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As we all know now Qt can run on Symbian Phones but there is one problem all SDK’s and Tool chain of this officially supports windows.

So how about people like us(who’s default OS is Linux) cant we develop for Symbian using Qt?

In answer to this question I found many articles/blogpost how to install Qt for Symbian on Linux but this is the one which work for me http://lizardo.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/installing-qt-for-symbian-sdk-4-6-2-on-linux/ .

I followed this post every thing was perfect except 2 things

1) creating .sis(the Symbian executable) file.

2) creating installer.sis(the Symbian executable installer) file.

and i figured out how to do that too.

I re-witting the basic installation from http://lizardo.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/installing-qt-for-symbian-sdk-4-6-2-on-linux/ . plus my Hacks/Tricks .

Tool-Chain:

Download all required files to a single directory (e.g. “~/downloads”):

• S60_5th_Edition_SDK_v1_0_en.zip (623MB) or S60-SDK-200634-3.1-Cpp-f.1090b.zip (355MB): S60 SDK for Symbian OS (be sure to click on the “Download all-in-one S60 SDKs” button for 5th edition, or “Download S60 SDKs for C++” for 3rd edition, FP1)
• s60_open_c_cpp_plug_in_v1_6_en.zip (35MB): Open C/C++ Plug-in
• qt-symbian-opensource-4.6.2.exe (201MB): Qt for Open Source C++ development on Symbian
• gnu-csl-arm-2005Q1C-arm-none-symbianelf-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.bz2 (11MB): CodeSourcery’s ARM toolchain for Symbian
• gnupoc-package-1.15.tar.gz (6.2MB): tools and patches to run Symbian SDK on Linux
• gnupoc_1.15_installer_v2.sh: Unofficial GnuPoc installer (supports 3.1 and 5.0 SDKs)
• qt_for_symbian_4.6.2_linux_installer_v3.sh: Unofficial Qt for Symbian installer for Linux
• Nokia Smart Installer Which makes it easier to deploy your Qt application to Symbian phones.

For building the native tools from gnupoc, you will need:

• the GCC C/C++ compilers
• development files for zlib
• development files for openssl

On Ubuntu, you can install these using the following command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev libssl-dev

Installation

First, install GnuPoc + S60 SDK + the Open C/C++ plugin:

./gnupoc_1.15_installer_v2.sh \
<download-dir> \
<gnupoc-dir>\
<x.y>

Replace <download-dir> with the location of all files downloaded in previous section (e.g. “~/downloads”), <gnupoc-dir> with the destination directory for GnuPoc and the SDK files (e.g. “~/gnupoc”) and <x.y> (Note that this is not the directory) with the SDK version you want to install (e.g. “3.1″ or “5.0″). Note that both directories must have absolute paths.

If installation was successful, you should see an output like:

Installation has finished. Before using the GnuPoc SDK, run these commands on the console:

export PATH=<gnupoc-dir>/bin:$PATH
export EPOCROOT=<gnupoc-dir>/symbian-sdks/5.0/ # trailing “/” is required!

(These commands must be run again every time a new console is opened.)

Run the commands as instructed on the message. Next, install Qt for Symbian:

./qt_for_symbian_4.6.2_linux_installer_v3.sh \
<download-dir> \
<qt-s60-dir>

Replace <download-dir> with the location of all files downloaded in previous section (e.g. “~/downloads”), and <qt-s60-dir> with the destination directory for the Qt files (e.g. “~/gnupoc/qt-4.6.2″). Note that both directories must have absolute paths.

If installation was successful, you should see an output like:
Installation has finished. Before using the Qt for Symbian SDK, run this command on the console:

export PATH=<qt-s60-dir>/bin:$PATH
unset QMAKESPEC    # make sure there is no QMAKESPEC variable set

(This command must be run again every time a new console is opened.)

Before using Qt for Symbian, you should run the command as instructed on the message above.

