As many readers of this blog are aware, openSUSE has been offering packages of git snapshots from KDE since quite a while. They are quite useful for those wiling to test, report bugs, and / or hack on the code, but also for those who want to see what’s brewing in KDE land (without touching their existing systems). However, a major drawback for non English speakers was the lack of translations.

In the past months I’ve set up LDAP at home, to avoid having different user accounts for the services that I run on my home hardware. Rather than the venerable OpenLDAP I settled for 389 Directory Server, commercially known as Red Hat Directory Server, mainly because I was more familiar with it. Rather than describing how to set that up (Red Hat’s own documentation is excellent on that regard), this post will focus on the steps required to enable encryption using Let’s Encrypt certificates.

One thing I always wanted to do when going on holiday is to track where I go, the places I’ve been, and see how much I’ve travelled around. This is true in particular when going to places where I walk around a lot (Japan stays at the top of the list, also for other reasons that are not related to this post). Something like viewing a map showing where you were, and where did you go, with optional export to KML or GPX to import into other programs like Marble.

(Note: this post also appears in Planet KDE and Planet openSUSE because I thought this might be interesting to others) As I mentioned in some other posts, I have a small “server” which I use as a NAS to provide archiving for photos and other files of interest. As it runs in a remarkably small (and quiet) enclosure, I’ve managed to put it in an incospicuous part of the room it is in.

If I look back at the last post I made on ths blog… let’s say quite a lot of time has passed. The reason? Well, first of all, one would call it a lack of motivation1, and afterwards, the emergence of a small yet quite annoying pathogen which caused a bit of a stir worldwide. But today I’m not going to talk about viruses: perhaps some other time when you can avoid hear about it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Part of this post is about openQA, openSUSE’s automated tool which tests a number of different scenarios, from installation to the behavior of the different desktop environments, plus testing the freshest code from KDE git. Recently, thanks to KDE team member Fabian Vogt, there has been important progress when testing KDE software. Testing the Dolphin file manager Those who use KDE software, either in Plasma or in other desktop environments have at least heard of Dolphin, the powerful file manager part of KDE Applications (by the way, have you checked out the recent beta yet?

As you may already know (if you don’t, please check these older posts) openQA, the automated testing system used by openSUSE runs daily tests on the latest KDE software from git. It works well and uncovered a number of bugs. However, it only tested X11. With Wayland starting to become usable, and some developers even switching to Wayland full time, it was a notable shortcoming. Until now. Why would openQA not run on Wayland?

A new version of Danbooru Client is now available! What is Danbooru Client? Danbooru Client is an application to access Danbooru-based image boards (Wikipedia definition). It offers a convenient, KF5 and Qt5-based GUI coupled with a QML image view to browse, view, and download images hosted in two of the most famous Danbooru boards (konachan.com and yande.re). Highlights of the new version Unbreak konachan.com support (change in URL format) Coming up next HTTPS support!

In the past three weeks, the openSUSE community KDE team has been pretty busy to package the latest release of Applications from KDE, 16.12. It was a pretty large task, due to the number of programs involved, and the fact that several monolithic projects were split (in particular KDE PIM). This post goes through what we did, and how we improved our packaging workflow. Some prerequisites In openSUSE speak, packages are developed in “projects”, which are separate repositories maintained on the OBS.

Admit it: how many times you have seen “software from this branch is completely untested, use it at your own risk” when you checked the latest code from any FOSS project? I bet you have, many times. For any reasonably modern project, this is not entirely true: Continuous Integration and automated testing are a huge help in ensuring that the code builds and at least does what it is supposed to do.

You may be aware that openSUSE Leap 42.2 is now in the release candidate stage, and there’s a lot of activity aimed at squashing those pesky bugs before they hit the final release. One particular bug proved to be quite tough to fix, and it was only solved thanks to the “heroes” mentioned in the title. This is the history of the bug. The report October 6th, 2016 - A bug iss reported against Plasma reporting a hard freeze of Plasma when using the Noveau driver, but not with the closed NVIDIA blob.

