last weekend was FOSDEM and it was a blast! Camila's first and I get that she didn't look forward to it that much - we had some trouble on the way there. As I'm now just on the way to the airport to pick her up (she had a meet-up with some KolabSys people) I dunno if she changed her mind but I bet she did. If only because she got some Brazilian beans from Izabel Valverde ;-)

For me it was the usual - there was little visiting of talks for me. Seriously, 200 hours of talks in 2 days? Attempting to visit the interesting ones just leads to frustration so I've given up on that. There are just too many people to talk to, too much beer to drink and sell and little catch-ups to have. FOSDEM needs to become a week-long event. Seriously.

A cool highlight of FOSDEM was of course the release of Lydia's awesome Open Advice project. It's a book for people who want to participate and make a difference in Free Software, explaining our culture and drawing upon some bright minds for real-world experiences. It is quite a read - I only got as far as the introduction by ex-FSFE Dude Georg Greve and some first paragraphs of a few chapters. But it's worth it if what I've read is any indication. Of course, in true Free fashion, it's open and even ready to edit and improve if you want!

There was a lot of fun around the openSUSE crowd as usual. The crew did a great job selling t-shirts, hats, beer and other stuff all for the benefit of FOSDEM (we donated the proceeds of the sales as usual). The awesome 'Old Toad' beer was as popular as ever - it is indeed a great beer and a good way to keep the fun alive. The Greek(o)s really drove this part as they must've drunk at least half our supply ;-)

Oh and after being pressed Frank promised that he'll ensure ownCloud has a good booth next year. So, ownCloudies (can't think of a better name atm) - you guys & girls really have to take that dive in 2013!!! Don't let Frank pull it alone. Not that His Baldiness can't do that, it's just that he'd look lonely. We can't have that.

And at night the usual great dinners - Thai food one night, Japanese Tepan Yaki or something (fiery, dang) another. Finishing it off properly with a few beers.

By the way, I've set up the LinuxTag wiki page for the openSUSE gang, sign up!

hugs,
Jos

Sometimes the decision of how a program should behave is not right or wrong technically but based on the user expectation.

In Okular we are asking ourselves what should happen when you have two lines with the following text

This is an ex-
ample

and copy it. Should it return "This is an ex-\nample" or "This is an ex-ample" or "This is an example"?

Head over to the KDE forums and vote!

At the end of a long day here are some photos from KDE at FOSDEM 2012. Pradeepto says "3.24 AM here, am in office, those pictures made my day/night/whatever itis now".

KDE Love as Claudia sells t-shirts

Paul demos KDE Software on every form factor: mobile, tablet, desktop, Windows, cloud and server.

Corridor chat with Frank

Cross-Desktop room group photo (missing lots of people who were at other talks)

KDE dinner - had to turn away quite a lot of people who were too late to get a seat. I may be concussed but I'm still able to herd KDE cats better than anyone else did.

A business man pose from Paul

Lydia Launches the Open Advice book on which I am a contributing author

FOSDEM reminded me why I love KDE, great people and friends working on great technology.

There appears to be some confusion regarding the meaning of yesterday’s announcement that Kubuntu 11.10 is going to be the last release Canonical is offering commercial support for.

For those who have not yet read about it, let me quickly recap the situation. Up until now Kubuntu was a Canonical supported flavor of Ubuntu. This essentially means that you can buy a support contract from Canonical to help you with your Kubuntu infrastructure. Every once in a while Canonical would stamp ‘LTS’ on a Kubuntu release to indicate that they would support this release for 3 or 5 of years to come (delivering security and major bug fixes primarily). The 11.10 release is the last release for which Canonical offers these services. As a direct consequence Jonathan Riddell, a good friend of mine and fearless leader of Kubuntu, will work on other technology during work hours.

You might have noticed that I was writing a lot about Canonical just now, and the reason for this is that the change mostly is about Canonical and not Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is and always has been a mostly community driven project. To give you an idea what mostly means in this case: out of the 25 people who notably contributed in the past year, 1 person was employed by Canonical to do so (i.e. 4% of general Kubuntu work was financed by Canonical). Please do not get me wrong though. Jonathan is a great developer and does a considerable amount of work, particularly in those areas where the community currently lacks motivation, hence some workflow revision is in order to make the ‘new’ Kubuntu equally efficient.