Usage example

Install Nokia Smart Installer :

1. Unzip Nokia Smart Installer  on top of your installed Qt for Symbian folder in <qt-s60-dir>

To test the installation, I will describe how to build the “colliding mice” example.

1. cd into the example source:

cd <qt-s60-dir>/examples/graphicsview/collidingmice/

2. Now build the example and generate the SIS file

qmake
make debug-gcce
make sis
make installer_sis

Chnages/Hack/Tricks

You will notice that when  you do make installer_sis
there is some error related to “createpackage.bat” file this is batch file what we have to do is open

Makefile

search for ok_installer_sis:

and change createpackage.bat to createpackage.sh

createpackage.sh is already there just that its not getting reflected in Makefile .

and now if you do make installer_sis you will get collidingmice_installer.sis

I have also created one bash function as follow:

function qtsis {
export PATH=<gnupoc-dir>/bin:$PATH
export EPOCROOT=<gnupoc-dir>/symbian-sdks/5.0/ # trailing "/" is required!
export PATH=<qt-s60-dir>/bin:$PATH
unset QMAKESPEC    # make sure there is no QMAKESPEC variable set
}

Add this function in your .bashrc file with proper path which you get after installation.

and do source ~/.bashrc

now when ever you want to compile your qt code for Symbian 1st execute qtsis command on your terminal then other qt commands

A few notes:

• Make sure Qt is installed on the device before installing Qt applications. The easiest way to install it is to copy the “qt_installer.sis” package found under <qt-s60-dir> over bluetooth and open the received message to begin the installation.
• Only the “debug-gcce” (if you are using the GCCE toolchain AKA “CodeSourcery toolchain”) or “debug-armv5″ (if you are using RVCT) will work, because the current Qt releases only ship debug versions of the libraries

enjoy

I should have posted this long time ago, at least 2 months. Mid last year, Pallavi Damera approached us for a new usability testing of KMyMoney. After some back and forth, it was decided to test on KMyMoney 1.0.2, which was just about to be released at that time, and the budget and ledger areas would be the main focus of the tests. Budget is like the dumb son of the views, having been without maintainer for a long time. and the ledger is the main view to enter information, and therefore the most important one.

For the 4.4 release, my local ACM chapter had a small release event where I demoed all the neat new features. One question that came up was “Why are all the control panel pages so…disorganized?”

I’ve wanted to work on that since it seemed like it’d be really simple and quick to do. However for the past few weeks, I’ve been stuck working with an iRobot Create for my robotics class. [plug] My team and I have been using the libirobot library I started writing a long while ago to get our two projects done.[/plug] Since the library is completely unfinished and experimental, it took up all of my KDE hacking time. D’oh.

But after the two projects were done, I suddenly found myself with free time again. So instead of working on getting webcam support into phonon like I should’ve been doing, I fiddled around with the organization. (Here’s a WIP-quality screenshot too)

I asked a few folks who thought it was disorganized, and they seem to like the new ordering. The only problem though, is that we need a new icon for the new ‘input hardware’ category. I created a bug report, to which pinheiro replied:

ok valid bug, there is a bunch of icons in kcm that could be better a comprehensive list of those and also proposals to make them better would be fantastic.

pinheiro on bug 231270

I’m going to go through them this weekend with some other campus KDE users and a new design major friend I recently met (who has never used or seen KDE before) and look at what needs improvement.

’till then, if you’ve got a problem or suggestion for some icons, go say something in that bug.

Plasma Netbook Reference Platform

A couple days ago I downloaded a build of the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform (PNRP?), threw it on a USB key and for the first time ran it on an actual netbook. Up till now I'd been running it either on my laptop or on funky "developer devices" hooked up to a normal monitor. Putting it on one of the first-gen EEE PCs was really eye-opening. The whole form of the user interface makes so much more sense on a smaller screen, and it worked right out of the box quite nicely. There were a few issues here and there, and some new issues related to design came to light as I sat there watching P. use it (he loved it, and is now back to using that rather old netbook now because of the new interface on it). This is exactly what we hoped for when getting PNRP up and running: being able to easily see it in the proper context and get working quickly and effectively on improvements. Since my experiment with P and the old netbook, there have been two new builds and I'm about to update his USB stick to today's version.

