Awesome Easter, good Holy Week, too tired to type more :-)

20 Apr 2014 3:49am GMT

The past week has been exhilarating and exhausting for our Kubuntu crew. I'm sure the other *buntu teams were working just as hard. Not just packaging, because that goes on all the time, though not at this intense pace. But the attention to detail, the testing, polishing, patching, discussion with developers to get those patches upstream, coordination with Debian, cleaning up copyright files, man pages and other documentation, making screen shots, our user docs and new website, more testing, more polish.... it was truly an amazing effort.

I used `ubuntu-bug` from the cli more than I ever have before, testing out the betas. It was an amazing experience to file the bug, and then see it fixed within the day! This happened again and again. The entire Ubuntu ecosystem really works well together. My thanks to those developers who read and respond to those bug reports.

What I love about Kubuntu is how everyone pitches in. All of us try to maintain balance in our lives, so that there is time for leisure and enrichment, along with work. Also, the work is fun, because the team enjoys one another, posting fun links, joking around, but continuing to work away on our todo lists. Even those who didn't have time for packaging, often stopped by the devel channel to find out what needed testing. It all helped!

Since I'm not a devel, all this was inspiring rather than exhausting. So I had the time and energy to spend time helping out folks with questions and trouble in #kubuntu and #kde. That felt great! We were able to answer most of the questions, and overcome most of the difficulties.

One issue that came up quite a few times in the last couple of days, was PPAs. On a clean install, of course all old PPAs are blown away. On an upgrade, however, they can linger and cause lots of perplexing problems. Official PPAs like backports are fine, but specialty ones should be removed before upgrading. If you need them, you can always re-add after the upgrade. For the same reason, unpin any packages you have pinned.

It is really fabulous to be able to present the latest KDE software into our Kubuntu LTS. This will give us the freedom to try out the newest stuff from KDE based on the sparkly new Frameworks, Plasma Next and so forth, in our next release. So, our users will be able to use software supported for five years if they want, while also having the option to install 14.10 (if all goes well) and check out the newest.

19 Apr 2014 10:35pm GMT

Hi,

this is just a quick bug fix release, the last one depending on PackageKit 0.8 series, it doesn't have new features apart from having some fixed support for appstream 0.6.

For the next 0.8.3 version PackageKit 0.9 will be required.

For more information you can look at the git logs.

http://download.kde.org/stable/apper/0.8.2/src/apper-0.8.2.tar.xz.mirrorlist

Have fun :)

19 Apr 2014 9:50pm GMT

Hello everybody.

Me and last year's Season of KDE student Anuj Pahuja implemented a save and load feature as well as keyboard support for KBounce. However, before finally merging the changes into the master branch I'd like to hear your opinion regarding some design questions. Here they go:

1. The player is allowed to load a saved game only once. i.e. as soon as the game is loaded the save file is deleted. I made this to avoid cheating from the player's side. Without deleting the file, a player could replay the same saved game countless times, managing to always go to the highscores list.

I'm unsure about this. Is it desirable for a player to have this ability? What's your general experience on the subject?

2. By default, the keys used to move the cursor are W, A, S, D; L for rotation and Space to simulate a mouse click. What do you think about this setup? Are the arrow keys preferred over W, A, S and D? Independent on the default settings the shortcuts may be changed by the player.

3. The following screenshots show the new dialogs I've had to include. #1 looks terrible though I can't think on good alternatives to improve it for now. Your opinions are very welcome.

Save Game Dialog

Load Game Dialog

Trying to Load a Game When Tere's None Saved

4. Is Ctrl+O a good shortcut for "Load Last Saved Game"? What would be a better alternative?

The code is available at the keyboard-integration branch on kbounce's repository. Give it a try and feel free to share your thoughts on the comments bellow.

19 Apr 2014 5:17pm GMT

I've been using the vim-fswitch plugin for switching between .h and .cpp files for a long time now. The thing I was really missing was the inability to switch to private headers and implementations (filename_p.h and filename_p.cpp)

Recently, I discovered the (more than awesome) CtrlP plugin. I am not going to explain here what it is - I strongly advise you to check it out!

I've written a small extension for it which provides the header/source/private files switcher.

