Status update

Long time no post so here a small status update.
Two weeks ago I participated the kate developer sprint in Darmstadt. I'm very glad that the kate devs invited me to their sprint and say thanks to Dominik who organized the meeting and Joseph Wenninger and BaSysKom for the dinners.
Although I could not help much within their design decisions I got a lot of insight how kate works and what it should be (apart from an easy text editor). I could also fix two annoying bugs (properly restore cursor and selection after Undo/Redo) which bothered me since the first day I used kate. :)

A new binary snapshot (4.0.70) is available during this day. We could not release .67 - .69 because we had some troubles with qt4.4-rc1 and I switched my build system to cmake 2.6.0-rc. It took more work than expected but it's a good test for the cmake devs to be backward compatible.

We're looking forward to split down our packages from e.g. one big kdeedu package to one package for each app. The problem is that I don't have a nice idea how to solve this with cmake so we get all our dependencies automatically. How do the Linux packagers solve this problem?

Okteta / windows and new snapshot

As Friedrich Kossebau wrote I adjusted okteta to work on windows. But I must correct him in the number of adopted lines. In fact there are only two lines which are platform specific changes. The changes in khe_export.h were only needed because he forgot to change them as he changed the library names. It doesn't hurt on linux but it was wrong. So in the end there're only two changes left to make okteta compile on windows :)

I've also created new binaries (4.0.67). They should appear soon in the installer. kdesdk is missing because it was not compilable, but I already fixed it in svn.

Cebit

I'll be there tomorrow (Saturday). Now that Saro is back home I can visit the KDE booth without getting hundreds of bug reports ;)
Saro was on Cebit from Tuesday to Thursday and I'm happy that he had some time to visit Bremen - although we had no time for sightseeing it was nice to show him my home.

Snapshot 4.0.63 binaries

This weekend I built binaries for 4.0.63 snapshot. Kopete should now work with jabber too.
For the next snapshot we plan to integrate okular - poppler, freetype and fontconfig are already built but we need some more time to test things :)

Snapshot 4.0.61 available

Finally managed to compile and upload 4.0.61. This time I included kdenetwork with kopete (tested only basic icq, jabber support will come with the next snapshot) and kdewebdev. Make sure to select the sourceforge mirror because ftp.kde.org still has 4.0.60.
Also created new phonon & amarok packages as the former ones did not work with the current snapshot.

Ralf also released a new version of the Installer. It got a major design rework and now uses libcurl for downloading. Please report bugs to b.k.o or to our mailing list.

As Saro pointed out here we're looking for maintainers who continuously build one kde package. Packaging is done by me (for now) but it would be nice to have someone who makes sure that the package compiles fine with msvc and mingw so I don't have to bother around with compile errors when I want to create a new package.
This would also allow me to do some more bugfixing :)

Using KDE 4.0 on openSUSE

Yesterday I installed kde4.0 from the openSUSE repository. All went fine and after I found out how to enable xcomposite effects I'm now a happy use of kde4.0 :)
I'm very impressed by the new desktop. It's much cleaner than 3.5 - and this with nearly no configuration work. That's a big advantage over kde3 and windows because I and a lot of people who only want to work with the desktop just don't have the time or are to lazy to spend a day or two to configure the desktop for their needs. Especially when you use kde at work.

But I also have three annoying bugs - don't know if they're already in b.k.o.
The first one is that my trashcan don't like me and goes away on every login. The I've massive redraw problems since I updated kde this morning (it worked much better yesterday). Looks like the digital clock is the problem - I can only reproduce it once the clock gets away on a redraw:



And the last one (which is maybe related to the redraw problem) - the screensaver screws up my desktop. The only solution is to kill my x server.

reporting bugs for kde/windows

Today I read the techbase talk to kde/windows and was a little bit disappointed. Not because of the many bugs reported - we did not announce anything stable so nobody can expect that his special app will run (some of the authors maybe forgot this). But of the animosity in some comments. Sometimes I've the feeling that the author once compiled a hello world program and now knows everything about programming. The curious thing is - Ralf and me did not get a single patch to fix issues in the installer.

So when you encounter bugs, please add them to bugs.kde.org - otherwise you've a high chance that they won't be read. Also when posting a bug please be as specific as possible. And for the installer - please wait for 0.8.6. We already released a first test version here. Bugs in the installer should be reported to kde-windows @ kde.org

I know I'm rephrasing, but keep in mind that we do this in our free time and have also a reallife :)

Slashdotted?

This night I got a sms from SaroEngles - he told me that http://download.cegit.de/kde-windows is down due to this article. As I'm not a student and have to work for my money, I did not read it until this morning. ;)

I couldn't do anything against the downtime. Later Ralf told me that he has a user limit and his server is working fine. Therefore we ask all kde/windows users to not use download.cegit.de or webdev.cegit.de as their download mirror anymore. We'll likely remove them from the mirror list when the new installer, which can also download from ftp servers then, will be out.

New windows binaries available soon

I've uploaded new binaries to our server. They're from build from trunk two days ago. Ralf will move them to the public area as soon as he's some time- We plan to release svn snapshots every two or three weeks but it depends on how much time we have.

My current development activities are cut down a little bit - mostly due to real life. In the last days I added curl support to our installer. Now it should be able to also download from ftp servers.

Apropos servers - Ralf got access to ftp.kde.org - this means that our binaries are now spread over the world! As you can see there's quite some interest for the packages and Ralf seems to be happy that his two servers are no longer the only ones who deliver kde/windows packages...

Last but not least I want to say thanks to SaroEngels. He does a very good job enhancing our emerge scripts. And afaics he's also a good contact person in #kde-windows for others people problems with kde/windows - I could never ever do end-user support longer than five minutes :-D