Have you ever heard Continuity, the solution of Apple which provides one seamless experience between your iPhone and your Mac?

You may be surprised, "Woohoo, it's amazing but I use my OnePlus along with my Mac." With my GSoC 2019 project, you can connect your Mac and your Android phone with KDE Connect!

And you can even connect your Mac with your Linux PC or Windows PC (Thanks to Piyush, he is working on optimizing experience of KDE Connect on Windows).

Installation instruction

1. You can download KDE Connect Nightly Build for macOS from KDE Binary Factory: https://binary-factory.kde.org/view/MacOS/job/kdeconnect-kde_Nightly_macos/. But notice that it's not yet a stable version, and it requires that you have permission to run application from non-certificated developer. We'll release a stable one next month on August.

2. Otherwise you can build your own version. Please follow the instructions on KDE Connect Wiki. If you're using macOS 10.13, MacOS X 10.12 or below, we recommend that you build your own KDE Connect because our Binary Factory are building applications for only macOS 10.14 or above.

You'll finally get a DMG image file in both 2 ways.

Just click on it, mount it and drap kdeconnect-indicator into Applications folder.

Open kdeconnect-indicator and your magic journey with KDE Connect for macOS begins!

Use

After installation, you can see an icon of kdeconnect-indicator in the Launchpad.

Click it to open. If everything is ok, you will see an KDE Connect icon in your system tray.

Click the icon -> Configure to open configuration window. Here you can see discovered devices and paired devices.

You can enable or disable functions in this window.

Currently, you can do these from your Android phone:

• Run predefined commands on your Mac from connected devices.
• Check your phones battery level from the desktop
• Ring your phone to help finding it
• Share files and links between devices
• Control the volume of your Mac from the phone
• Keep your Mac awake when your phone is connected
• Receive your phone notifications on your desktop computer (this function is achieved but not yet delivered, you can follow another article to enable it manually)

I'm trying to make more plugins work on macOS. Good luck to my GSoC project :)

Acknowledgement

Thanks to KDE Community and Google, I could start this Google Summer of Code project this summer.

Thanks to members in KDE Connect development. Without them, I cannnot understand the mechanism and get it work on macOS so quickly :)

Conclusion

If you have any question, KDE Connect Wiki may be helpful. And you can find a bug tracker there.

Don't be hesitated to join our Telegram Group or IRC channel if you'd like to bring more exciting functions into KDE Connect:

• Telegram
• IRC (#kdeconnect)
• matrix.org (#freenode_#kdeconnect:matrix.org)

I wish you could enjoy the seamless experience provided by KDE Connect for macOS and your Android Phone!

16 Jul 2019 12:20pm GMT

In June, I had a great time at a series of KDE events held in the offices of Slimbook, makers of fantastic Neon-powered laptops, at the outskirts of Valencia, Spain. Following on from a two-day KDE e.V. board of directors meeting, the main event was the 2019 edition of the Plasma development sprint. The location proved to be quite ideal for everything. Slimbook graciously provided us with two lovely adjacent meeting rooms for Plasma and the co-located KDE Usability & Productivity sprint, allowing the groups to mix and seperate as our topics demanded - a well-conceived spatial analog for the tight relationship and overlap between the two.

The Plasma team walked the gorgeous Jardí del Túria almost every day during their sprint week to stay healthy and happy devs.

As always during a Plasma sprint, we used this opportunity to lock down a number of important development decisions. Release schedules, coordinating the next push on Plasma/Wayland and a new stab at improving the desktop configuration experience stand out to me, but as the Dot post does a fine job providing the general rundown, I'll focus on decisions made for the Task Manager widgets I maintain.

On one of the sprint mornings, I lead a little group session to discuss some of the outstanding high-level problems with the two widgets (the regular Task Manager and the Icons-only Task Manager), driven by frequent user reports:

• Poor experience performing window management on groups of windows
• Unnecessary duplication in the UI displaying window group contents
• Unintuitive behavior differences between the two widgets

To address these, we came up with a list of action items to iteratively improve the situation. Individually they're quite minor, but there are many of them, and they will add up to smooth out the user experience considerably. In particular, we'll combine the currently two UIs showing window group contents (the tooltip and the popup dialog) into just one, and we'll make a new code path to cycle through windows in a group in most recently used order on left click the new default. The sprint notes have more details.