Some have also been asking how this relates to the Kubuntu Netbook effort. Kubuntu put out a tech preview of Plasma Netbook and continues to ship a netbook version. Why didn't we go with Kubuntu, then? Well, that question is a loaded one. In particular, it implies that only by sticking exclusively with Kubuntu would Kubuntu's efforts be validated. To me, those efforts stand on their own as being great and valuable and it's still something I encourage and support personally.

The openSUSE Build Service gives us two new things, however. One is a new set of tools that makes the "test, feedback, change, test again" and "try, change, publish alternate" workflows easy beyond belief (and the tools work on all major distributions, including *buntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Debian..). Plasma Netbook wins and that means our users win, regardless of the distribution they ultimately use it on.

The other thing using OBS gives us is another distribution joining in and getting involved. Instead of Plasma Netbook being theoretically available everywhere but only available in an "out of the box" configuration specifically for netbooks with one distribution (Kubuntu), it's now available "out of the box" for netbooks on openSUSE as well. I hope that number of out-of-the-box-for-netbook distributions continues to grow, and grow faster.

Testing and growth is precisely the reasoning behind the PNRP. It gives people something to play with and improve upon, but it also gives those who would package up Plasma Netbook a gage by which to measure what a Plasma Netbook release should look like (that's why it's called a ("reference"). This will only help to improve Kubuntu Netbook and will lower the cost of entry and raise the chance of success for any other OSV (or OEM) who wants to engage with Plasma Netbook.

Summary: we're working together with as many groups as we can to float everyone's boats higher. It's not a choice between one or the other, especially not when there is a "Help everyone!" option for us to choose.

Take a moment to take the Plasma Netbook Reference Platform for a spin and discover just how easy it is go get that thing on a USB stick and booting on your netbook. The ease of a live CD, the speed (and persistence between boots) of a hard disk install. Huzzah!

We Do More Than Chase Taillights

The community press is fairly awash with stories about Linux on tablets. Why now? The iPad. This is what we're best at it, isn't it: chasing other people's taillights. Ok, that's a bit dour and we are actually really good at creating new stuff too. But when someone else comes out with something great, we steamroll off with amazing momentum to react. The word "react" is an interesting one: it's the combination of "re", which indicates repetition (it can also mean, funnily enough in this context, "backwards"), and "act". While reacting is important in not letting Free software be end-run by the good ideas of others, we also need to be proactive. The prefix "pro" can mean this: "a prefix of priority in space or time having especially a meaning of advancing or projecting forward or outward".

The good news is that we are often proactive and there is a lot of interesting work being done in Free software. The concept of "activities" are big topic right now for us in Plasma, to pick just one example, and they aren't to be seen outside of Free software. There are many such examples to pick from, but there's something about our proactive work that fails us. After all, why aren't the MacOS or Windows fanboys railing on about the need for activities on their platform? (Ok, besides the fact that they are still a work in progress on our platform; but I predict when we ship them fully formed, that still won't change the answer.)

These companies do something we don't which we ought to be doing: not only are they proactive as well as reactive in creating technologies, they tell people about what they've done.

If the press, driven by our promotional efforts (across Free software, not specifically/only KDE people), spent the same effort publicizing our proactive efforts as they do our reactive ones it would be wonderfully (or painfully, if you are competing with Free software ;) apparent how well F/OSS does on the innovation front.

Defining Ourselves By Successes

We also need to learn how to define ourselves by our successes and see our failures as interesting, expected and required by-products of the road to those successes. There are people in the community who look at our success in countries around the world and discount it all as being "not relevant" because it isn't in the country they live in, and therefore conclude Free software has failed generally. Similarly when we talk about using KDE (or other F/OSS) software in production usage, instead of defining our successes and positioning ourselves in line with them we too often discount all possible usage of that software because of failures that affect only a portion of the market. This leads to us eliminating ourselves from entire market segments that we are perfect for just because we aren't (yet? :) universally perfect.

