4.13 Beta 1 Workspaces, Platform and Applications for openSUSE: start the testing engines!

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).

January 4, 2014

An expedition in the QML realm

Among the different widgets I use on my desktop, there is a small one which tells me my current public IP address. The reason I’m having it is due to the fact that my own ISP uses a NAT for almost all its customers (don’t ask - long story) and so I need to keep tabs on my current IP, because it may have been blacklisted, and so on. Up to now I was using this plasmoid written in Python, but the code had several issues and used its own way of getting the public IP.

November 25, 2013

8 months with KDE and openSUSE - looking back after the 13.1 release

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.

November 2, 2013

KDE:Unstable:Playground is no more (or: adjustments in KDE repositories)

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.

September 13, 2013

KDE in openSUSE: repository and maintainership changes!

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.

August 6, 2013

Qt5 on openSUSE (including experimental KF5 packages)

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.

July 30, 2013

Last round of testing: 4.11 RC2 packages for openSUSE

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.

July 16, 2013

KDE releases 4.11 RC1, and openSUSE packages follow!

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.

July 1, 2013

4.11 beta 2 openSUSE packages available

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.

June 17, 2013

4.11 beta 1 packages available for openSUSE 12.3

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).