nixternal

What a groovy week, no matter how busy it was! Yesterday I found out that among 3 other people, I am now an official member of the KDE e.V.. Thanks everyone for the support and the votes, as well as a congratulations to Gary Greene, Paul Adams, and Alexis Menard. I am honored to be a part of the wonderful KDE community and look forward to many, many, years of working together to make KDE the best!

On top of this news, I found out this morning that I have been approved as an Ubuntu Core Developer. This means that I now get to upload to the Main repositories, hopefully providing our current Kubuntu core developers a little relieve during the Intrepid cycle and in the future. I took the long and lazy route to core developer by taking my sweet arse time and just enjoying everyone in the community and enjoying the work that I have done. I look forward to the many, many, years of Kubuntu development.

With this news, I have to give a big thank you to Jonathan Riddell, Sarah Hobbs, Scott Kitterman, Lydia Pintscher, Celeste Lyn Paul, Anne-Marie Mahfouf, Wendy Van Craen, Tom Albers, Rafael Fernández López, Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas, and the entire KDE and Ubuntu communities, THANK YOU!

YES! It took me long enough with all of the work that was going on at the same time, but I would like to present you the ability to test out KDE 4.1 Beta 1 in Kubuntu Hardy right now! It seems we have worked out a majority of the quirks, but I can’t promise you that you may not get an overwrite issue with dpkg just yet. I do think we got them all covered, but you may have something nobody else does, so we didn’t catch it. We have been testing these packages since Saturday/Sunday and I have updated them as people reported issues.

To top it off, I have also included the KDE 4 PIM packages that contain applications such as Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, and more! The package name to get all of that is kdepim-kde4.

So, to install and test these new packages, please add the following to your Kubuntu Hardy /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main

Once you have done that and you already have a previous KDE 4 version installed, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Otherwise type the following:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop

Note you may need to install kdebase-runtime-data-common in order to get Application directory icons under the Kickoff menu.

To install the KDE 4 PIM packages, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdepim-kde4

I would recommend that you backup your ~/.kde4 directory if there is anything that you might need, and then delete the ~/.kde4 directory to limit any quirks you may receive. After you have done this, update away, reboot for good measure, select KDE 4 from KDM, and enjoy!

I ask that you join us in #kubuntu-kde4 on IRC (Freenode) to discuss any issues that you may have. We can all work together to see if the issue we are seeing is a packaging/Kubuntu only/KDE 4.1 Beta 1 only issue and if not, file some reports on bugs.kde.org.

Thanks everyone for your patience! I will continue to work on the extragear packages and roll them out within the next day or so. Those should be fairly easy

Have fun!

It seems the popular question these past two days are, “Are there any KDE 4.1 Beta 1 packages yet?”

The answer is, soon! I am working on building the packages now and will hopefully have them all complete within the next couple of days. There are a lot of changes that need to be done to the packages for the 4.1 Betas, so I am taking my time making sure to catch all of them before releasing the packages to the world.

A little patience is all I ask and as soon as they are complete, I will blog about them here and also keep checking Kubuntu.org for a release announcement. Thanks!

I wanted to let all of the Planet KDE and Planet Ubuntu readers know just how awesome our communities are. 24 hours ago I wrote a blog post titled, “KDE 4.1 documentation needs your help,” and we received and overwhelming response. On a typical day, #kde-docs on IRC has about 5 people idling most of the time. Right now there are 19 people, of which 75% of them are working on documentation right now. Simply awesome! We have been up to around 25 people earlier, but still this is the most action I have seen in that channel in the past 3 years.

I want to give a quick thanks to the following people on IRC who jumped in and started working:

• Anne-Marie Mahfouf
• David Edmundson
• Faemir
• frewsxcv
• gaurav
• hdevalence
• Jonathan Jesse
• Karthik Periagaram
• katastrophe
• NigelS
• Roshan (ubunturos)
• Stephanie Whiting
• and others I may have missed…

THANK YOU!

Jumping in and contributing to a free software project is so easy these days. Proof are those who jumped in yesterday and today and started cranking out documentation work without ever having worked on such a thing in the past.

If you are looking to help out KDE any ways possible, documentation is about the easiest thing there is. Just have a good grasp of the English language (we have proof readers, or you can be a proof reader), and have just a bit of interest in writing. You can update current documentation, add new documentation, proof read, and more. If you are interested, #kde-docs on Freenode IRC is where we are at. Do not worry if you don’t know DocBook/XML, it would be awesome if you did, but myself and others who work with DocBook/XML have no problems taking any formatted document you have and either converting into DocBook/XML or copy and pasting into a file.

Thanks again everyone and keep on making KDE rock!

Wow what a day! I woke up this morning to an email from Allen Winter letting us know that he would like to implement a documentation freeze on June 3, 2008. That is like 2 weeks away! There is still a lot of documentation work to be done and very few of us to spread around. This is where you come in!

• Can you read and write English?
• Can you write technical documentation using DocBook/XML?
• Do you have KDE 4.1 running on one of your machines? (either a recent alpha release or a trunk checkout will do…it would be nice if you were running a 4.1 or trunk release)
• Can you do 200 push ups?

Wait a second!?!? 200 push ups? Don’t know how that one got in there. Anyways, we NEED PEOPLE OF ALL SKILL SETS, who can read and write English fairly well, to help us get out as much documentation as possible for the 4.1 release, due out on my birthday, July 29th! If you are familiar with writing documentation and know your way around DocBook/XML, man do we have a lot of work for you If you can read and write English but aren’t up on your DocBook skills, we can use you as well, and will have plenty for you to do.

There is plenty to be done and this is a perfect opportunity for you to get involved with KDE development. If you are interested, please get on IRC and join us in #kde-docs on Freenode. I (nixternal) will be around pretty much all day to help out as well as a few others will be in there to help out as well. So if you are ready to jump into something head first, hey, come and see us

Thanks everyone!

If you are located in or near the Chicago land area, this Thursday, May 1, 2008, ICS will be holding a Qt Quickstart seminar. Registration is free and there is the ability to register for upcoming Qt Quickstarts in May for the Detroit, Michigan area as well as the Washington, D.C. area.

Thursday’s event here in Chicago is broken down as such: (Times are Central Standard Time (CST))

Location:

Doubletree Hotel Chicago Oak Brook
1909 Spring Road
Oak Brook, IL 60523

• 08:30 - 09:00 - Registration & Continental Breakfast
• 09:00 - 12:00 - Desktop Applications
• 12:30 - 16:00 - Embedded Linux Applications

Hope to see you there!