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.

Plasma 5

Plasma 5 can be installed from two different repositories:

• KDE:Frameworks5, which has the latest (and only one, for now ;) official stable release (you will also need KDE:Qt5 if you use openSUSE 13.1; see instructions at the link);

• KDE:Unstable:Frameworks, which hosts git snapshots.

As the latter is under heavy development, it is not recommended unless you truly know what you are doing.

Also, packages are mutually exclusive with the 4.x workspace. Installing Plasma 5 will uninstall the 4.x workspace. To revert, simply reinstall the 4.x workspace packages (kdebase4-session should suffice).

Don’t forget, if you use Plasma 5 packages, to report bugs in the software to KDE directly (or you can use the official discussion forum) and packaging ones to Novell’s Bugzilla.

4.14 betas

You will find the newest beta from the 4.x series in the KDE:Distro:Factory repository. Building for openSUSE 13.1 (along with Factory) has been enabled in order to get widespread testing.

As this is a beta, although very stable, do not use it on production systems unless  you know what you are doing. The same recommendations as Plasma 5 apply for reporting bugs.

You can also join the discussion on the KDE Community Forum’s beta releases area.

Latest 4.13 release

KDE:Current hosts the latest release (4.13.3) from the stable 4.13 branch. If you have the repository enabled you will automatically get it once you update packages.

Go ahead and enjoy the latest and greatest from KDE!

In the first week of August 45 KDE people will meet at Randa in the Swiss mountains. They will spend a week of their free time and an uncountable amount of passion and dedication to work on free software. It needs money to bring them together and make the best out of their energy. You can help. We are running a campaign to make this happen. It ends today. Please donate now.

I had the opportunity to be at Randa in 2011. I have been at lots of KDE sprints over the years. Randa is one of the very special ones. There is an amazing level of energy, the buzzing atmosphere of getting things done, a deep sense of purpose. Randa is a good place to create free software.


Part of that is the environment. In the middle of the mountains with not much around than the impressive nature of the Swiss Alps, you feel physically focused on what's important. Everybody is living in the same house for a week, eating, sleeping, and hacking. There are no distractions, there is a quietness which is inspiring.

Another part is the deep commitment of Mario, the organizer of the meeting. He puts in a lot of personal energy. He even dragged in his family and friends. He equipped the house with WLAN. During the meeting he tries hard to create the best possible environment for all the volunteers who come to Randa, so they can focus on creating free software and all what is around that.

With this in place, magic happens. KDE Frameworks 5 was started at Randa. The famous tier diagram was created there. One of the projects I have been working on, Inqlude, originated there. Sebas came up with the name, the idea was discussed and prototyped, and on the train home I wrote the first version of the web site, inspired and motivated by the energy from the meeting. Lots of other good stuff originated from Randa.


All this is only possible with the help of all of you. Many people put in their passion, energy, vacation, free time. But it also needs money to bring people together who otherwise couldn't afford it. You can help with a donation.

Are you a KDE user? Do you use KDE software for work or leisure? You can help the community to sustain the development of the software you use. You can give something back with a donation.

Are you a KDE contributor or have been one in the past? You have experienced what a difference meetings such as the one at Randa can make. Maybe you have met your employer or your employees at a KDE sprint. Maybe you started as a student in the KDE community and now have found your dream job as a software developer. You know what it means to learn and grow in the KDE community. You can help, you can give back, you can contribute with a donation.

Do you care about freedom? You want to be in control of your software and your privacy. You want to be able to study your software to see what it does, be able to change it and help others by giving them the changes as well. KDE is committed to this for more than 17 years now, to protect the freedom of users and contributors, and give access to great technology to everybody. Eva Galperin said in her Akademy keynote last year: "You are the developers. You are our last and only hope. Save us". That's what meetings such as Randa help to do. You can support it with a donation.

Please donate now.

Google Summer of Code 2014 reached its mid term last week and I am proud to announce that all of the students from openSUSE have successfully passed their mid term evaluations

In other news, the openSUSE Project will be holding its first openSUSE Summit in mid-october. It is an exciting news, and anyone who is willing to contribute can do so.

On a personal front, the last 2 weeks have been very laid back and I need to improve on my management skills, lets see.

PS : Writing regular blog posts, is leading me to a place where I dont know what else can I share, maybe a few ideas can help.

Recently, I discovered BitTorrent Sync, which seems to satisfy most of my file syncing demands. It's encrypted client-side, cross-platform and works behind NATs and firewalls. While it is currently still proprietary (who cares, really), it is available for many devices. Besides the usual Windows / Mac binaries, you can find it on Android's Play Store. … Continue reading BitTorrent Sync on openSUSE

End of last week, we have released version 1.6.1 of the ownCloud Client, the desktop tool that does file syncing with your ownCloud. Read on the Desktop Client page how to get and install it.

