At the last minute I'm getting away from the snow and ice to visit Camp KDE in San Diego this weekend. I'll be there waving the openSUSE flag, giving a talk about using the Build Service to package and distribute your KDE applications for many Linux distributions, generally enthusing people about openSUSE and thinking about ways for KDE to be better as distributed. So if you see a guy with an SUSE t-shirt on staggering under a huge pile of DVDs, say hi! I hear San Diego has a very good zoo, perhaps they'll lend me a chameleon for even better recognisability...

If you've been paying attention at the back there, you'll know that openSUSE started using a new community-driven online update administration process for 11.2. As well as Novell employees, community people are taking care of the workflow of examining and approving online updates to buggy packages. Now I have a favour to ask of you - the online updates that are ready to go out need testing to make sure they don't inflict gross mischief on users' systems.

KNetworkManager has an online update sitting in this queue awaiting testing. As anyone who has read http://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=553908 knows, I forgot to initialise 2 bools added to KNetworkManager just before 11.2 shipped, causing the settings that control whether DNS and routing settings from DHCP to be applied to be set randomly, so the update team wants someone more reliable's opinion on whether my fix for that is any good.

If you want to test it out and take part, add the 11.2 update test repo (or manually browse this URL and install all the NetworkManager-kde4 packages yourself) - http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2-test . NB that due to a process bug the release number is the same so you will have to --force the install. If it works for you, please comment on bnc#553908 to that effect.

Since today is the big day when KDE trunk starts to depend on Qt 4.6, Raymond Wooninck (tittiatcoke), community packaging hero, has worked to provide packages of the unreleased Qt 4.6 in the openSUSE Build Service.

If you want to develop KDE trunk without the hassle of compiling Qt, you can use these packages (openSUSE 11.1). We'll be updating them every week to stay current as Qt 4.6 nears release. Please keep in mind that we're not responsible if you install them and your system KDE packages and anything else that depends on Qt stops working (although we will help you put things right, and the trolls will probably want to know about binary-incompatibility problmems) and when 4.6 is released, it will move into the KDE:Qt repo.

I'm just back in from the first day the openSUSE conference. The day started badly when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming that OpenOffice ate my presentation (again), but it was still there when I resumed my laptop and so I biked the 5km into the Berufsförderungswerk Nuernberg, the technical college where the conference is a guest. A good number of people were in for Lenz Grimmer's keynote on virtual development teamwork, which was a relief, then I sat in for a bit of the openSUSE Weekly News talk by Sascha Manns. Running a news magazine is an important and demanding part of a project's internal and external communications and I'm grateful that Sascha and team put in the effort, and hope they get more contributors. Then I earwigged at the back of the GNOME team meeting, while Andy Wafaa demoed me the SUSE Goblin image. It's impressively polished and will give the Plasma netbook interface a tough act to follow.

Over lunch I mingled with openSUSE users and developers old and new, and a good number of KDE people including Frank, Alexandra, Danimo and Frederik who had made the journey to Nuernberg. We had a cross-desktop meeting afterwards to figure out how to improve the general openSUSE desktop experience. Following the recent decision to set a desktop choice in openSUSE, I feared there might be some tension, but it was all very amicable and constructive. I had to leave early to give my talk, 'The Future of openSUSE KDE', moved forward from the weekend. OpenOffice behaved, nothing crashed, and I gave my manifesto for producing the best desktop distribution with exemplary cooperation with upstream projects. And interspersed it with previews from openSUSE 11.2, so nobody fell asleep. KNetworkManager4 drew the most questions, and even managed to detect Danimo's phone on hotplug, something I'd never tested.

Finally we had a BoF session led by Cornelius to plan a KDE Showcase image for use at shows and by reviewers, which has a lot of potential, if also to be a lot of work.

Tonight we're unwinding at Joe's Bar, a refactoring of the Novell/SUSE office as a den of iniquity, hosted by our Community Manager, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier. Don't speak too loudly to me in the morning...

The main openSUSE users' mailing list are a demanding bunch who know what they want. Over the last few months the KDE group have been asking them what they still miss from KDE 3 in KDE 4, and one of those things has been the ability to add a submenu of the main app launcher, whether Kickoff or traditional, to the panel as a button in its own right.

I thought Chani's recent blog about a generic app menu dataengine for KDE 4 could be useful in reimplementing this feature, so I sat down for a quick Friday afternoon hack. However, after a while I realised that I could do better than just hacking up another menu applet implementation. I realised that we already have all the code needed for building the menu tree, drawing the menu, handling the clicks, and configuring the menu in the existing launcher menus ('start buttons'). Looking at the code, it just came down to changing the point in the menu used for the menu's root. So I added a way to enable the context menu for submenus, identify the path of the submenu, then tell the panel or the desktop to add a new 'simplelauncher' applet using the original submenu as the menu root. The changes were only a few lines of code to the existing applets so we have a nice minimal yet fully-featured solution.

That didn't take too long so I even had time to make a movie:

OGG Theora version

Flash version

KDE needs as an entire project to support a Web browser that everyone can use in 2009. That's the simple message behind this blog entry and my talk at LinuxTag on Saturday.

