Richard A. Johnson

Well, I lost a bet this week and the result was I had to use GNOME for 1 month. I could easily cheat, but I wanted to go through with it and see what I have “supposedly been missing.” Well after day 1, I have to admit that after listening to Jorge talk about the Dust theme, I have a somewhat pretty lookin’ desktop.

So, I went ahead and installed Empathy to chat with my buds, Gnome-Do because everyone ooh’s and ahh’s over it, and Gwibber, so I can tweet in style. I tried using the Gnome-Do Twitter plugin, but it didn’t work at all for me. Well it worked a little, as in I could see others tweets, but it didn’t like mine at all. Always said it had some sort of authorization error.

I am impressed with the quality of GNOME these days and I have to take my hat off to all of those involved. GNOME still is not for me, and probably never will be, but it is fun from time-to-time to check out the competition. I have GNOME on my home desktop, but the rest of my machines are either KDE 4 (4.1.3 Kubuntu and Trunk with Debian), and WMII (umph!).

If you use Plucker and/or the Plucker desktop, please raise your hand…

Plucker seems to be silent on the development scene as of late. The last development thing they did was within the past 6 months and they added a patch which actually raises the version to 1.9. Those of you who use Plucker in Debian and/or Ubuntu may have noticed the desktop edition is a mess. As of right now, the version available for a merge into Gutsy from Debian Sid has the desktop building disabled. This can’t be good, but I really don’t know 100% because I am not an avid Plucker user. But seeing as I have helped maintain in the past, I wanted to see how much work is involved with getting it release ready.

The amount of work is crazy, but guess what….I got it to build the desktop, and while at it, I patched a couple of the issues that were reported in bug reports in Ubuntu. Now the building was insane, because for some reason the patch or the developers decided to use a library called libhttp which hasn’t been developed or worked on since 2001. I don’t know why they didn’t use something like libcurl, but that is them not me, plus the libhttp library is for embedded communications that involve streaming over a socket.

Good news none the less, I am working on getting the libhttp package into Debian right now, I am 75% there, I just have to make a couple of changes and it will/should get sponsored. Once that happens, then I can just sync it into Ubuntu and finish getting Plucker to function correctly. I have been in communications with the Debian maintainer for Plucker and he is interested as well, so hopefully sometime soon we should have a viable Plucker package. And when that is complete, I will hopefully get it backported to those of you using previous stable releases. That’s it for now, sorry for the double posting

I have recently decided to concentrate more on the development side of Linux, more importantly Ubuntu, KDE, and now Debian. The first stage I will cover in my endeavors will be packaging. Packaging consists of taking the upstream tarballs (programname-version.tar.gz or .tar.bz2) and converting them into packages that can easily be installed in Ubuntu as well as Debian without you having to compile (configure, make, make install) or worrying about dependencies. A successful package that a majority of you are used to in Ubuntu and Debian look like programname_version.deb. Some of you have even done a successfull dpkg -i programname_version.deb for an application that either is not in the repositories or was updated and packaged somewhere else. Well this post is to cover the necessities before you jump in and go nuts trying to figure out how to correctly create a package.
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please enjoy the ride…

There are a couple of KDE extra packages in Debian that haven’t been touched in a while and I was interested in helping maintain them. StevenK from IRC, a super cool DD (Debian Developer), told me how to go about getting it done. So I emailed the current maintainer who seems to be on a hiatus for about the past year and a half. Next thing I know I am told to check out pkg-kde on Alioth, Debian’s version of Sourceforge or Launchpad. While there I noticed some names looked familiar in the development area (tonio, toma, Hobbsee, Riddell). So upon further research I said the heck with it and signed up! A couple of emails from ana on IRC (#debian-qt-kde on irc.debian.org or OFTC), I was a member. I was then told to go ahead and start a bug up and go that route and to attempt to bring the package into the pkg-kde/kde-extras area. So now that is rocking and I am working with Debian KDE people.

Also this week I was able to locate a Debian Developer, actually two, in Chicago and have agreed to meet up and get my GPG key signed. This is just the first step in many, but I am totally stoked to get the chance to help out big daddy Debian! So maybe one day I can be cool like StevenK and become an official DD.</daydream>. Overall I am super impressed on just how easy it is to become involved in 3 of the greatest projects ever! KDE, Ubuntu, and now Debian. In the words of Jonathan Riddell, “GROOVY!”