So what changes for real?

• No commercial support from Canonical for future releases.
• Jonathan Riddell will work on non-Kubuntu stuff during work hours.
• Alignment of Kubuntu with other siblings like Edubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu.
  For those who care: on a technical level this means that a considerable amount of Kubuntu maintained software will be moved from the main to the universe archive.
• Probably some workflow changes that are yet to be discussed.

Is this bad?
It probably is if you wanted to adopt Kubuntu in your company and were counting on a Canonical support contract. However this is probably more of Canonical’s loss than your’s. As noted earlier there is a pool of more than 25 people one could employ directly to get the same result, perhaps even better. It is certainly sad that Jonathan will not be able to continue getting payed for working on his baby though.

Is this good?
Moving to universe bares a great deal of opportunities for Kubuntu. Primarily it gives the community yet bigger control over what the distribution looks like as we do not need to get software approved to be worthy of Canonical’s support. At the same time it also reduces the policy overhead (main inclusion for those who have heared of it). The detanglement allows us to move even closer to KDE without having to worry about conflicting interests, as what is good for KDE is not necessarily what is good for Canonical.
All in all I expect Kubuntu to become more agile and continue to regularly deliver an easy to use Linux distribution featuring the latest and greatest KDE software.

There is an occasional and not very amusing urban myth that Kubuntu is a stepchild of Ubuntu based on the idea that Canonical is not giving the same amount of care to Kubuntu as other flavors of Ubuntu. It’s not true because Canonical has given much more care to Kubuntu than many other flavours. But all those who believe in this myth may now rejoice as the stepchild is moving out and going to share a flat with its much loved siblings \o/

<p><a href="http://www.formspring.me/deepsky28">http://www.formspring.me/deepsky28</a></p>

At FOSDEM it was announced that Google will run Google Summer of Code again in 2012. Wohooooooo! KDE will apply as a mentoring organisation again. Here are the next steps to prepare:

For students:

• Read the GSoC FAQ and timeline. (Don’t skip this step. It’s important.)
• Read some GSoC infos from KDE.
• Keep an eye on the ideas page to see what KDE is looking for. You’re also welcome to come up with your own idea as long as you discuss it with a mentor.
• Get in touch with a mentor and discuss your idea. Maybe already contribute a little. (The better we know you the time it gets to voting on your application the better.)

For mentors:

• Add ideas to the ideas page. Only add ideas if you are willing to mentor them! Please add them within the next 2 weeks. Earlier is better as students are already looking for ideas now. We will try to give a focus to accessibility this round. This does not mean that all ideas have to be related to that in some way but it would be great if a significant percentage of them would be.
• Consider holding a GSoC info session at a university near you. Get in touch with me if you plan to do that. There are ready-made presentations and flyers available for you.

If you have any questions feel free to come to #kde-soc on freenode or send an email to the mailing list kde-soc at kde dot org.

There have been cases of virtuoso going a little crazy and consuming a lot of CPU cycles. It's extremely frustrating. However, it's ever more annoying when you have no idea what's wrong.

Most of bug reports we get just say that virtuoso is consuming too much CPU, and that isn't the least bit helpful. So, here is a short guide to figure out what query is causing virtuoso to go crazy.

Listing Queries

Nepomuk contains a query service which is used to cache queries and to execute them asynchronously. We can use it at any point to figure out which all queries are being executed.

$ qdbus org.kde.nepomuk.services.nepomukqueryservice / /nepomukqueryservice /nepomukqueryservice/query1 /nepomukqueryservice/query4 /servicecontrol

Each of the /nepomukqueryservice/query[n] represents one query.

Getting the SPARQL Query $ qdbus org.kde.nepomuk.services.nepomukqueryservice /nepomukqueryservice/query4 queryString

And you'll get something like this -

select distinct ?r ?v2 where { { ?r a <http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/11/01/pimo#Note> . ?r <http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/08/15/nao#created> ?v2 . } . ?r <http://www.semanticdesktop.org/ontologies/2007/08/15/nao#userVisible> ?v1 . FILTER(?v1>0) . } ORDER BY DESC ( ?v2 )

This query is extrememly important cause without it finding the cause is nearly impossible.