18 Apr 2014 10:24pm GMT

There was a post recently about running a static code analysis tool on Qt 5 with some rather cute results. The main purpose of the post is to advertise the tool used, but it does make a nice point of how careless we can be when writing the code.

Since KDE is a Free/Open project, we don't usually have the necessary finances in order to be able to use the tools like the one linked above. Fortunately, not all is grim. The great people at Clang, apart from making one of the best C++ compilers, provide us with a few tools as well.

I've written about clang-format some time ago. Now, it is the time for another, a bit younger project - Clang Analyzer.

What is it?

The Clang Static Analyzer is a source code analysis tool that finds bugs in C, C++, and Objective-C programs. The analyzer is 100% open source and is part of the Clang project. Like the rest of Clang, the analyzer is implemented as a C++ library that can be used by other tools and applications.
~ from the project's website

It tries to analyze the different execution paths of your code and try to detect whether some of them can lead to problems.

As an example, I've used it on KActivities. And I got a false-positive, but a very reasonable false-positive. Namely, one variable was not initialized when declared, and as far as the analyzer is concerned, it might have been left uninitialized till its insertion into sqlite.

In reality, it was initialized in a range-for loop which is guaranteed to have at least one iteration, which the analyzer could not have known. It took me more than a minute to explain to myself that the variable can not be uninitialized, so I can not blame the the static analysis for the false alarm.

How to use it?

At the moment, it does not have a very sophisticated mechanism of execution. It follows the usual pattern of wrapping the compiler commands (similar to icecream, colorgcc etc.).

You need to set your build to use the wrapper instead of the actual compiler.

Lets say that you have installed Clang to /usr/local and copied the llvm/tools/clang/tools/ directory to /usr/local/share/clang/ (the analyzer is not installed by default, so you need to copy it manually).

You can create a separate build directory (in my case /opt/kf5/build-analyzer/path/to/your/project) and invoke cmake from there like this:

cmake /path/to/your/project's/sources \
    ...options you normally pass to cmake ... \
    -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/local/share/clang/tools/scan-build/c++-analyzer

After cmake finishes its magic, run the analyzer:

/usr/local/share/clang/tools/scan-build/scan-build \
    --use-analyzer=/usr/local/bin/clang++ make

It will compile your project and analyze it at the same time. It will take much more time than an ordinary compilation run, but that is to be expected because of all the additional work it does.

To see the results, you need to run the scan-view command which will start a small web-server and point your web browser to it. You'll be able to browse the detected issues from there. It nicely displays the sequence points that lead to the detected problem.

18 Apr 2014 8:29pm GMT

In my previous post, I wrote about a plugin for switching between header and source files (with the support for private classes) for C and C++.

The plugin has evolved for the last two days. It gained another mode, which will also be usable outside of the C/C++ world.

• Full mode - Finding related files based on the words in the file's name

If you use the CamelCase, or the snake_case naming scheme for your files, the plugin will extract the words from the current file's name and search (using the find command) for the files that have any of those words in their names.

For example, for ResourceActor.scala, it will return:

ResourceTable.scala ResourceService.scala SomethingElseActor.scala

Full Switching

It is still available at github.com/ivan-cukic/vim-ctrlp-switcher

Hope somebody finds it useful. Everyone is encouraged to contribute or star the project.

18 Apr 2014 2:19pm GMT

Kubuntu 14.04 LTS was released yesterday along with the all new KDE SC 4.13. Browsing around the internet this morning the feedback feels really good. Here's some of my favourite quotes.

spiros spiros on Google+

Thank you for this great release

César J. Pinto on Google+

My God… I'm very surprise with kubuntu… it feels more fast than unity and gnome. wow…. I just…. i have no words to describe my happiness

@srikrishnaholla on Twitter

Downloading #kubuntu 14.04 LTS. Man, I've missed #kde !

@gholmer on Twitter

Get it while it's hot! Newest Ubuntu with the king of desktop environments, KDE! #kubuntu http://www.kubuntu.org

@apachelogger on Twitter [OK he's not entirely neutral]

This is the best release so far! Such awesome, so #Kubuntu 14.04 LTS! http://goo.gl/jQFdZJ #bestreleaseever

@jotakinhan on Twitter

Using #kubuntu again after using other distros for long time and its great!