As you may know (unless you’ve been living in Alpha Centauri for the past century) the openSUSE community KDE team publishes LiveCD images for those willing to test the latest state of KDE software from the git master branches without having to break machines, causing a zombie apocalypse and so on. This post highlights the most recent developments in the area. Up to now, we had 3 different media, depending on the base distribution (stable Leap, ever-rolling Tumbleweed) and whether you wanted to go with the safe road (X11 session) or the dangerous path (Wayland):

Every day, a sizable number of people posts problems on the KDE Community Forums and the ever-helpful staff does their best to solve whatever issues they’re facing. But what exactly does one do when this happens? This post provides more insights on the process. NOTE: The following applies to my workflow for the Kontact & PIM subforum. Step 1: Someone posts a problem The questions posted are various, and range from simple tasks (“how I do XXX”) to very specific workflows.

A new version of Danbooru Client is now available! What is Danbooru Client? Danbooru Client is an application to access Danbooru-based image boards (Wikipedia definition). It offers a convenient, KF5 and Qt5-based GUI coupled with a QML image view to browse, view, and download images hosted in two of the most famous Danbooru boards (konachan.com and yande.re). Highglights of the new version Support for width / height based filtering: now you can exclude posts that are below a specific width or height (or both) New dependency: KTextWidgets Coming up next Sooner or later I’ll get to finish the multiple API support, but given that there’s close to no interest for these programs (people are happy to use a browser) and that I work on this very irregularly (every 6-7 months at best), there’s no ETA at all.

Ever since the launch of Argon and Krypton, the openSUSE community KDE team didn’t really stand still: a number of changes (and potentially nice additions) have been brewing this week. This post recapitulates the most important one. I’d like the most recent Qt, please As pre-announced by a G+ post, the openSUSE repositories bringing KDE software directly from KDE git (KDE:Unstable:Frameworks and KDE:Unstable:Applications) have switched their Qt libraries from Qt 5.

As KDE software (be it the Frameworks libraries, the Plasma 5 workspace, or the Applications) develops during a normal release cycle, a lot of things happen. New and exciting features emerge, bugs get fixed, and the software becomes better and more useful than it was before. Thanks to code review and continuous integration, the code quality of KDE software has also tremendously improved. Given how things are improving, it is tempting to follow development as it happens.

Recently I’ve been setting up LDAP authentication on CentOS servers to give a shared authentication method to all the compute nodes I use for my day job. I use 389-DS as it’s in my opinion much better to administer and configure than openLDAP (plus, it has very good documentation). As I have a self built NAS at home (with openSUSE Tumbleweed), I thought it’d be nice to use LDAP for all the web applications I run there.

KDE has recently released the newest Release Candidate of the Applications 15.08 release. Among the new features and changes of this release, there is a technology preview of the new KF5-based KDE PIM suite (including reworked, faster Akonadi internals), new applications ported to KF5 (the most notable ones being Dolphin and Ark). After some consideration and thinking on how to allow users to test this release without affecting their setups too much, the openSUSE community KDE team is happy to bring this latest RC to openSUSE Tumbleweed and openSUSE 13.

Since [26th December 2005]({{ site.url }}/2005/12/up-and-running/), I’ve been runnning this blog with Wordpress. At the time there were little alternatives and finally I had got hold of a host (Dreamhost, at the time) that supported PHP and MySQL without being overly restrictive. 10 years later, things have somehow changed. The issue The main reason lies in how Wordpress has evolved over time: no, I’m not speaking about the subjective “bloat”, but the fact that it’s been moving towards a full-blown CMS, which is not what I have in mind to run my blog.

A lot has been happening on the KDE side of openSUSE… this post summarizes what’s been going on so far. Live media for Plasma 5 One of the most-often requested ways to test Plasma 5, given it can’t be coinstalled with the 4.x Workspace, is the availability of live images to test either in VM or bare metal without touching existing systems. Given that other distributions started doing so since a while, naturally openSUSE couldn’t stay still.

The ever-amazing Plasma team from KDEjust put out a new release of Plasma. I won’t spend much describing how big of an improvement it is - the release announcement at KDE has all the details needed to whet your appetite. And of course, now it’s the turn of distributions to get out packages for the users at large. This is also the case for openSUSE. The KDE:Frameworks5 repository hosts the new 5.

Following up onKDE’s announcement of the latest stable release, we have now packages available for 12.3 and 13.1 (a 13.2 repository will be made available after it is out). You will find them in the KDE:Current repository. Current users of this repository will get the new release automatically once they update. Why you should upgrade? You can take a look at the list of changes to get an idea. These fixes touch many important KDE applications, including KMail, Okular and Dolphin.

Congratulations to KDE (of which I’m proud of being a part of) for the newest release of the Plasma workspace! At the same time, the 4.x series has seen a new beta release, and the stable branch got updated, too. I’m betting a few people will ask “Are these available for openSUSE?” and of course the answer is yes, thanks to the efforts of the openSUSE community KDE team and the Open Build Service.

Since a couple of weeks the packages offered by openSUSE in the KDE:Unstable:Frameworks repository have undergone a series of changes. In particular, the packages now install to /usr. For the libraries (KDE Frameworks 5) this will mean a transparent change for the userbase as they are expected to be co-installable, but the workspace components (Plasma 5) will confict with the existing Plasma 4.11.x installation. What does this mean in practice? If you want to use Plasma 5 you will not be able to use a 4.

Requests to unlock KWallet automatically on login (assuming the wallet password and user password are the same), like gnome-keyring can do, have been going on for years: in fact, bug reports requesting this feature are quite old. Recently, thanks to the efforts of Alex Fiestas, a PAM module, which interfaces KWallet to the system authentication methods, has been developed. In parallel, the necessary glue code has been also added to the various parts of the KDE workspace so that it could make use of it.

This is a guest post by Raymond “tittiatcoke” Wooninck, with contributions from myself and Hrvoje “shumski” Senjan In the next hours the [KDE:Current]({{ site.url }}/2014/03/being-current/) repository will publish the latest release from KDE (4.13). As that this release comes with a big change (the new semantic search), we would like some simple steps in order to perform the right upgrade. Before the upgrade In order to migrate data automatically from the Nepomuk store to the new format, you will need Nepomuk up and running, and just for the time needed for the migration.

It is not news that openSUSE, through to the effort of the openSUSE community KDE team, offers several third-party repositories for those who want the latest software from KDE. Since a while, stable releases were offered in the KDE:Release:4x repositories, created with every major release of KDE software. These were meant to offer the latest and greatest to the users without having them to track KDE:Distro:Factory, which is instead used to track packaging for the next openSUSE release and is more in a state of flux.

Yesterday KDE released their first beta of the upcoming 4.13 version of Workspaces, Applications and Development platform. As usual with the major releases from KDE, it’s packed with a lot of “good stuff”. Giving a list of all the improvements is daunting, however there are some key points that stand out: Searching: KDE’s next generation semantic search is a prominent feature of this release. It’s several orders of magnitude faster, much leaner on memory and generally is a great improvement from the previous situation (this writer has been testing it for the past months and he’s absolutely delighted about it).

And so, finally openSUSE 13.1 is out of the door (I couldn’t celebrate like I wanted, as I’ve been very busy). This release has lots of improvements, and of course, the latest stable software from KDE. It is time (perhaps?) to look back and see what the team has done during this development cycle. With regards to the KDE software packaging, the past 8 months have seen quite an increase in the involvement of poeple from the community.

As you may know, there is an ongoing effort to rearrange and adjust the openSUSE KDE repositories. In line with the previously announced deletions, and more recent adjustments, a number of changes went into the organization and layout of the KDE repositories: KDE:Distro:Factory and KDE:Release:4xy will now hold the “core” KDE packages: this means the base Development Platform, Workspaces and Applications, and additional applications for a basic desktop experience.

Summer is ending soon (at least for those living in the northern hemisphere) and while usually cleaning is done during spring, the KDE team decided to do what I’d call… autumn cleaning of repositories. You may know that the KDE presence in openSUSE, aside being the default desktop, is quite a long one. In the past years different repositories were created by the members of the openSUSE KDE team (at the time mostly made up by KDE people hired by Novell) in order to review and test packages, like newer Qt versions, KDE software, and so on.