This would be akin to Apple telling nobody to buy the iPhone just because they don't feel they, as a company, are a great fit for the enterprise or that due to the lack of multitasking the iPhone is a poor choice for a variety of use cases. Those are both statements of truth, but that communication would do a great disservice to those whom the iPhone does work just fine for by preventing them from trying it. Now, if we made the iPhone we'd make double sure people know it wasn't ready for the biggest of enterprise usage and how our lack of multitasking is a "real issue that makes us not ready for production usage". Yes, we would be able to take the iPhone and destroy its potential success in the market. This in spite of many of the people I know who are "guilty" of this behavior thinking the iPhone is a great product, a feeling they have because they have been made aware of the benefits clearly and because it is a product, faults and all, that is clearly defined by its successes.

Note that Apple does not ignore (all) failings: eventually the iPhone OS will do multitasking. Nor do they try and say that it currently does indeed do multitasking. They aren't saints (I'm not a fan of their use of legal pressure and ultra-secrecy), but we can learn from some of the things they do well. I also love their approach to the enterprise by seeing sales to enterprise customers as "collateral successes". They don't perceive themselves to be a failure because they don't do well in the enterprise, they are a success because sometimes they win even in places they do poorly. Imagine if we had that same healthy viewpoint of F/OSS? There is no excuse not to.

So not only do we have to be proactive (as well as reactive) in creation, we have to be able to define ourselves by our successes and speak openly to the people who are well served by those successes.

Speaking Openly About Our Failings

In my opinion, the best place to speak about our low points is with each other, where "each other" is defined by "the people working on those things". This is how we can identify and fix those issues. I'm not advocating actively hiding them from the public, but talking with each other about them is the best way to see improvements be made.

When we decide that our first action will be to broadcast what we see as problems via, say, our blog we are setting up a very nasty situation, especially if we're talking about someone else's work. We may not have the whole story, and spreading half-facts or even incorrect information does not help anyone.

It reminds me of a story about a guy who was spreading rumors about this other fellow called, for ease of story-telling, Bob. Bob and the rumor monger have a discussion about the rumor and it turns out it was largely a misunderstanding. The guy apologizes for the misunderstanding and expects it to be all better between them from that point forward. Bob says it's more complicated than that, and to illustrate he takes the guy out to a bridge and brings along a feather pillow with him. Atop the bridge Bob tore open the pillow and the feathers blew in every direction on the winds that swept the river valley below. Bob pointed out that while he realized ripping the pillow was not the right thing to do, the feathers were still spread out everywhere and were now beyond his ability to get them back.

When we blog, we're ripping open a feather pillow into the Internet.

Just as important, when we discuss things between team mates in the context of the appropriate mailing lists, irc channels, etc. then we give each other the opportunity to respond without pressure and in context. People, being people, respond much better with greater performance with that kind of approach. If your goal is just to piss people off, then don't do such a logic, reasonable thing. If your goal is to see things improved, then discuss it with the people involved first. Then go blog about it and document the warts, but this time with accuracy and all parties aware of what's coming.

Of course, if you get ignored or the responses returned are indicative of being in need of a wake up call (e.g. there's denial at play) then maybe press the issue by taking it to a wider audience at that point. I've personally called various people to task in the past via my blog, but before doing so I try to ensure that I've first attempted (in some cases for months!) to get the issue dealt with either privately or in the appropriate context. There are times when the unfortunate is necessary.

In KDE, this is very rarely the case.

A new course is now open for participation over at the KDE Community Forums. This time the students will use a KDE utility called Krazy Code Checker to improve the code quality of a KDE application of choice, mentored by our own administrator (and System Settings maintainer) bcooksley.