Killing queries $ qdbus org.kde.nepomuk.services.nepomukqueryservice /nepomukqueryservice/query4 close

This will end the query

When/If you find virtuoso consuming too much cpu, list out all the queries and close each of them one by one. The moment virtuoso gets better, you'll have your culprit.

That's the query you should post in the bug report.

Please keep in mind that this is the fourth of a series of post. Please read previous ones ( I, II and III) before the following.
The venue is very important in order to be successful. I suggest to launch the project in a city with the following characteristics:

• Big not not too much, so activities created have a global impact in the city. 
• With at least one big University with Computers Science and Engineering/Science Faculties. This will ensure potential contributors.
• Well communicated with bigger cities so activities organized can attract visitors from those cities.
• With an international airport so it is easy for the Global Free Software Communities (GFSC) to celebrate promotional and technical activities with foreign speakers and attendees.

The facilities are a key element in order to have success. Some of the most relevant characteristics that the venue must have are: 

• Close to the city center, well communicated with the airport or train station (if there is international airport) and close to the University if possible.
• Close to hotels, hostels or other accommodations. It is important to have cheap accommodation around the facilities.
• Some kind of garden or natural area where to talk comfortably outdoors.
• Cafeterias, bars and restaurants must be close to the facilities.
• Facilities must have, at least:
• A room for conferences up to 75 - 100 people.
• High quality Internet connection. Wifi in the area and outside.
• AC Plugs.
• A meeting room.
• A computer lab or a room prepared for plugging laptops.
• A networking area with some tables.
• Stock

To be successful, the place must have a comfortable atmosphere. It must be a quiet but informal. It must promote interaction but also intimacy. 
Go back to the description post. Agustin Benito Bethencourt (Toscalix) Spanish Blog: http://abenitobethencourt.blogspot.com Linkedin profile: http://es.linkedin.com/in/toscalix

I worked out a solution to replace the random MAC address set by the smsc95xx kernel module with the MAC address generated by u-boot on the PandaBoard(ES). It should also work on the BeagleBoard.
As first you need this kernel patch to fix isses with exporting the assign type (PERM, RANDOM, STOLEN) to /sys/class/net/*/addr_assign_type correctly if the smsc95xx driver generate a random MAC address. Build your kernel, if you use openSUSE:Factory:ARM you can get RPMs here, until it's integrated into the official openSUSE kernel.
Now you need a mkinitrd with this patch or a you install these RPMs for openSUSE. This adds a initrd boot script to set the MAC address from kernel cmdline parameters. These are the available parameters and some example values:

• setmac.set_mac_addr=01:23:45:67:89:ab
• setmac.set_iface=eth0
• setmac.set_module=smsc95xx

The setmac.set_mac_addr= is mandatory to change the MAC and you have to choose one of the other two parameters. Either you specify the network interface or the kernel driver/module. In case you use setmac.set_module the first network device provided by this module which has a random MAC gets the new address assigned. Please note: this script change the MAC of a interface only if addr_assign_type=1 , otherwise nothing will change.
If you have installed the new kernel and mkinitrd you may need to follow these steps:# mount the boot partition which contains the uImage (and may also the MLO file) 
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
# make sure this partition contains the new uImage
# build a new initrd
mkinitrd -B
# create a uInitrd
mkimage -A arm -O linux -T ramdisk -C none -a 0 -e 0 -n initramfs -d /boot/initrd /mnt/uInitrdNow you need to tell u-boot to boot from the uInitrd and to set the needed cmdline parameters. I prefer to use a uEnv.txt file instead of a boot.scr since you simply can change it without call mkimage. You can download my currently used uEnv.txt here. The content depends on your setup you may need to adapt yours:
bootargs=root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rw rootwait rootfstype=ext3 console=ttyO2,115200n8 vram=16M omapfb.vram=0:16M
bootcmd=mmc rescan ; setenv bootargs ${bootargs} setmac.set_mac_addr="${usbethaddr}" setmac.set_iface=eth0; fatload mmc 0:1 0x80000000 uImage; fatload mmc 0:1 0x81600000 uInitrd; bootm 0x80000000 0x81600000
uenvcmd=boot
Now umount /mnt and reboot your system. If you already worked around the random MAC address problem: don't forget to remove/disable these hacks.