@LowEndGeek on Twitter

Re-visiting #kde on #kubuntu 14.04 Working much better than regular #ubuntu

One of the first reviews was on Tux Arena:

"It is a beautiful release and it will definitely be here to stay for quite some time"

And in my inbox:

From: Robert Kovacs

Subject: Excellent Release Kubuntu 14.04

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:15:33 -0400

Thanks for all the hard work!. Kudos to the Kubuntu team. Just installed Kubuntu 14.04 and everything is working fine. Was using Kubuntu 12.04.3, which was also a great release.

Cheers!.
Bob Kovacs (USA)

18 Apr 2014 11:50am GMT

17 Apr 2014 10:16pm GMT

The Kubuntu and KDE team has been hard at work for the last 6 months, which has culminated into a rocking Kubuntu 14.04 release which introduces a whole bunch of new features, the most important of which are :

• A new semantic search framework for KDE SC 4.13, leading to faster email and file searches
• Automatic error reporting in order to improve the quality of KDE and Kubuntu
• A new driver manager to make it simpler to activate hardware that requires proprietary drivers
• Notifications for when additional drivers or language packs can be installed to improve your Kubuntu experience
• A new touchpad management app for laptops
• Misc. bug fixes and features that can be found here

Kubuntu 14.04 is a LTS release, so while introducing new applications, we've also taken into account personal and business users who would want to run it for extended periods of time, which is why the Kubuntu team makes the following promise :

• Kubuntu 14.04 will keep receiving security bug fixes when such fixes are available from KDE upstream for the next 5 years
• New releases of the KDE SC will be backported to 14.04 and be available via Kubuntu PPA's for the next 2 years
• A long-term upgrade path to the next LTS release

Along with the above, the Ubuntu team also has plans to backport new Xorg and friends releases as well as new kernel releases as part of their LTS Enablement stack, making sure that your hardware performance keeps improving over the time of 5 years.

All of this makes Kubuntu the ideal distribution to use for enterprise rollouts, OEM's and of course regular users who want a longer support cycle ( as opposed to the regular, 9 month, support cycle )

You can download your copy of Kubuntu 14.04 from here. We also have some Kubuntu swag that you can purchase over here!

17 Apr 2014 6:09pm GMT

Welcome to Kubuntu 14.04 LTS, a brand new Long Term Supported version with the latest KDE software to enjoy.

Long Term Support means bugfixes and security updates will be added for the next 5 years, so you can be safe to use it until 2019. New releases of important KDE Software will also be available from the Kubuntu Updates and Kubuntu Backports PPAs.

17 Apr 2014 6:00pm GMT

KDE SC 4.13 is finally out. As you may have heard this marks the release of Baloo. The bear is now out in the wild!

One of the many things that has changed is the "Desktop Search" configuration module. This blog post is about why the changes were made and what the rationale was behind it.

The Configuration Module

The old module was built on top of Nepomuk and it explicitly mentions that on the top. While "Nepomuk" was a decently known brand within the KDE Community, a normal user cannot be expected to know what it is.

It also presented a plethora of options in order to disable and enable Nepomuk, the File Indexer (used to say Strigi) and the PIM indexing. It also provides ways to control the indexing and labels to show what exactly is going on.

With the new module we have removed all of these options. The user should not need to know about the project called "Baloo", and indexing is an internal implementation detail in order to make searches faster. It doesn't need to be broadcasted.

Additionally now that we're so much faster, we can no longer afford to inform the user about each file. We often indexing hundreds of files per second. Plus, the files are indexed in multiple stages.

The old module's primary function was to control what is indexed. This was done in another tab -

This allowed the user to set which types and mimetypes of files should be indexed, control the list of regular expressions which should be matched against the filename, and control the list of directories which should be indexed, and which should not.

Quite a few things.

In contrast, the new KCM is quite minimalistic.

Here are some of the key things that we have changed -

• The KCM now uses a new search icon which clearly demonstrates that this is related to search.

• We now index your HOME directory by default and allow you to black list certain directories which you may not want to appear in the search results.

• The custom regular expression and mimetype filtering has been removed. We believe that it wasn't something an average user would know or care about. Also, we don't think anyone should need to micro-optimize the indexer to such a level.

• This current release does not fully support removable media. By default all removable media are not indexed. You can however remove them if the blacklist in order to index them.