The course requires basic C++ knowledge and a KDE development platform (kdelibs) >= 4.4 (self-compiled or distribution packages). If you want to get a feel of how it’s like, you can take a look at the previous krazy course.

Interested? Head over to the forums and read the course description. If you want to participate, post a reply with the subject you want to work on. Have fun!

Klassroom – Krazy fixes 2 »

probably you know chakra project ! a distrolet based on archlinux , after about 2 mounth working on artwork of chakra (of course not non-stop) today i finished it and it is ready to use for next release of chakra project… NEDA theme is contain Wallpaper , KDM , KSplash , Plasma theme , also im working on plymouth theme for more integration of all part of chakra together.

plasma theme is new in chakra and in previous releases we used default kde plasma theme . this theme is based on Dark Air and we changed it a bit , like white font instead black font and some widgets replaced and etc…

this is a preview of chakra with NEDA theme and artwork and more screenshots will publish here (in this blog) later , today is Norooz (persian new year) and im going to vacation

Plasma Javascript Jam: 5 Days and Counting
As is noted on the timeline page, the Plasma Javascript Jam Session is just 5 days away from being open for subsmissions! From the 24th on there is a one week window (ok, plus one day ;) for your submissions to come rolling on in to javascriptjam at kde.org. I can't wait to see the results! :)

In this week the main focus has been on cleaning up Bugzilla. We formally spend Tuesday and Wednesday on triaging bugs, but even the days before and afterwards the cleanup continued. We started out on Tuesday morning with about 180 bugs and now we’re down to 10-20. Check out our bugs wiki page with links to filters, instructions on bug reporting and triaging:

http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/QtWebKitBugs

In addition we kept the Subversion server busy with a fair amount of fixes. I extracted the following highlights:

• Several fixes in the DRT testing tool, among others by Chang (36139) and Laszlo (36139). The currently skipped layout tests remain a place with low hanging fruits and are a great way to get started with contributions.
• Chang also fixed some bugs in the Qt part of the Canvas and Gradient implementations (36059, 36060).
• Kim and Noam fixed bugs in the accelerated compositing code path (36034, 36158, 36219).
• Antti landed the tiled backing store, which allows changing the rendering of QGraphicsWebView to cache the contents of the rendered page in tiles that are updated dynamically (35146, 36121, 36102).
• Yael has started implementing the HTML 5 progress element, mapped to appearance of QProgressBar through QStyle (35937, 36113).
• Robert fixed a crash inQWebView::setPage (36137).
• Jakub fixed a crash in the Qt Multimedia media element backend (36142).
• Kenneth fixed a bug with the media type not being restored when printing (35308).
• Tor Arne fixed a bug with text not being clipped correctly (29477).
• Diego added a viewport update debug feature to QtLaunchner (36175).
• Luiz is working on support for popups with multiple selections (36177).
• Antonio has been fixing bugs in the spatial navigation (36020).

There is no weekly build yet, but it’ll show up in the usual location in the coming days.

L’Institut de la Francophonie numérique is sponsoring travel and lodging to the Libre Graphics Meeting in Bruxelles on 27-30 May, for people from one of the country of francophonie, that are not France:

Albanie, Arménie, Bénin, Bulgarie, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodge, Cameroun, Cap Vert, Comores, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypte, Gabon, Ghana, Guinée, Guinée Bissau, Guinée équatoriale, Laos, Liban, Madagascar, Mali, Maroc, Maurice, Moldavie, Niger, RD Congo, République centrafricaine, Roumanie, Rwanda, Sénégal, Tchad, Togo, Tunisie, Vietnam

So if you are an artist using free software, a developer implicated in a graphic open source project, and want to make a presentation (in either French or English) at the Libre Graphics Meeting, or if you know anyone from those countries, and that would fit the requirements, please read this email or give this email from the Create mailing list. This is a great opportunity to travel to Bruxelles, and meet other people of the Free Graphics World:

Some time ago, I took over an orphan KMyMoney package in SVN. I fixed so that it works, but I wasn't so happy with it. Since it downloads a straight snapshot from SVN, it doesn't have docs or translations.

