Today I took the plunge and merged the Solid network management infrastructure into KDE SVN trunk, where it will soon be released as part of KDE 4.1. Here's a summary of what it includes. Since what follows is Long, Save Planet[KDE|OpenSUSE] and read more for details.

I'm at II Guademy 2008, the Spanish conference combining aspects of GUADEC and Akademy this weekend. I arrived yesterday, had lunch with my Novell colleagues Rodrigo Moya and Vincent Untz, then got straight into our presentations, which are a combined call for more cooperation and communication between the two Free desktop environments communities, leading to more effective sharing of data and infrastructure.

I wasn't chased out of the place or pelted with fruit, but I think it will be a long road. In the long term it should bring benefits for both desktops in the face of expanding ambitions and growing maintenance requirements. At breakfast Aleix Pol, Richard Hughes and I had an interesting discussion over breakfast, echoing a thread on the XDG list, about the possibility of standardising KDE's KNotify and reworking GNOME's libnotify to use it, so there is some real interest in the idea outside the Novell desktop group.

I've been pimping the openSUSE build service to anyone who'll listen. It's a bit surprising, when you jump out of the openSUSE pond, how few people have heard of all the features like packaging for distributions besides openSUSE. More effort needed there...

Today I'm going to present Akonadi, the PIM data server. Last week we moved it out of KDE main modules and into kdesupport, divesting it of the last bits of KDE dependencies, so I'm able to sincerely present it as a desktop-independent way to store and access your PIM data, emails, contacts, calendars and everything else. So I better stop blogging and make sure it is ready to demo...

One last thing. Dinner last night was 'interesting'. I can't get into specifics, but a visit to the Los Bestias restaurant should be mandatory for inter-desktop geek conferences. They really shake things up.

I've just published the Building KDE on openSUSE guide over at the openSUSE wiki. It makes it insanely easy to build latest KDE 4.1 in a minimal number of steps, but the goal is not just to make it easy, but to give people the tools and the skills to go from just building KDE to developing it. If you're the type of person who always stays up to date with the latest alphas/betas, or are a Power Bug Reporter who wants to report bugs with full debug output and maybe try applying a patch from a developer or twiddle a few bits yourself, this is a way to get the freshest KDE 4 Plasma or Amarok around.

The guide uses Qt 4.4 and the kdesupport packages from the openSUSE build service so you don't have to build them yourself. The openSUSE KDE Team are so obsessive about keeping those packages up to date that the only way to get them fresher is to smuggle yourself into Trolltech (I hear the big N810 disguise works). So there's no need, if you want to work with the main KDE modules or extragear, to build those yourself. For the record, with a 4 year old HP zt3000 - Centrino 1.5Ghz, 512Mb RAM - laptop, I was able to build a minimal KDE 4 desktop in 4.5 hours.

And if you run into any problems or have feedback, talk on the Discussion page attached to the Guide or look for 'wstephenson' in #opensuse-kde on Freenode.

Google have extended the Summer of Code 2008 student application deadline until April 7 so if you were busy last week or concerned your application wasn't good enough, now's your chance to get it in.

And I took the opportunity this morning to add an idea that we could really use on the Free desktop - a way to sync wallet secrets between different computers, and maybe between KDE and other secure stores like GNOME keyring and the Mozilla password manager. If you think you're hard enough, please apply. It's a non-GUI job, and involves getting your hands dirty with various APIs and solving some tricky problems - just the kind of skills needed to make yourself useful as a professional Linux hacker.

Student? Love KDE and/or openSUSE? Want to get 0x1194 bucks for improving them? Then check out the openSUSE Google Summer of Code ideas page or suggest your own project. There are a number of projects listed already which would improve KDE on openSUSE and upstream. As well as getting paid, it's an opportunity to work on a real world project, and learn from the experience of some leading KDE and openSUSE developers.

But don't delay, the deadline is on Monday March 31 midnight UTC.

Some people already think we do a damn fine job packaging KDE at openSUSE. But we're just a few guys and we'd do it even better with your help. Tonight at 1900UTC we're having our latest openSUSE-KDE IRC meeting in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode and we'd love to see you there. This is addressed to anyone who uses KDE on openSUSE and values the way KDE works there, whether you just booted a KDE 4 Live CD or if you can remember KDE 1.1 on SuSE 6.4 and have your name on half of kdelibs. In return we value your attention, so we can tell you what's coming up, your feedback, so we do it right, and your time - if you can help us plan features or organise squashing our bugs or tell us about the things we overlook because we are used to them, KDE gets better.

