Just finished - Kami Jigen Game Neptune V

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A few days ago I finally completed (after about 3 months) 神次元ゲームネプテューヌV, or “Kami Jigen Game Neptune V”, the latest instalment from Compile Heart in the Neptune franchise of PS3 games. It took quite a while (approximately 3 months), and I think it’s about time to wrap things up.

December 27, 2012

Testing KScreen packages available for openSUSE

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”.

December 15, 2012

Systemd and KDE Workspaces in openSUSE 12.3

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.

December 4, 2012

4.10 Beta 2 packages available for openSUSE

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.

December 2, 2012

Making KDE applications Python 3 friendly

When I’m not on forum duty or handling openSUSE-related contributions, I try to improve my code contributions to KDE, even though I’m by no means an experienced programmer (I program all day long in Python, but I’m still a biologist after all). For the upcoming 4.10 release I’ve been polishing up Python 3 support. As you may know, Python 3 isn’t the standard in many distributions (Arch Linux excluded), but despite the slow start, it is slowly gaining steam.

November 25, 2012

New theme for KDE openSUSE 12.3 is now in!

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.

November 12, 2012

openSUSE KDE Bug Squashing Days

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.

October 28, 2012

What's cooking for KDE in openSUSE 12.3 - theming

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.

September 29, 2012

Another story of a patch, or of bugs, investigation, and fixing

As others, bigger members in the KDE community say, “nobody will do it for you, and therefore they will”. The patch from the title comes from such a story. Let’s give some background first: I’m really a heavy activity user, especially when working. My home PC has about five activities, my work one 3, and I managed to compartimentalize the various “topics” that each activity does pretty well. After an update a couple of weeks ago from the latest code from KDE git, I started noticing weird behavior.

September 22, 2012

Story of a patch, or: united we stand

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.