I have disabled the tab anymation in my install(s). This was just frustration - the tab has already changed, it's displayed on screen, but it's "slowly" fades in so I can see it.

It become too much distracting and my life is better since. Has anyone else been feeling the same? Do we have a lot of complains on this issue? If we do, this might be a good idea disabling this feature by default.

I had a realization yesterday. I was on my way home, after class, and it suddenly hit me: it’s 5:30pm. And the sun is still shining.
Winter is over. :)

So now it’s spring, and soon it will be summer, and you know what that means – summer of code! :)
Actually this blog post comes a bit late – If you’re a developer, you should have already put your project ideas up on the wiki, and if you’re a student you should already be talking to developers and reading those wiki pages to find a project that interests you. Still, it’s not too late to start – today google announced the list of accepted organizations. This didn’t really affect KDE – it’s a pretty safe bet that google will accept us – but for students who aren’t sure where to start, there’s now a nice list. :) Of course, I still say KDE’s the best community to work with ;)

So if you’re a student, and you haven’t figured out what you’re doing this summer, get moving! :) GSoC is one of the best possible ways to spend a summer. :)

oh, and lydia has put together a cool flowchart to show all the important deadlines. :)

This is a junior job for all of you that want to get started in KDE development and don't know what to do, kdesdk/poxml is a set of tools used to convert KDE xml-based documentation to po (translator friendly format) and back. They are still using Qt3Support, that is not bad per se, but is not good either.

Doing the port should be straightforward if you have some Qt experience and read the docs on porting form Qt3 to Qt4.

Of course i'll be there to help and review the final diff, so what are you waiting for?

Being an avid biker, I often find myself assembling nice tours for upload on my N810. Usually that involves designing a round trip with Google Maps, downloading its .kml file, converting this to .gpx with the help of gpsbabel, copying the converted file to the N810 using scp and finally opening it in Maemo Mapper. Although working reliably, this process is tedious and cumbersome: The route is calculated on TeleAtlas data by Google and displayed on OpenStreetMap tiles in Maemo Mapper.

Ideally I want to use Marble instead; Prepare a route on my desktop PC, export it to my N900 (which replaces the by now broken N810) and have Marble on the N900 guide me on the tour. Admittedly it may be a long road to have that working smoothly, but the journey is the reward

Moving on in this direction, I committed some code earlier this evening that adds reverse geocoding support to Marble’s new Online Routing feature (SVN trunk only). Those on the bleeding edge can now search for an arbitrary number of placemarks and calculate a route between them. Kudos to the openrouteservice.org team whose service we can use, the openstreetmap nominatim author for the great search and reverse geocode service and of course all the OSM mappers collecting the data.

Beware the fine print, though: Routing is limited to Europe currently and some obvious features in Marble are yet missing — showing a route summary, print support, import/export of routes to kml/gpx. Last not least the code is young and not tested by too many people yet (please change that). I am happy to receive feedback and bug reports.

Other news say that KDE was accepted as an organization in Google’s Summer of Code. By happy coincidence the KDE ideas pages lists a project Marble To Go with me as the mentor. If you think you are eligible for doing a Summer of Code project, maybe that one is for you. Give it a thought!

In the good tradition of finishing with some demo material, here is a short screencast to satisfy the “no pic, no care” crowd Best watched fullscreen.

Routing in Marble using openrouteservice.org from Dennis Nienhüser on Vimeo.

If neither embedding the video nor the Vimeo page does work for you, use this page instead, please.

Hello KDE Comunity, my name is Vitor. I’m almost (if I have some luck xP) finishing the CS course of the University of São Paulo – Brazil.At the university I’m a member of the Sanca Livre, a group dedicated to the spreading of  Free Software, which currently act by the promotion of training courses, talks and travels to events related to Free Software.