The ICC meeting from 30th January to 1th February was again a great chance to meet with colour management people in person. The meeting was hosted in Munich at Adobe with a great view over the snowy city. I joined the sessions under the OpenICC umbrella to represent the open source community.

Of course many talks went over various specification topics and coordination with other standard bodies and groups of interest in colour exchange. But as ICC is evolving, there are new topics coming up as well.

Notably, ICC is slowly moving from a solely static colour content description of what colours are. There is great interest to cover as well the process of applying colour conversions. This covers necessarily definition of terms and workflows and gets to the questions of why, how and who handles colour. This will help users to do high level decisions as opposed to the current need to understand low level technical ICC terms and figuring out how that applies to actual used implementations.

I presented my work inside OpenICC to add monitor identification and calibration state information inside ICC profiles to streamline profile distribution and installation. The concept found support and the presentation about the meta tag keys came along nicely.

ICC members dive currently into spectral imaging, which is prototyped in SampleICC. I appreciate this direction, as it very likely simplifies the use of spectral readings for colour calculations in applications.

The only discussed hint to reduce the size of n-channel profiles, was work on how to put formulas inside the colour processing pipe. It would be great if that comes to a useful result. Formulas inside ICC profiles where first introduced during the v4 specification but only apply to single channels. For per channel operations are currently some few formulas supported. However the new approach allows to express with more elementary operations and allows free access to all channels.

Obviously many members have a strong background in printing, which is greatly reflected in the spec. But some companies have a strong relation to various imaging industries, like camera manufacturers, who as well create printing or displaying devices. There is potential, that ICC will support their interests, provided they actively contribute. For instance ICC profile embedding inside images is well covered inside the ICC spec. That was a good base for e.g. the W3C to introduce colour management for photography on the net. There is no equivalent to movie or video content. In parts embedding of ICC profiles there does not even exist.

Altogether, the ICC meeting was a great chance to coordinate and intensify the work of ICC and OpenICC.

I fixed the thumbnailing issue. It even selects an image which has the best aspect ratio to begin with – not more squeezed banners:

But as feared it requires a patch to kdelibs which I hope to get into KDE 4.8.1.

Hello KDE fellas!

After a very busy university term, I have finally got myself to write this post about the status of reading RSS/Atom feeds on KDE. Consider this post as if it was written in September 2011, things have been pretty much frozen since then.

The aim of it is:

• updating the KDE community on what is new with news feeds reading in KDE;
• “refactoring” ideas in my mind after a semester of slacking off;
• encouraging people to help making the “feeds reading experience” on KDE cool again! (YES, I AM asking you to join this project)

Akregator (news feed reader of the Kontact suite) was introduced along with KDE 3.4 in 2005 and aficionados of the KDE platform are still using it. However, many other users switched to more convenient web platforms such us Bloglines earlier on, or Google Reader (GReader) lately. Look at these statistics on the GReader devs blog. Ok, it’s not clear what the y-axis in those graphs represents, but still… Unfortunately, Akregator has also been struggling with attracting new users. See this survey from howtogeek.com and you will have a picture of what many geeks choose as they favorite news feed reader. Alas, it’s hard to find a single comment where the Big-G aggregator is not mentioned What makes so many readers to favor the Google aggregator? Well, as usual in the case of Google products, it works fairly well and it has got almost all the features that most users want. In my opinion, there is more, though. The most important feature of GReader is that it’s out there on the web and, no matter where you are, you just need a browser and a Google account to access it. What is wrong with using Google Reader then? First of all, you also need an internet connection to access it and you know, that’s not really everywhere (Notice that since May 2010, the offline feature of Google Reader is no longer available). Second, in terms of comfort, nothing beats a KDE application, with its perfect integration with your desktop, notification system, ability to use quick search features, and so on. Third, if you care about your privacy, the new Google’s privacy policy is definitely not something that can make you happy.

