BSmith1012: I love the simplicity and extra effort you put into making it flexible. I know how much you hate icon views, and yet still made it possible to use in your example, so I appreciate that.

I posted this in the kde Brainstorm ages ago. If you release something like the screenshot that can include all of my favorite applications as Icons, I’d prolly be happy with that and I feel like many others will appreciate it as well. Thanks for all of the hard work!

Answer: True, I’m not a fan of icon views, but there were a lot of requests to have those in both lancelot and kickoff. This didn’t take much effort now that we have QML. When this is finished, it will be rather easy to recreate kickoff, kickoff with icon view, or any other launcher you are used to. I do intend to create a few different layouts that will be shipped by default with the main launcher.

—

Fitzcarraldo: Lancelot (currently 1.9.5) is my launcher of choice, so I am interested to read about Lancelot 2. Can you give us a rough idea when Lancelot 2 might be released?

Answer: I’m not sure when it will be released. I don’t really expect it for the next version of KDE Plasma. I might publish a preview version out-of-kde-sc-schedule for testing purposes.

—

sir_herrbatka: Where the code is hosted? I would like to test it.

Answer: The code is currently at kde:scratch/ivan/lancelot-qml. The main applet is mostly for testing the infrastructure I’m making. In terms of features, it is nothing close to the current version of Lancelot, though it does look similar.

The important thing is that it will not screw up your regular installation – the applet is differently named.

While we all love and cherish our KDE browsers (Konq and rekonq) there are many users of Firefox and Chromium. And they can not use share-like-connect, they can not have their web-pages linked to activities, they can not …

Is there a brave soul in our community (or a few brave souls) that are willing to write a small addon for any of the aforementioned programs that will

• know when a URL is loaded in a tab
• know when the user switches between tabs
• know the windowID of the window in which the tab resides, and
• and report those events to the activity manager?

Talking to the activity manager is the easiest part of it all, it has C bindings, it is a d-bus service, so take your pick.

If you’re interested, please write to us on plasma-devel at kde.org

Now is the time to bring some of the features that proved to be useful to common Plasma users, and, for this, I’ll need help from everyone, be it brainstorming or even coding. This post is meant to introduce to you what technologies are going to be available to build upon.

You should post all your ideas to the KDE Workspace Vision part of our forums.

Linking the documents to activities

Background: One of the purposes of activities is to link documents (including web pages, images, etc.), applications, contacts etc. that are related to the activity so that you can access them faster. Apart from manually telling the system which resources belong to an activity, the goal is to have the system score the documents based on the number of times you’ve used them in a specific activity*.

So here are some of the ideas I plan to make reality.

• Manual linking of files by right-clicking them in dolphin.
• Linking via Share-Like-Connect applet – eventually, when most of our applications get patched to report the documents they open to the activity manager, we’ll know which document is in focus at any given time. This way, we’ll have global (in the panel) buttons to share the document, bookmark it, link it to the activity.
• Linking contacts from Kontact, Telepathy and similar
• Linking the highest scored documents automatically or semi-automatically
• Have the favourite applications section in menus dependent on the activity
• Rank krunner results according to the scores
• Browsing the resources that belong to the activity with Dolphin (and file open/save dialogue)
• Showing all that in the Shelf applet

* actually, it is a little bit more complex than that, but it is irrelevant for this purpose.

Other simpler things

• System settings module for advanced activity configuration – the name and icon setup plasma provides is a bit underwhelming
  • Setting the basic activity info, creating and deleting
  • Setting whether the activity is private (requires a password to be unlocked, data is encrypted) – see Encryption in KDE SC
  • Setting whether the usage statistics should not be collected in a specific activity at all, or only for certain applications

Dreams

• Automatic grouping of documents that relate to each other based on the usage statistics (for example, the literature you used while writing a scientific paper)
• …

Help

So, the thing that I need from all of our awesome users is to polish these ideas, create new and more awesome ones, etc.

Intro

Insanely enough, I decided to completely wipe out my current system and after quite some time reinstall Debian. I completely forgot how tiresome is reinstalling everything from scratch – all the packages needed by KDE SC, all the packages needed by me, and everything else. Even more, I’m used to installing the minimal system, and then installing xorg, …

So, when the initial installation was over, I decided to make a clean KDE build (like I haven’t lost enough time already) – and after a few attempts I managed to install just enough dependencies so that the stuff I want (or work on) works without a glitch.

eeePC as a graphics card

At the time I started to get pleased by my newly refreshed and cleaned system, my screen just went blank, and after a reboot, the computer made quite a few beeps before starting to boot the OS while leaving the screen blank.

