nixternal

Big Bang
I recently started working for a local company here in Chicago called Cleversafe. It is a company that specializes in distributed storage solutions. And the best part about this, it is an Open Source company! Want to view their open source community, check out Cleversafe.org. I am the new Linux Packaging and Development Engineer. What exactly does this mean? It means I will be packaging up their application for various platforms as well as maintaining the appliance we create. The current appliance is built off of the CentOS 5 platform, but who knows what the future will bring, as I am eying Ubuntu/Debian as well as Foresight. Other stuff that I will work on in the future is the Open Source Community. After 2 days, I am in love with the place. Everyone is super cool, and it is just like every open source community I have worked with, so diverse with people from all over the world nestled into a very nice office space in the West Loop Gate area of Chicago.

Evolution
Oddly enough, being an open source company, they currently utilize Microsoft Exchange Server. The nice thing is, I don’t have to use any Microsoft products! That’s right! And their Exchange Server doesn’t even support IMAP or POP3, OWA only. KMail will not work with this setup, Thunderbird sucked just as bad, but Evolution, I am impressed. So you LUG Radio folks and your KDE PIM bashing, I will have to join you a little here. It took me a few minutes to figure everything out configuration wise, but as it stands, I have my Inbox, Personal Folders, and even Company Calendars. I have 2 minor annoyances thus far though, 1) Evolution wants to lock up every now and then, and 2) None of the alerts work from the Company Calendar. For 1) I may be the problem behind this, so I will have to test later tomorrow. For 2) I could very well be missing something, so if you use Evolution in a similar environment and have your alerts working with an Exchange Calendar, fill me in. The last time I used Evolution was way back in those Ximian days, and have since been using Mutt and lately KMail. Kontact is without a doubt the greatest in certain areas, and of course the areas I used it with (POP3). I have to admit though, Evolution is kicking ass with Exchange.

Religion
Free software is my religion, and with the new job, I get to exercise my religion on a daily basis and get paid finally So for those doubters out there, free software can pay, and pay well I might add. If free software is where you want to make a living, don’t give up! I spent about 14 years volunteering in the free software world always wanting that free software job. Well, I never gave up and now I have it. The only downfall, my time with Ubuntu and Kubuntu may be limited a bit. Looks like the weekends will be for Kubuntu and KDE, and as soon as I am settled into the new job a bit more, then I can start devoting time in the evenings.

So, if I am a little slow in responding, now you know. I know all of you in my previous KDE 4 posts keep asking questions and wanting this or that packaged, and as soon as I get some time, maybe this weekend, I will work on getting you what you want, unless of course someone beats me to it.

Oh, with the new job came a new work laptop, a Dell Latitude D830 which is a Core 2 Duo with the Nvidia Quadro NVS 135M. Thus far, using the binary Nvidia drivers, it is working well. I wish it were the Intel X3100, but since it is a freeby I will not argue And my lord is this thing heavy. 15.4″ widescreen that does like 1680×1050, insane! For those of you who may have been looking at this lappy, let me just say with Hardy (Kubuntu and Ubuntu), everything works out of the box, this include Wifi (Intel 4965 AG/AGN) and the Bluetooth! Rock on. Oh, and Kubuntu is getting just under 5 hours of battery time. Finally a lappy for me that works well with Guidance

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!

Hey everyone, I accidentally told a couple of people showing up for the meeting scheduled for June 5, 2008 at 01:00 UTC that it was tomorrow. I was wrong and I apologize. The meeting is in 1 hour and 20 minutes, so make sure you show up. I will try and ping you all on IRC in the next few minutes.

#ubuntu-meeting at 01:00 UTC June 5th, 2008

That is 6PM in California, 7PM in the mountains, 8PM in Chicago, 9PM in New York, 10PM somewhere out in the Atlantic, 11PM somewhere further in the Atlantic, 1….bah, you get the idea

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!