This leads us to the encouragement that titles this post: let’s make Akregator sexy again and let’s switch back to it! An idea for doing this came up in the last summer, when I was looking for a Season Of KDE project. I was chatting with Jakob Sack (jakobsack) and Robin Appelman (icewind) on the #owncloud channel and they mentioned that a feed reader was one of the most important among the applications missing in ownCloud. If you don’t know what ownCloud is, you should absolutely check it out (http://www.owncloud.org)! Jakob’s and Robin’s idea was not just to create an online feed reader, but something way cooler: bringing Akregator to the cloud. Immediately after this idea came up, I checked it with Frank Osterfeld, the Akregator maintainer (Frank from now on). Since the very first conversation with him, it became clear that there was a fundamental preliminary step to take before bringing Akregator to the cloud. This was a fully working port of Akregator to Akonadi.

Started few years ago, the creation of the Akonadi framework gave fresh nourishment to the development of applications that manage personal information on KDE, i.e., KDEPIM applications. Many components of Kontact, the personal information manager of KDE, greatly benefited of the port to Akonadi with new interest and new features coming to the platform. Unfortunately, one of the components that was left out from this trend was Akregator. The basic reason for this was that Akregator has always had basically only one committed maintainer, Frank (kudos to him!), and not many other developers involved. A partially working port of Akregator to Akonadi eventually happened in 2008-2009, when Frank was joined by Dmitry Ivanov, a GSoC student at that time. You can read more about the amazing job that Dmitry and Frank did in that period in Frank’s post dated July 2009 and Dmitry’s post dated November 2011.

What happened since then? Not much. No earth-shattering changes happened to the code and the port to Akonadi never made it to the master branch of KDE. Again, the reasons are: basically no developers involved and the code that had become very complex, mainly because of two architectural choices. First choice was the decision to use tagging instead of a simple folders tree structure. Second, the choice to write a common resource for all the RSS services and just a sub-instance of it for each individual service (Newsgator, GReader, local). Dmitry’s resource is called krss and it’s in kdepim, branch work/akonadi-ports.

The news is that during SoK 2011, under Frank’s mentorship, I wrote a new Akonadi RSS local resource. It imports information about the feeds from an OPML file, loads the items and store them in Akonadi. You can flag the items as read/unread/important, and organize them in folders. We used many pieces of Dmitry’s code, including the serializer and all the classes that model the basic objects such as feeds or items. We rewrote the basic methods that define the resource from scratch. The code became simpler, although some features are missing in the new resource. It’s also less general, since you can’t extend it easily to any application other then the OPML storage. It works, though, and you can see it in action in the following (mandatory) screenshot .

krsslocal on Akonadi Console

You can find the source code in the following repository:

http://quickgit.kde.org/?p=scratch/cosentino/krsslocal.git

If you want to suggest features, report bugs, or just comment about the resource, feel free to buzz me (zimba12) on Freenode (I am very often in #owncloud and #akregator).

Other encouraging news: Frank wrote a new migrator for the old data (it’s in kde:clones/kdepim-runtime/osterfeld/akregator-migrator) and he fixed some bugs on the Akonadi port of Akregator (it’s in kdepim, branch work/akonadi-ports) while testing it against the new resource.

Finally I believe there can be new excitement around Akregator!

krsslocal on Akregator

If you also got excited and want to know more, you can check out my wiki where I take notes about the entire project at the following link: http://algorithmsforthekitchen.com/wiki/doku.php?id=sok I use it as scratch paper so the information won’t be much coherent. In case it doesn’t make sense, feel free to ask me questions on chat.

Once again, this IS a call for joining the project and don’t forget the KDE Philosophy: When making a suggestion, change “we should..” to “I will..”.

In the part 2 of this post (stay tuned on planet-kde for it!), I will be talking more about the ownCloud feed reader application on which I am working right now and how this will be integrated to Akregator+Akonadi in the future.

Cheers!