One of the capacitors on my graphic card went crazy and had blown up. Since I needed to do some work, I couldn’t allow myself to be without access to the system, and using a much slower (eee)PC with a much smaller screen while my main system lies incapacitated (or incapacitor-ated) was a no-go.

The first solution was to do an ‘ssh -X’ from eeePC and connect my big screen to it. And this worked quite well except that VGA connector didn’t want to allow the full resolution of my screen so the picture was a bit blurry.

The is in a nutshell, the power of Linux and X11.

ATI

After I finished the things I needed to do, I hurried to the last open computer-store to get a new card. The last one left in the store was ATI’s HD6450, so I didn’t have any doubts which card to get.

I have to say that I was thrilled I’m getting rid of NVidia driver problems (although I didn’t really have any ) and getting into AMD’s world (after all I haven’t bought a single Intel’s CPU since 80286).

But, as per Murphy’s law, while KWin worked with all fancy effects (via the openGL backend), all openGL programs decided to claim that this driver doesn’t support openGL – at all. Even the simplest examples from the ‘Computer graphics’ course I teach.

After seeking the solution on the intertubes, and trying each and every one, I almost decided to quit and leave it like that. Fortunately, after a while, I /decided/ it was the problem with the fact I need fglrx-glx package which I can’t install because it would break quite a few other packages (and thus apt would uninstall them) including some qt4 stuff which required mesa-glx.

Then I decided to do the dirty thing – to simply overwrite mesa’s libGL.so* stuff with those from fglrx. Usually, this is not really a safe thing to do, but since openGL is a C library that has to conform to a few well-defined standards, all implementations need to be binary compatible, which in turn means those can easily be interchanged.

This and a few radeon.modeset=0 sprinkled in a couple of places made my system fully functional.

Outro

This morning I even decided to tear apart all the components from the case, clean them and resemble the system (cleaning the body as well as the soul – it’s a chán/zen thing )

Now I have something that works and feels as a completely new system.

So, what I’ve been up to? I’ve been finishing the backend stuff and the library for registering the “desktop events” aka opening a document, web page and similar. All that is contained in the activity manager, so all the recorded stats will be tied to specific activities.

Share-Like-Connect

One of the side effects of the /usage tracking/ is that we now know what document is currently being viewed/edited, so the Aaron’s S-L-C concept can finally come to life without using the fake dummy data.

Tasks Documents applet

This doesn’t exist yet, but when applications start reporting which documents they are showing, we’ll be able to make a fully document-oriented workspace for those that like that kind of stuff.

Zeitgeist integration

We (Nepomuk – Trueg and myself) and Zeitgeist people (Seif and Trever) had quite a few hours spent deciding the best way for the two systems to collaborate and I think we have done well. Apps that support Zeitgeist will automatically support us as well, and vice-versa. So, whether you are using a Gnome application in KDE, or KDE application in Gnome, it will just work(TM).

As you probably already know, I’m a sucker for fall-backs, so I still intend to make this work even if you disable one of the services. And it will work, but badly if you disable both of them.

Contour and Plasma Active

The thing worth mentioning is that I’m now a part-time member of the Contour team at basysKom, so you can expect these things to be finished faster than it was when I had to give focus to other non KDE-related projects.

Click for full resolution

Plasma themes

One of those was the promise of removing the fanciness from Plasma with ASCII art. The others include Glaze and Spoons themes.

Outsourcing

Because of this unfortunate situation, I’ve decided to give the theme creation up to the community. I’ve submitted the themes in question to gitorious at http://www.gitorious.org/kde-plasma-themes.

So, if you want to help, just clone the repository and start creating art. I would ask you not to fork the themes, but improve these ones – just make merge requests and I’ll accept them as soon as possible. Don’t forget to add yourself to the list of authors.

If you prove to be a serious contributor, you’ll get direct commit permissions to the whole repo.

git.kde.org

If you’re wondering why I didn’t use git.kde.org but Gitorious, the main reason is that the repo was created long before git.kde.org was even in plans, and I just haven’t blogged about it.

Pictures are worth a lot more than words so:

As you can see, the city was crowded, and they served weissbier and weisswurst.

I arrived to Tampere at 9PM – just in time to join the ongoing party in some fancy nightclub

Please notify me on IRC (or mail) when that happens… cheerio

Edit: AKISMET sucks!!!!
]]> http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/blog/2010/05/15/comment-voes-with-wp/feed/ 2