In the past few days, the openSUSE KDE team has been working hard, following the footsteps of the nice work done by the Kubuntu and Arch Linux communities, to provide Qt5 packages for the distribution. In fact, work was already done in the past, but the packages were not coinstallable with the existing Qt4 installation. Thanks to a renewed effort, the OBS holds now Qt5 packages that won’t overwrite the existing Qt4 install: they currently live in the KDE:Qt51 repository (Factory and openSUSE 12.

The latest release of the KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications (4.11) is around the corner: in fact, the last RC was recently made available. We’re almost there, but it doesn’t mean that testing and reporting should stop: on the contrary, it is needed even more to ensure that no bad bugs crawl up in the final release. As part of this effort, openSUSE packages for RC2 have been released through the OBS, and are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository.

The latest release from KDE moved from beta to RC stage, thus finding and reporting bugs is more important that ever. At the same time, the distribution packaging teams are also working in polishing their packages. As far as openSUSE is concerned (not dissing other distros, just mentioning the one I’m involved in ;), you can kill two birds with one stone by installing the packages provided in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository.

KDE released the second beta of the KDE Platform, Workspaces and Applications 4.11, and after the necessary time for the OBS to build packages from the released tarballs, packages are available for openSUSE 12.3 and openSUSE Factory. Like the previous beta, they are available through the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. 4.11.x is is targeted for inclusion in the upcoming openSUSE 13.1. So far 4.11 has been pretty stable for me, but you should never forget these packages are for testing and bug reporting purposes: don’t use them on production systems.

As a consequence of [the recent changes in the repositories]({{ site.url }}/2013/06/upcoming-changes-to-opensuse-kde-repositories), the openSUSE KDE team is happy to announce the availability of packages containing the first beta of the KDE Platform, Workspaces and Applications 4.11. Packages are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. As it is beta software, it may have not-yet-discovered bugs, and its use is recommended only if you are willing to test packaging (reporting bugs to Novell’s bugzilla) or the software (reporting bugs directly to KDE).

Since KDE has released the first beta of Platform, Workspaces, and Applications 4.11, there will be some changes in the packages offered in the openSUSE repositories. In short: KDE:Distro:Factory will now start tracking 4.11 betas and RCs: packages are being worked on. Use this version to test packages and to report bugs upstream. KDE:Release:410 has been decoupled from KDE:Distro:Factory. If you were using 4.10 packages from KDF, you’re highly encouraged to move to this repository.

These posts kind of sound like a broken record, right? ;) Anyway, since KDE has released new versions of Platform, Workspaces and Applications as part of the stable release cycle, thanks to the OBS we have packages available for openSUSE 12.2 and 12.3. The 4.10.4 update will also be released as an official update for 12.3 in due time. Where you can get the packages? Two places, as usual: KDE:Distro:Factory in case you are interested in contributing to packaging for the next openSUSE release; KDE:Release:410 (openSUSE 12.

KDE released 4.10.3 versions of the Platform, Workspaces and Applications yesterday, with more than 70 bugs being fixed. Notably: Several fixes in handling encrypted mails in KMail Fixes for KDEPIM syncing and ownCloud A number of improvements in Dolphin, including crash fixes Optimizations in the Plasma Workspaces [The full list](https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&bug_status=RESOLVED&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=CLOSED&bugidtype=include&chfieldfrom=2013-01-01&chfieldto=Now&chfield=cf_versionfixedin&chfieldvalue=4.10.3&order=Bug Number&list_id=638034) has other important changes. As usual, there are two different repositories from which you can get them:

KDE has released its monthly update for the 4.10 release, and after a brief wait while the Open Build Service worked over the released tarballs, the openSUSE KDE team is pleased to announce the availability of the 4.10.2 release packages for openSUSE 12.2 and 12.3. []({{ site.url }}/images/2013/04/757111961.png) Despite being a minor release, more than 100 bugs were fixed, in particular there were many KDEPIM fixes touching both the low level stack and KMail/KAddressbook/Kontact.

Hot on the heels of the announcement from KDE, the openSUSE KDE team is happy to announce the availability of packages for the latest stable release of the KDE Platform, Workspaces, and Applications. Packages are available in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository (which is where the packages to land in 12.3 are tested) for openSUSE Factory (soon to be 12.3) and openSUSE 12.2 and soon (when the Open Build Systen finishes rebuilding a number of packages) in the KDE:Release:410  repository for openSUSE 12.