Together we make an even bigger difference to the Free Software desktop, and every single contribution you make creates hundreds or thousands of individual moments of satisfaction as others use KDE.

Over in Salt Lake City, Utah, Novell's BrainShare 2008 event is taking place. This is where the faithful come to see what's new and good in the big red N world every year, and what would be better to liven up a wintry landscape than a colourful talk about KDE 4? The KDE Team here at Novell have worked our KPats off all over KDE 4 to make it great and the Novell customer base deserve to know about it. So I put together a presentation to communicate the advantages of the brand new version of the other desktop on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and since 1839kg of CO2 is not to be sniffed at, got my colleagues Adrian Schroeter and Zonker who are big KDE fans and were already attending to present it. So the interested but not-a-techy introduction to KDE 4 can be found here (Novell login eg Build Service, forums or bugzilla required) along with a lot of other interesting stuff about what Novell does with Linux.

I'll keep this short because my mental batteries are running a bit low. Yesterday Dirk, Cornelius and myself from SUSE travelled to Mountain View in California for the KDE 4 launch event at Google. So far we had BoFs on marketing, distributions (always fun), and now it's Plasma's turn. Apart from that we had a nice lunch - even if the food didn't quite satisfy all the hungry hacker appetites present. I've had fun meeting all the north american community members and hackers for the first time, spoken briefly on the phone to LugRadio with Aaron, and patched KUser to fix a bug the Slackware guys were experiencing. There's a nice vibe here, much like at aKademy, and to me the turnout proves that with good planning, it would be possible to hold an aKademy here in the future.

The nice thing about a community event is the way it brings everyone together. I just gave a presentation to all my colleagues at the SUSE office here in Nuernberg on KDE 4.0, what it brings to the table and where it's going in the future. It was great to have our two largest meeting rooms joined together, with a capacity audience. For the last few weeks Dirk, Stephan, Lubos and I on the KDE Team have been working all the hours we can to add the final polish to 4.0 and to make sure the openSUSE packages of KDE 4.0 are the freshest and highest quality KDE binaries available.

KDE 4 gives us an opportunity to demonstrate the power of the openSUSE Build Service. By visiting this one click KDE 4 default pattern, you can install a complete KDE 4 desktop onto your openSUSE 10.3 - without any typing at all. Other patterns make it possible to update Qt, the KDE4 platform, or the entire desktop. A special KDE4-DEVEL pattern contains only the KDE 4 build requirements. In this way we aim to make openSUSE the best platform for developing KDE 4.

Some notes about KDE 4 from openSUSE:

KDE 3 and KDE 4 are co-installable

• Start a KDE 4 session using 'Session Type' in your display manager
• KDE 3 apps store settings in $HOME/.kde as usual
• KDE 4 apps store settings in $HOME/.kde4
• Caution: If you set KDEHOME (it is unset by default) both KDE3 and KDE4 apps will respect this value.
• KDE 3 versions are clearly indicated in the menu in the description field eg "kwrite - Text Editor/KDE3"

Also

• KDE 4 is the first openSUSE KDE where the applications live under /usr, for Filesystem Hierarchy Standard compliance.
• You can easily update all packages if you know the name of your KDE4 repository. If you used the one-click installer it is "KDE:KDE4". Then do "zypper update -t package -r KDE:KDE4".
• Our KDE 4 packages are frequently updated and include branch diffs relative to the tagged version for recent fixes.

That's it - read more about KDE4 on openSUSE and then go start something amazing."

I decided a couple of weeks ago to sort System Settings out and here is the first result: I reworked the views using Qt4's InterView framework, reusing the KCategorizedView from Dolphin. This gives us a better quality view than the hard coded view used until now - item layout should work at large font sizes or high res displays. It will also make it much easier to improve the UI with custom delegates and category drawers in future - just by reusing code. I was able to chuck out a couple of classes entirely which will make System Settings easier to maintain.

There are a number of things still to do, at the moment KCategorizedView always draws a rubberband, and the number of search hits are not displayed, but it's usable already and these will soon be fixed.

Here's the screenshot: