For the first time, FrOSCon will take place this year in St. Augustin near Bonn, the former capital of Germany. Due to its location, it is also in reasonably short distance for most KDE contributors from the BeNeLux countries.

The conference is gonna be very similar to FOSDEM -- many open source projects have applied for an own room, as has KDE. Since the event will take at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, where I happen to study, I will organize the devroom.

Thus: If you would like to attend, please add yourself to the FrOSCon 06 Wiki page. We are also still looking for KDE presentations and tutorials, KDE 3 related ones just as well as talks on new technology.

For those of you who like a cheap sleeping opportunity, there is have a gym available 500m from the conference site. For those who prefer a nice bed, we'll find you a nice location with reasonable prices. If you have any questions, just contact me on irc or via mail.

See you at FrOSCon!

People have been wondering what I have been up to all the time. Now let me tell you: For one uni and a project consume most of my time at the moment. It should get better as the time of exams has passed by (which is on the beginning of april). But even then expect me to have only limited time available until may.

Now for what I've been up to on KDE things: I've been organizing the KDE presence at Chemnitzer Linux-Tage this year. We showed off Kubuntu Dapper Drake and gave away Breezy CDs. Beineri showed XGl on his SUSE 10.1 desktop (this works just fine with dapper, btw). People were amazed.The GNOME guys showed the official Novell videos but the crowd usually surrounded the joint KDE/Kubuntu/Klik booth. There's nothing like a live demo.

I also gave a presentation on KDE and the future of the Linux desktop (slides) which was apperantly well received by about 200 people sitting in the audience and a couple of people listening to the live stream (the audio-stream will hopefully be available for download soon).

Additionally, I had the chance of giving a three hour workshop on Qt 4 (slides) with 23 participants. Interestingly, all attendants finished the tasks on schedule, which is pretty good given that this was my first Qt workshop and I had a fairly limited idea of my audiences C++ skills. Thanks to tackat for his workshop slides and for the review of my slides.

... is love, peace and this little bugger. The iAudio X5 has all I really want: 20 or 30 GB of harddisc, a color display, and plays mp3, wma, ogg vorbis and even flac (and more, e.g. mpeg4 video, but I'm not sure I really can make use of this feature, given the tiny display). It has a high quality microphone build-in and can record to mp3. So that'd be a good alternative to an iPod, which I don't want since it's not capable of playing oggs. It provides USB host support and thus allows for plugging in cameras in order to serve as intermediate storage for camera data. The X5 costs 280 Euro cheapest for the 20 GB version or 330 Euro cheapest for the 30 GB version.

PS: I should add that the X5 has an FM module included and it can record from FM to mp3.

Due to obligations at Uni, I was unable to attend all days of Linux World Expo and Conference in Frankfurt this year. However I spent most parts of Tuesday and all of Thursday at the the KDE booth.

Due to the more business-focused nature of the fair, most of visitors were consultants, administrators and developers. Many people asked about our position on KDE for use in the public sector and companies, our plans for the future and technical questions.

When Kurt demoed Klik on SUSE 10.0 or even spontaniously created packages, quite some jaws dropped on the floor. Other presentations included KDE on Kubuntu as well as a designated demo point that showed KDE in the office environment with Kontact and KOffice.

Bernhard Reiter received the Linux New Media Award for the "Best Groupware Solution" on behalf of the Kolab team and Martin Konold and me conducted a successfull Kolab tutorial.

The Trolls showed Qtopia and Qt 4.1 at their booth. I had the pleasure to finally meet Scott Collins and some of the other Trolls I hadn't met before. Scott is a weirdo, but he's really funny.

On Thurday evening after packing, the Trolls joined us for dinner in an italian restaurant in Frankfurt close to the fairgrounds. At around 11:00 I took the train home to Bonn. If you ever get the chance to ride on a new ICE 3 train going 300 km/h at night next to an autobahn, seize it! The view from the panorama window is amazing. I need a decent camera...

Ok, finally back at home. *Pheeew*.

Over the last days I played with the Nullsoft scriptable installer system (NSIS) which allows for creating comfortable installation routines based on a description file. It's pretty scriptable and gives nice results. Together with Ralf Habakers recent efforts to port KDE to Win32 with MinGW, the GCC for Windows port, it looks like installing KDE 4 applications with Scons/bksys could be both pretty flexible for us and simple for the user (unlike developing on windows for developers without MSVC, but I will comment on that in a later article).

It seems like we could create a fairly generic script that would fit most applications that we can semi-automatically create RPMs for today. At least for SUSE, that's pretty painless.

All a user would generally need is installing the KDE base package (compare to the ".NET framework" that many apps need on windows today). This would only be required once for any KDE-based application and the installer could even fetch the package automatically.

Even though packaging windows applications with NSIS looks odd to someone only trained to create tarballs and RPMs, it is a pretty flexible piece of software.

This friday I went to the meeting of SUSE beta testers to the SUSE headquarters in Nuremberg. The travel went pretty smooth and so I soon checked in and arrived in a meeting room with all the other testers. We got a nice introduction to the openSUSE project, covering the past, the status quo as well as future plans. Greg from Novell as well as Adrian, Sonja and Andreas from SUSE gave me a good feeling about the project's future.