During the discussions for the release of openSUSE 12.3, the topic of update notifications and applets was brought up again. Originally openSUSE shipped with a custom update applet, but since it was basically unmaintained, the decision was made to switch to Apper for openSUSE 12.2 The original Apper used in that version had a number of issues, which the upstream developer (Daniel Nicoletti) fixed in a newer version, which also had a lot of other improvments.

Following up on the announcement from KDE, the openSUSE KDE team is happy to announce the availability of 4.10 RC3 packages. Remember that they are packages meant for testing and reporting bugs, so that the next release will be as polished as possible. You will find the packages in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. An updated live media based on the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 ([see previous post]({{ site.url }}/2013/01/test-the-upcoming-opensuse-12-3-and-kde-workspace-applications-and-platform-4-10-rc2)) is also available (files named KDE4-4.

Following up on my previous post, a different type of image has been made by the openSUSE KDE community members. In particular, alin has created images sporting the same software from KDE (4.10 RC2) but using the upcoming openSUSE 12.3 as base. Download links: 32 bit version 64 bit version Release directory (in case the above links go 404; the files are named KDE4-.4.10.RC2-Live) These images are provided not only to test 4.

The 4.10 release for the KDE Development Platform, Workspaces and Applications is drawing nigh… as you may have read, there is now an additional release candidate in order to test some last-minute changes. Of course, the KDE developers can only do so much: it’s impossible to test all possible combinations. That is, unless the community at large helps by finding and reporting issues the developers can fix. But doing so requires a 4.

Yesterday Alex Fiestas showed on his blog a video of a recent development version of the KScreen library, created to handle easily multiple monitor setups in KDE, almost in an “automagic” way. As this is a project where configurations and setups are highly heterogeneous, a lot of testing is required to ensure things work reliably. Of course, you cannot ask a developer to have all sorts of screen combinations, but remember one of the strengths of FOSS: “many eyes make bugs shallow”.

openSUSE is migrating to the use of systemd for the upcoming 12.3 version, given the difficulties that emerged in trying to co-maintain two different init systems (SysV + systemd). While I am not going into the details of this choice (I leave this to more informed people), this has some consequences for software higher in the stack. As ConsoleKit is deprecated, systemd offers its own daemon to keep track of sessions and assigned seats in a system.

The KDE community has just released Beta 2 of the upcoming 4.10 release of the Development Platform, Workspaces, and Applications. Of course, distributions are providing binary packages for the adventurous… and how could the green distro be left out? In fact, it is not. Beta 2 packages were uploaded and built in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. Updated packages have also been submitted to the development version of openSUSE (Factory) as the ultimate goal is having 4.

Following up my [earlier post]({{ site.url }}/2012/10/whats-cooking-for-kde-in-opensuse-12-3-theming), the new openSUSE 12.3 theme has finally landed into the official openSUSE repositories  and will be part of the upcoming 12.3. A lot of work has gone into the new theme since I last posted about it, so this post will show how things look at the moment.

A few caveats:

• The theme targets the 4.10 release of the KDE Workspaces, so it may be not be perfect under 4.9;

• The default wallpaper has not been chosen yet.

Without further ado, let’s get down to seeing what’s improved.

Like everything, openSUSE is not perfect. Bugs crop here and there, or there is missing / quirky functionality that users may run into. Being a distribution of heterogeneous software, this means that bugs fall into these categories: Upstream bugs in the software shipped by openSUSE Bugs in the packaging Bugs in distribution-specific setups or that derive from interactions with these setups (e.g. kernel, low level software stack, etc.

Although the release of openSUSE 12.3 is yet to come, the people of the openSUSE community contributing to KDE are already at work to bring the best possible KDE experience for the new release.

Recently Fedora’s Lukas Tinkl pushed to kdelibs (for the 4.10 release) a patch that enabled Solid to talk to udisks2, which is a replacement for udisks. Fedora already moved to udisks2 (and killed HAL) and future GNOME releases will only use udisks2, so the need for a working backend was a necessity, and at the same time they acted like good open source citizens, and pushed the code both to 4.