On the academic background, I got some experience on robotics, genetic algorithms and FPGA’s, besides the plain CS course. At the professional side, I work on automotive realtime systems (lots of assembly and low level stuff).

My first contact with Linux and and open source in general was quite some years ago, using the Conectiva (a brazilian distribution, now known by the name Mandriva). Since then, I’ve been using it in servers, but it was just in the last few years that I really began using it as my main desktop system, and since then I’m more and more involved with Free Software as a developer.

In the past, my contributions were limited to small patches and bug reports. I always spent a lot of time reading technical articles about many projects, notably from KDE 4 serie, but had never seriosly developed for any of them. So I began to talk to Tomaz, in order to bring him to my university as a teacher for the Qt training course he blogged about some time ago. It was talking to him that I decided to publish a personal project (it’s hosted in the KDE playground -> utils -> kpws), and develop it as an open project, marking my first serious work on the Free Software community. Besides this project, I’m planning to find something to work on related to Plasma and KDE Games.

KDE Personal WebServer, or kpws, is being written to provide a easy way to transfer data from KDE to any device connected to the same network, without relying on any OS specific software/protocol. This is achieved by means of the HTTP protocol, which is natively supported by anything having network connectivity.

Screenshot1

The idea is to handle as many mime types as possible, so that the user can drop anything (files, folders, plasmoids, text, and so on) there, and the software will create a page to render the relevant content to the client, or in case of files, simply send it as a simple download, making it instantly accessible on any device with a browser.

At the state, there’s no drag and drop support, it can only share files/folders, and the ui is… well, a bit ugly. The code was done to support many types of objects, so it shouldn’t be so hard to make it share other things.  There’s however, many work to be done on the integration with KDE, UI beautification and a lot of polishing on the core classes, so I’m gonna write another post showing the technical side of the project.

I’m looking forward to work with you, guys, and would like to thanks Tomaz by all the support, motivation and of course, the Qt course this weekend.

I read an interesting blog this morning Freedom vs. The Cloud Log where Glyn Moody interviewed Eben Moglen. Eben Moglen was General Council of the FSF for 13 years and helped draft various versions of the GPL. He talks about the implications for software freedom caused by the rise of services in the 'cloud' where your data is owned by the service provider, and the fact that they don't usually release the code of their applications that run on the servers.

With the recent ownCloud initiative, the KDE community is doing something about the problem, by allowing you to have your own data stored in a variety of types of places of your choice, so that it is independent of a particular machine. It gives you a option of putting it on a host providers machine, or on you own network - somewhere where you personally are in control of it.

I had been thinking of getting some sort of home server, that was always connected to the internet, to use as a music server. The Apple Mac Mini running either Mac OS X or Kubuntu (like I run on my small laptop) seemed to be the best bet. Most servers are still really big and ugly with noisy fans, and not really suitable for running in your living room. The Mac Mini is one of the few attractive and quiet options, but it is quite expensive.

When Eben Moglen talked about how we could construct a distributed infrastructure peer to peer style, instead of client/server as used by Facebook and the like, he mentioned a small ARM based server called the 'SheevaPlug'. That got me thinking, and I went off googling for everything I could find about this tiny server the size of a wall wort power supply. It turned out that there is a new model called a GuruPlug which has additional features like WiFi, eSATA interface for cheap fast hard disks, and an SD slot. The more I thought about it, the more fun the idea sounded. There are so many things you can do with one of these little servers.

So I just went ahead and ordered one. The basic server was 91.47 euros, a JTag board for debugging was another 26.82 euros, and shipping by FedEx was a bit pricey at 49.76 euros. The total cost was 168.05 euros, which is actually quite a lot relative to how much a cheap netbook costs these days. I'm sure in a years time you will be able to walk into a computer shop and get them for more like 50 euros or so. I think these things will be subject to Metcalfe's Law where their usefulness will rise according to the square of the numbers of users. If Eben Moglen is right we should be able to undermine the efforts of authoritarian governments, such as China, the UK, Australia, France and so on, by going completely peer to peer with strong encryption and cut off the government snoopers from invading our privacy and stealing our civil liberties. So for reasons like that, I think my 170 euros, plus a bit of my time will be a good investment.