I bet there will be updates and details about our discussions in blogs and on opensuse.org, soon. At this point, there are just ideas that will be tested for feasibility and then discussed on opensuse.org, such as ideas about a future open build server.

In the evening after a lot of fruitful discussions, we joined SUSE people on their release party. It was really nice. Lots of food and free drinks. I bet only very few people stayed sober and even met some people that I didn't know yet, such as Duncan. The brave SUSE trainees ran the bar. Thanks guys!

Around midnight, a cuban guy with a bongo drum stepped by and someone dragged him into the party location. Soon, our very own Duncan took over the instrument. He's is a natural talent playing on the bongo drum. His performance was amazing even though he claimed he only played it once before. Being from latin America works wonders when it comes to rythm

As a nice surprise, Jan from openusability.org and his gf Jutta stepped by. It was easy for them since they were staying in Erlangen, which is basically around the corner, even if Coolo doesn't seem share this opinion .

At around 2am in the morning, a couple of developers and beta testers decided to switch locations. We ended up in the "downtown"-bar, a really small location that is in fact located in downtown Nuremberg. We enjoyed the great atmosphere until we noticed we ended up at a "bad taste party". It was nevertheless really cool (What does that tell about us?...). The music was a rather wild but interesting mix of all styles. The bartender girl was pretty hot though and tried her best to prove that. After a lot of partying and a couple of drinks they kicked us out at around 5am since they wanted to close.

I ended up in bed at around 6am, and for that reason I was unable to attend the sightseeing tour organized by the SUSE folks. It's a real pity, but Tackat got me an express version when we went for the train station this evening. Today, we seized the rest of the day to hack on Globepedia. I finished the windows port and the Installer. Now I am sitting in the ICE back to Bonn, trying to create SUSE rpms. When you read this, that probably means I arrived at home.

One thing is for sure: SUSE guys don't only know how to make a cool distribution, they also know how to party!

So Tom's story hit Slashdot. A lot of responses, from simply requests to almost flame-like comments asked KDE4 to simply be fast. I feel urged to comment on that:

• Qt4 gives us a major speedup in first place. The KDE3 codebase that we ported to Qt4 is already faster than "Kanzler" (this seems to be a general positive thing about Qt4, see also here).
• As Aaron has indicated quite a few times during aKademy, Plasma will not only bring a nicer look, but also unify applications that have previously been separated, resulting in a faster-loading, tighter integrated Desktop Environment.
• KDE 4 will have eye candy, but it will still work nice and fluent on computers without modern gfx cards. Also, every decent 2D-gfx card will soon be accelerated by Exa, resulting in improved graphics performance.
• The granularity of libs will be a lot finer, resulting in applications that only load whatever they need. But with preloading and all the other fancy magic in modern memory management, memory whiners that base their analysis on top & co. should be careful about their results anyway.
• And finally: There is no hidden agenda or ally with graphics card vendors whatsoever, so we have no interest to make KDE slow, the contrary is, of course, the case. After all, we are also using KDE, and nobody of us likes to wait, either.

Conclusion: Yes, KDE 4 will also be about speed, it will hopefully be even speedier than KDE 3, but that's something that future development will show.

amarok podcasting rocks, but it's not only big in .nl, Fab! Deutschlandfunk (Cologne) and Deutschlandradio Kultur (Berlin) are two german nationwide broadcasters that deliver lots of informational content. Both recently introduced podcasting for some of their shows. On their page about podcasts, they introduce podcast reception with iTunes AND amarok. Go for it!

Ok, so we just had a meeting where discussed the redesign of kdelibs and kdebase. Although we have great technology in there, with Qt4 we have a good opportunity and reason to clean up the foundation of our very own DE.

Basic outlines:

• In the new structure, things are less tied into each other, leading to an cleaner overall design
• Through the libs-components, KDE might attract more developers and ISVs that just want to use some classes. The hope is that they will eventually use even more of them, they are free to chose. In turn, we benefit from new users of our classes
• The new components will at least be split in core and UI each, so it will be possible to exploit the possiblities that QCoreApplication offers to people seeking out for console-only development with smaller footprint.
• KApplication as it exists in its current form will die. We are currently discussing a couple of alternatives to make sure all KDE stuff is properly initialized without increasing inconvenience for programmers.
• The current classes will be moved to a KDE3Support library to ease porting
• additionally, kdelibs trunk might be tagged/branched so app developers can continue with raw porting to Qt4

The new design graph outlines the new things pretty well.

Legend:

• Green: Qt
• Blue: Platform independent
• Red: Platform dependent

Now go, talk about it and spread the word, KDE4 is gonna have an even more rocking architecture!

The life of the traveling KDE developer is not an easy one. We put our lives on hold while we travel far from home to meet with other ardent souls to bring you Free Software par excellance. It's a hard life indeed, as you can see in the picture below. We are sitting in a square in the old town of Malaga with food, beer and the backdrop of a cathedral. Somehow we manage.

PS: Ivor said that it might be worth to add that we are eight people from eight different
countries, and our waitress is actually polish, owns a Dell Inspirion, and knows about Linux