Decision-making aside, a personal highlight for me was a live demo of Marco Martin's new desktop widget management implementation. Not only does it look like a joy to use, it also improves the software architecture of Plasma's home screen management in a way that will help Plasma Mobile and other use cases equally. Check out his blog post for more.

I got a new laptop. Slimbook founder Alejandro López made it a proper computer by attaching a particularly swanky metal KDE sticker during the preceding KDE e.V. board sprint.

In KDE e.V. news, briefly we stole one of the sprint rooms for a convenient gathering of most of our Financial Working Group, reviewing the implementation of the annual budget plan of the organization. We also had a chance to work with the Usability goal crew (have you heard about KDE goals yet?) on a plan for the use of their remaining budget -- it's going to be exciting.

As a closing note, it was fantastic to see many new faces at this year's sprint. It's hard to believe for how many attendees it was their first KDE sprint ever, as it couldn't have been more comfortable to have them on board. It's great to see our team grow.

See you next sprint. :)

---

In more personal news, after just over seven years at the company I'm leaving Blue Systems GmbH at the end of July. It's been a truly fantastic time working every day with some of the finest human beings and hackers. The team there will go on to do great things for KDE and personal computing as a whole, and I'm glad we will keep contributing together to Plasma and other projects we share interests and individual responsibilities in.

As a result, the next ~10 weeks will see me very busy moving continents from Seoul back to my original home town of Berlin, where I'll be starting on a new adventure in October. More on that later (it's quite exciting), but my work on the KDE e.V. board of directors or general presence in the KDE community won't be affected.

That said -- between the physical and career moves, board work and personal preparations for Akademy, I'll probably need to be somewhat less involved and harder to reach in the various project trenches during this quarter. Sorry for that, and do poke hard if you need me to pick up something I've missed.

And of course:

16 Jul 2019 1:49am GMT

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 19.08 release to them

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 18 of July.

More interesting dates
August 1, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 RC (19.07.90) Tagging and Release
August 8, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 Tagging
August 15, 2019: KDE Applications 19.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/19.08_Release_Schedule

15 Jul 2019 7:22pm GMT

The All Systems Go! 2019 Call for Participation Re-Opened for ONE DAY!

Due to popular request we have re-opened the Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go! 2019 for one day. It will close again TODAY, on 15 of July 2019, midnight Central European Summit Time! If you missed the deadline so far, we'd like to invite you to submit your proposals for consideration to the CFP submission site quickly! (And yes, this is the last extension, there's not going to be any more extensions.)

All Systems Go! is everybody's favourite low-level Userspace Linux conference, taking place in Berlin, Germany in September 20-22, 2019.

For more information please visit our conference website!

14 Jul 2019 10:00pm GMT

11 Jul 2019 11:00pm GMT

For a long period of time, I'm cultivating the desire of having a habit of writing monthly status updates. Someway, Drew DeVault's Blog posts and Martin Peres's advice leverage me towards this direction. So, here I am! I have decided to embrace the challenge of composing a report per month. I hope this new habit helps me to improve my writing and communication skills but most importantly, help me to keep track of my work. I want to start this update by describing my work conditions and then focus on the technical stuff.

In the last two months, I've been facing an infrastructure problem to work. I'm dealing with obstacles such as restricted Internet access and long hours in public transportation from my home to my workplace. Unfortunately, I can't work in my house due to the lack of space, and the best place to work is a public library at the University of Brasilia (UnB). Going to UnB every day makes me waste around 3h per day in a bus. The library has a great environment, but it also has thousands of internet restrictions. The fact that I can't access websites with '.me' domain and connect to my IRC bouncer is an example of that. In summary: It's been hard to work these days. So let's stop talking about non-technical stuff and get into the heart of the matter.

I really like working on VKMS. I know this is not news to anybody, and in June, most of my efforts were dedicated to VKMS. One of my paramount endeavors it was found and fixed a bug in vkms that makes kms_cursor_crc, and kms_pipe_crc_basic fails. I was chasing this bug for a long time as can be seen here [1]. After many hours debugging it, I sent a patch for handling this issue [2], however, after Daniel's review, I realized that my patch didn't fix correctly the problem. So Daniel decided to dig into this issue to find the root of the problem and later sent a final fix. If you want to see the solution, take a look at [3]. One day, I want to write a post about this fix since it is an interesting subject to discuss.