This summer the KDE project will once again participate in Google Summer of Code! Summer of Code will allow KDE to grow and bring in new developers to the community.

KDE will begin accepting student applications on March 29th, and interested students should check out the KDE Community wiki for a list of potential ideas. Of course, individual ideas not on that page are encouraged as well, so submitting a proposal based on a new KDE application or feature is great as well.

For a list of success stories from the 2009 edition of the program (including pretty screenshots!), see our GSoC 2009 wrap-up.

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KDE has once again been accepted as an org for GSoC. Yay! This means we’ll once again be welcoming a bunch of great students into our team to make KDE software rock this summer.

So what to do now?
If you’re a student who wants to take part in GSoC this year: Go and check out the ideas page and pick one you like or come up with your own idea. Then get in touch with the team working on the program you want to contribute to over the summer. Work with them to write a kick-ass proposal and then hopefully make it reality this summer. To keep up with all things GSoC you can also subscribe to the kde-soc@kde.org mailing list.

If you’re a potential mentor: Go and check out the flow chart below. It has everything you should need to know about how we’re doing GSoC this year. Then go and subscribe to the kde-soc-mentor@kde.org list. Further announcements for mentors will be made there.

If you have any questions please join us in our IRC channel #kde-soc on freenode or send an email to the kde-soc mailing list.

Recently , about 2 mounths ago I designed 3 splash screen for amarok 2.3 , but because I didn’t start my blog that time I couldn’t publish my splashes so i published them only on amarok web site (here) .after selecting this splash for amarok 2.3 , finally tonight i found time and deside publish my splashes officialy here , on my blog for public showing and use for customing your amarok splash screen… I hope to select these for Amarok 2.3.x

Download All Free Layers Of Splashes…

P.S: these days im working on Chakra Artwork for new release (Alpha 5) and also being ready for Persian New Year that called Norooz (in 20 March)….

Also I have many idea for KDE 4.5 Artwork , I hope to contribute with KDE Artwork team and nuno pinheiro

A bit overdue, the first release of Braindump is available. It has been a while since I announced the project of making a tool that gather allow to dump your thoughts into an electronic form. For those who have forget (which is probably most of you), Braindump is a collection of whiteboards on which you can put your notes, whether text notes, or drawing. It is entirely based on KOffice technologies. Which made Braindump quick and easy to develop, and it makes it very small, around 8000 lines of code.

I have been delaying that release because I wanted to make a video of Braindump in action, and have been too lazy to make one until now. On that video I first create new whiteboards, then I demonstrate how to add shapes, manipulate them, and finally the different layout:

I you look at Braindump development history, you will notice that over the past six months the development has been really slow, there are a few reasons to that, the first one is that most of the development is done by other people than me in the KOffice repository, the second one is that I feel that Braindump is already doing exactly what I want, with a few glitches, but as a geek I tend to live happily with those…

That said there is a couple of features I want:

• Search (and replace)
• Tagging, but then someone else (yeah again) is doing the work for me in KOffice
• Auto-growing text shape
• A solution to this problem: (almost) each time I create a new whiteboard, the first thing I do is to add a text shape. So I wonder about either having always a permanent text shape in the background, or always add a text shape when creating a white board.

I am also starting to be curious about ownCloud, since personally I find it to be the right direction of cloud computing, so I would probably be interested in the possibility of storing whiteboards on an ownCloud server. Lets see how it evolves.

If you have other ideas, do not hesitate to mention them, who knows, if I find them interesting, I might go on and implement them !

Download Braindump 0.8.0, this release will work only with KOffice 2.1.x, from now on I will work on porting Braindump to the upcoming KOffice 2.2.