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KDE Development in action.

A-Tumblin'December 30 2008

Did some tumblin' a few days ago, as a result of me and some tram tracks at Hackescher Markt disagreeing as to the general direction of the front wheel of my bike. This resulted in a banged up wrist and rib, but no damage to the laptop or head. So while I'm still able to perform my primary function at work, namely talk, I am somewhat useless in my primary function at home, namely as a holder of hands while our daughter learns to walk. She has decided that this dire situation necessitates desperate measures and promptly started standing by herself. This works ok, as long as the realization does not hit her that no one is holding her, at which point we're back to tumblin', this time into a pile of cute making happy gurgling sounds, which I am convinced mean "Dad, check out what I did!".

My year has been awesome, folks, and the next one is promising to be even awesomerer. I wish you all the very best, for the new year, out there in KDE land.

I'm also, like, totally stoked to be attending Camp KDE in Jamaica in a couple of weeks time, where I will be preaching the gospel of Akonadi and, more importantly, meeting my Zack! There shall be hugs! There will also be sun and a great bunch of other assorted KDE friends, both of which I can never get enough of. Did I mention my life rocks?

A Holiday Present - Weather Plasmoid 1.0 is finishedDecember 29 2008

Well, I've been extremely busy on the weather plasmoid and finally, '1.0' is ready for use. It's now moved to kdereview so that any final bugs can be shaken out. This should arrive in extragear as soon as the review is completed.

*** If your Qt is old, it WILL crash when moving mouse to focus mouse on the icons. Please get your distro to get latest Qt 4.4.x release!

You'll notice some differences:

* New! Five day view. Special thanks to Marco Martin and Lee Olson also the wind icon.
* Thanks to the Pinheiro for the new Oxygen Icons
* Dock applet to plasma panel thanks to Marco Martin for this.
* Tooltip support that displays the icon, place, condition and current temperature.
* Rearranged configuration dialog thanks to Davide Bettio for this.
* All the conversion combo boxes now work it you can mix and match any combinations.
* Clickable credits where present (depends on data source) this will take you to the original data from the source's website.
* Popup tooltips when you hover over the 5 day icons to show you what the condition will be.
* Clickable watches/warning links where present (depends on data source).
* If in Canada, if a watch or warning for your area is issued the applet will add the 'Notices' tab on its next update of data.

If you're using KDE trunk, please test and report any bugs you find to me on #plasma or email.

And now, for screen shots!

In this screenshot,

UDS Jaunty and Desktop ExperienceDecember 24 2008

The Ubuntu Development Summit happened at Google the other week. Large numbers of people got together to spend a week discussing the next six months in Ubuntu. Lots of specs got written and you can find the Kubuntu Jaunty specs here.

One of the most notable changes is the plan to change to using Package Kit, it's always a shame to move on from the hard work that has gone in before, but it makes the most sense for us to use a framework and apps that can be shared amongst many other distros. Hugs to Peter for work much appreciated.

I'd like to see KDE 3 libs off the CD for Jaunty, and if possible Qt 3 too. With Akonadi bringing in mysqld we'll need all the space we can find. One of the last hangers on to Qt 3 is OpenOffice, anyone feel like reviving OpenOffice KDE project for Oxygen and Qt 4 support?

Mysql is going to be a hassle, as I say it takes up a lot of space for Akonadi and Amarok seems to need a newer version than the server team want to support, hopefully we can find ways to make everything work.

Desktop Experience Team

People sometimes complain that Canonical doesn't do enough original development, there's also grumbles I hear that one of the two major free software desktops is

Everything Good Comes Together...December 18 2008

What an exciting day:

• The openSUSE team has an early christmas gift in the form of the second distribution release this year: openSUSE 11.1 - the best distro with the best KDE desktops.
  Download it within the first 24 hours to enjoy the Akamai speed afterburner!
• Also KDE 4.2 Beta 2 gets released today. Packages for openSUSE are available in the KDE:KDE4:UNSTABLE:Desktop Build Service repositories.
• Together this results in a new KDE Four Live release - an installable KDE 4.2 Beta 2 Live-CD based on openSUSE 11.1.

Have a lot of fun...

How to get CMake find what you want it toDecember 12 2008

Since some August or so we are now requiring CMake 2.6 for KDE svn trunk.

One thing was has been added and which is very nice support for the new environment variable CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH. It's purpose is to help with getting CMake to find what you want it to find.

Usually a software package is installed to some "prefix" directory, in the lib/ subdir of that prefix go the libraries, in the include/ subdir of that prefix go the headers, and in the bin/ subdir of that prefix go the programs.

By default, if you use one of the find_(file|path|library|program)() commands, CMake searches in a set of such prefix directories, e.g. in /usr, /usr/local, /opt/csw and more (i.e. in the include/, library/ and bin/ directories depending on whether find_(file|path|library|program) was called. Have a look at Modules/Platform/UnixPath.cmake for the full set of default search directories.

Since CMake 2.6 it also searches in CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX of the current project and in the directory where CMake itself is installed.
This works successfully in a lot of case.

But let's say, you have some custom install directories on your system, e.g. if you are a kdepim developer you might have kdesupport and kdelibs in /opt/kde4, while you install kdepimlibs and kdepim to $HOME/kdepim/.

Or, as another example, I have kdesupport in /opt/kdesupport, kdelibs in /opt/kdelibs, kdepimlibs in /opt/kdepimlibs, qt-copy in /op