Daniel also noticed some concurrency problems in the CRC code and sent a patchset composed of 10 patches that tackle the issue. These patches focused on creating better framebuffers manipulation and avoiding race conditions. It took me around 4 days to take a look and test this series. During my review, I asked many things related to concurrency and other clarification about DRM. Daniel always replied with a very nice and detailed explanation. If you want to learn a little bit more about locks, I recommend you to take a look at [4]. Seriously, it is really nice!

I also worked for adding the writeback support in vkms; since XDC2018 I could not stop to think about the idea of adding writeback connector in vkms due to the benefits it could bring, such as new test and assist developers with visual output. As a result, I started some clumsy attempts to implement it in January; but I really dove in this issue in the middle of April, and in June I was focused on making it work. It was tough for me to implement these features due to the following reasons:

1. There is not i-g-t test for writeback in the main repository, I had to use a WIP patchset made by Brian and Liviu.
2. I was not familiar with framebuffer, connectors, and fancy manipulation.

As a result of the above limitations, I had to invest many hours reading the documentation and the DRM/IGT code. In the end, I think that add writeback connectors paid well for me since I feel much more comfortable with many things related to DRM these days. The writeback support was not landed yet, however, at this moment the patch is under review (V3) and changed a lot since the first version; for details about this series take a look at [5]. I'll write a post about this feature after it gets merged.

After having the writeback connectors working in vkms, I felt so grateful for Brian, Liviu, and Daniel for all the assistance they provided to me. In particular, I was thrilled that Brian and Liviu made kms_writeback test which worked as an implementation guideline for me. As a result, I updated their patchsets for making it work in the latest version of IGT and made some tiny fixes. My goal was helping them to upstream kms_writeback. I submitted the series with the hope to see it landed in the IGT [9].

Parallel to my work with 'writeback' I was trying to figure out how I could expose vkms configurations to the userspace via configfs. After many efforts, I submitted the first version of configfs support; in this patchset I exposed the virtual and writeback connectors. Take a look at [6] for more information about this feature, and definitely, I'll write a post about this feature after it gets landed.

Finally, I'm still trying to upstream a patch that makes drm_wait_vblank_ioctl return EOPNOTSUPP instead of EINVAL if the driver does not support vblank get landed. Since this change is in the DRM core and also change the userspace, it is not easy to make this patch get landed. For the details about this patch, you can take a look here [7]. I also implemented some changes in the kms_flip to validate the changes that I made in the function drm_wait_vblank_ioctl and it got landed [8].

July Aims

In June, I was totally dedicated to vkms, now I want to slow my road a little bit and study more about userspace. I want to take a step back and make some tiny programs using libdrm with the goal of understanding the interaction among userspace and kernel space. I also want to take a look at the theoretical part related to computer graphics.

I want to put some effort to improve a tool named kw that help me during my work with Linux Kernel. I also want to take a look at real overlay planes support in vkms. I noted that I have to find a "contribution protocol" (review/write code) that works for me in my current work conditions; otherwise, work will become painful for my relatives and me. Finally, and most importantly, I want to take some days off to enjoy my family.

Info: If you find any problem with this text, please let me know. I will be glad to fix it.

References

[1] "First discussion in the Shayenne's patch about the CRC problem". URL: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/3/10/197. ⤴

[2] "Patch fix for the CRC issue". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/308617/. ⤴

[3] "Daniel final fix for CRC". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/308881/?series=61703&rev=1. ⤴

[4] "Rework crc worker". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/61737/. ⤴

[5] "Introduces writeback support". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/61738/. ⤴

[6] "Introduce basic support for configfs". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/63010/. ⤴

[7] "Change EINVAL by EOPNOTSUPP when vblank is not supported". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/314399/?series=50697&rev=7. ⤴

[8] "Skip VBlank tests in modules without VBlank". URL: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/igt-gpu-tools/commit/2d244aed69165753f3adbbd6468db073dc1acf9a. ⤴

[9] "Add support for testing writeback connectors". URL: https://patchwork.freedesktop.org/series/39229/. ⤴

09 Jul 2019 3:00am GMT