If you need any more motivation to go out there and make that happen, read on.

On Sunday the work continued at a furious pace. Dario carried on moving the connection list generating code out of the applet and into the KDED module. This makes the applet much simpler and easier for Plasma specialists to improve. We considered using a Plasma DataEngine or Service, but decided not to for now because it adds another layer of indirection. For NetworkManager at least, if the settings service process leaves the system bus (due to a deliberate or accidental exit) you fall offline. The settings service and Plasma are both complex programs, so combining them increases the chances that a bug in one can crash the other. So we put it in a different process, forcing one layer of indirection already.

Meanwhile Frederik Gladhorn and I were refactoring the storage layer for Connection settings so that it is independent of NetworkManager. One of the good things about NetworkManager's settings is that they are so comprehensive the classes I developed to configure them cover all of wicd's settings too. Frederik namespaced the general classes while I moved the DBUS code that is specific to NetworkManager 0.7 out of the libs/ directory. Since it is generated automatically from some .kcfg files by a modified kconfig_compiler and then extra stuff is patched into those files, this was quite a lot of work.

Our students from the University of Bergen, Anders, Peder and Sveinung, were busy working on the mobile broadband improvements for their degree group project. This includes a set of DBUS bindings for the ModemManager auxiliary interface of NetworkManager, which were used to successfully send an SMS and will support useful functions like retrieving cellular signal strength, a set of Qt widgets around libmbca, taking the pain out of configuring cellular data connections, and a test harness. We hope they will continue with KDE development after they graduate.

The status of Network Management as of Sunday 7 June then is that it doesn't even compile. I'm working on remedying that as soon as possible. If you do want to use Network Management from SVN, take a safe revision like r978079 until you hear otherwise.

We'd like to thank the Trolls for being great hosts and the KDE eV for sponsoring this sprint.

I felt like the grumpy grandpa of the NM sprint when the others hammered on my door at 9.30am after I'd rolled over for just another 10 minutes two hours earlier. The grey cells do still work once you hit your thirties but they need more care and feeding if I want to be able to speak intelligibly the next morning - not going to rock bars until 3am!

We've continued planning this morning. The big goals for this meeting was to 'get Network Management finished' and 'make it usable on non-NetworkManager systems' but our discussions last night showed us that the current complexity of the applet prevents both goals - it takes me several days of getting up to speed with the code before I dare to try to code it and it's deterring Frederik from making significant changes. So we identified all the pieces and started juggling them last night over pizza until they landed in a way that makes sense.

The big picture is that most of the complexity will move from the Plasma applet into the KDED module. This module will abstract different network management systems by being replaceable. The module provides a simple list of the things to show in the applet's popup. Configuration UI and stored settings are to be shared - we think that the current (NM-derived) settings schema is comprehensive enough.

There's a temptation to write an über-system that models everything and allows any number of applet implementations but we're resisting that as it would never be finished. I'm a little bit disappointed that we won't be adding a lot of polish and nice to have features but a sprint is the ideal time to swing a large hammer at hard architectural issues that otherwise would stunt Network Management's growth.

I pried my eyes open at 0430 and stumbled to the airport. This all started about a month ago when we had the idea of having a developer sprint to get Network Management into shape in time for KDE 4.3's release. Now I'm sitting in a meeting room in Oslo listening to the progress report of 3 Norwegian students Peder, Sveinung and Anders who are investigating ways to make setting up mobile broadband connections easier. Thanks to the KDE eV's sponsorship, six of us are meeting this weekend. TODOs include cleaning up UI glitches, fixing some exotic VPN types and auth types and deciding how to abstract different backends like wicd and ConnMan.

If you want to help out or just rubberneck, we're in #solid.

Martin Schlander already said the most important things but repetition never hurt a good message:

• KDE 4.3 is coming to KDE:KDE4:Factory:Desktop<. If you do nothing and use this repo you will get KDE 4.3beta1 installed soon!
• The stable KDE 4.2 packages will continue to be available in the new KDE:42 repo.
• The Extra-Apps repo is gone, its packages merged into Desktop, Community or Playground according to their level of support and release readiness.
• App packages which have both KDE 3 and KDE 4 versions are being renamed to show that KDE 4 is the default. Eg for digikam, we have kde3-digikam and digikam-kde4. This will cause a package upgrade to the new stable version. If you want to keep the KDE 3 version, install the kde3- package instead of the new KDE 4 based package.
• The Geeko is a quiet and stealthy animal. It doesn't make a lot of noise. But it produces solid, well engineered Linux distros year after year. Stephan 'Unstoppable Force Beineri' Binner has produced a respin installation CD of openSUSE 11.1 containing the latest and greatest KDE 4.2.2, and all the online updates since 11.1 came out in December. Is the longer openSUSE release cycle making you twitchy for a hit of something new? Do you want a rock solid openSUSE with the best KDE has to offer and none of this repo-fiddling nonsense? Get the respin from: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Medias/images/iso/.