• There is no explicit "Enable/Disable" button any more. We would like to promote the use of searching and feel that Baloo should never get in the users way. However, we are smart about it and IF you add your HOME directory to the list of "excluded folders", Baloo will switch itself off since it no longer has anything to index.

• Tags, Rating and Comments are no longer mentioned as they are not related to "Desktop Search". I'll talk about how they are now handled in another blog post.

This new KCM does remove a large number of options, but we considered those to potential optimizations from the Nepomuk days when we were not that performant. Baloo does still support most of these options, they just have sane defaults and are no longer exposed.

17 Apr 2014 5:09pm GMT

Today we've released 4.13 which is probably the best KDE Applications release ever :)

It also marks the second release we do with a four months schedule instead of a six month one. I think we've ended up with a pretty nice cadence in which we are faster delivering features and bugfixes to users, which at the end is what is important, since the earlier people get the features the earlier they'll find the bugs (let's accept it, all software has bugs) and the earlier the bugs are found the earlier they can be fixed. So basically it's faster progress :)

We have also made good our promise to keep our tests passing, as you can see everything from this release is green (kde-workspace is not green but is not part of the 4.13 release). So kudos to all developers for being awesome in that regard too.

Let's all celebrate on this release but not forget we need to keep working full steam ahead on the releases of KDE Frameworks 5, Plasma 2014.06 and KDE Applications 4.14.

Finally I'd like to remind you that most of the people doing KDE development are volunteers and they invest their time in making this awesome software for you to use for free.

Lots of them even spend time to travel abroad to meet each other in Sprints were they do concentrated hacking for a few days, so if you appreciate the work they do in those Sprints please donate some money so we can actually help them travel and we can make more Sprints happen :-) http://www.kde.org/community/donations/

As anecdote, I had the pleasure of meeting the guys from the KTP Sprint this Friday and after dinner they went back to hacking instead of joining some of us for some beers. That is dedication!

16 Apr 2014 6:17pm GMT

The Calligra team has released a bugfix version 2.8.2 of the Calligra Suite, and Calligra Active. This release contains a few important bug fixes to 2.8.0 and we recommend everybody to update.

Here is an overview of the most important fixes. There are several others that are not mentioned here.

General

• Move Export to PDF command to the Export menu section instead of the Print section for conformance with other office suites (bug 332603).
• Fix "Missing import filter" bug when saving if not extension is specified (even if selecting a File type is set to a format) (bug 328975).
• Use native file dialogs on Windows.

Kexi

• Make Rich Text property false by default for Text Editor form widget. Rich Text often causes misbehaviour.

Krita

• Fix resetting the slider spin box when double clicking on it (bug 330165).
• Ignore tablet press/release events which did not produce any sane buttons (bug 331925).
• Added support for 'evdev' tablets (bugs 332239, 331572, 329641).
• Save line smoothing options between runs of Krita. This is really needed for low-level tablets like Genius to filter the trajectory they report to us.
• Make Krita auto-recognize axes labels of Evdev tablets. The labels are stored in a special property of the XInput device.
• Recognize Surface Pro 2 tablets on Windows (bug 331922).
• Fixed size of predefined images.
• Set default gradient to alpha (bug 329008).
• Clean up the layout of the Transform tool.
• Hide unused settings for stroke in the Path tool (bug 331556).
• Fixed memory leaks in brush handling.
• Fixed memory leaks when resources fail to load.
• Fixed memory leaks when creating strokes (bug 331592).
• Don't crash on creating a file layer in Krita Gemini (bug 332871).
• Improved splash screen.
• Fix loading plugins for Krita Gemini.
• Save tags with special characters properly (bug 332708).
• Fix removing of tags, don't load or save dummy tags.
• Add import for PSD layer groups (bug 289857).
• Fix translation issues.
• Fix startup of Krtita Sketch and Gemini.

Try It Out

• The source code is available for download: calligra-2.8.2.tar.xz.
• Calligra binaries are available for download for many operating systems.

About Calligra

Calligra is part of the applications from the KDE community. See more information at the website http://www.calligra.org/.

16 Apr 2014 5:17pm GMT

16 Apr 2014 2:35pm GMT

16 Apr 2014 10:47am GMT