The recommendation is to update your installation to this version. The previous version 1.6.0 had great new features, first and foremost the parallel up- and download of files and a way more performant handling of the local sync journal. That required a lot of code changes. Unfortunately that also brought in some bugs which are now fixed with the 1.6.1 release.

On the windows platforms, we experienced a memory leak that over time let the memory consumption of the client grow. Also, a problem in the Qt5 library that we ship for windows caused the problem that under some circumstances the wrong encryption lib was loaded, so that some people saw SSL problems on Windows.

And there were crashes. Users kept on reporting that the client was crashing after some time on windows, without a special reason. None of the developers was able to reproduce that or ever saw that. We asked for backtraces, which also can be produced on windows. Even though the backtraces looked similar, we did not find an obvious reason for the crashes. Finally, by reading through all involved code levels again and again, Olivier was able to spot some code in libneon that, again under special circumstances, could cause crashes on win.

It was a one line fix, we quickly built test packages, people tested, and finally the crashes were gone (the patch to libneon is on its way to upstream of course).

All that is now fixed in 1.6.1.

What does that show? There not very much little “easy” bug findings any more. That is similar to the soccer world championship, where the coaches keep telling that there are no “easy opponents” any more nowadays, which is also true. These tricky problems we face in the client are hard to find, require time, often special setups if they are reproduceable at all, and advanced debugging skills. Very challenging, very much fun. But that also requires very much patience from the people who suffer from that bugs. We keep on asking questions, ask to test new daily builds and need time to investigate stuff, and more time to release once we have the fix.

Thank you all for helping in this situation, not giving up, for again testing another daily build, reporting back, trying again. That is really big.

Although the IMF 2014 already took place over a month ago, it is still time to mention the publication which has been presented there:

Post-Mortem Memory Analysis of Cold-Booted Android Devices

Both the paper and the corresponding presentation slides are online (click links or see publications).

The paper was created in cooperation with the Department of Computer Science at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. I herewith thank the other authors Christian Hilgers, Tilo Müller and Michael Spreitzenbarth. Especially for presenting the paper at the conference during my absence.

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 4.11.x Plasma Workspace.  The move was made to ease maintenance and packaging, as it meant dropping a number of hacks, and also to make KF5 + Plasma 5 packages suitable for inclusion in openSUSE Factory.  At the same time, the 4.11.x workspace packages were adjusted to reduce the number of components conflicting, so that applications depending on workspace libs (such as KDevelop) would remain on the system also with P5 installed.

We’ve also said this many times but it’s worth repeating: Plasma 5 will not be the default in openSUSE 13.2; the stable, LTS release 4.11.x will (as a note: 4.11.x because the workspace did not increase its version number since becoming LTS, while the Development Platform and the Applications are at 4.13 at the moment).

That said, if you are feeling brave, feel free to try out Plasma 5… and don’t forget to report bugs!

P.S.: Most thanks go to Hrvoje “shumski” Senjan, who did most (if not all) of the packaging work.

P.P.S.: If you like what KDE is doing, please consider supporting the Randa Meetings 2014.

We are happy to announce coming of Scilab to openSUSE Factory. This means that Scilab will be included into standard repository of next openSUSE release – 13.2.

If you want to use Scilab right now, you need to add science repository or use Scilab 1-click install.

Many thanks to Atri Bhattacharya and  Ibrahim Erturk for great work!

Scilab is a scientific software package for numerical computations providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications which includes hundreds of mathematical functions with the possibility to add interactively programs from various languages (C, C++, Fortran…). It has sophisticated data structures (including lists, polynomials, rational functions, linear systems…), an interpreter and a high level programming language. Matlab and Maple files can be converted.

Hi,

recently, I pushed a commit that speeds up the update of an osc project
working copy, if most of the packages in the working copy are already up to
date (that is no update has to be performed).
The following table shows the improvements of the new code (in terms of
wall-clock time). Both project working copies were already up to date
and the packages in the home:Marcus_H project were unexpanded.

project       # number of packages  #    old code # new code
home:Marcus_H                   66        51.135s    10.653s
d:l:r:e                       1245     7:07.07min    17.804s

(the numbers for the devel:languages:ruby:extensions (d:l:r:e) project
were kindly provided by darix – thanks!).

Technically, we just reduced the number of http requests for packages
that are already up to date by using the backend’s getprojectsourceinfo
call (/source/project?view=info&package=pkg_1…&package=pkg_n).
Note: currently, such a reduction is not possible for packages that have
a _service file, because a small change in the backend is needed (see [1]).
Consequently, there are no time improvements for such packages.

If you want to test the new code, use the osc package from the
devel:tools:scm repo (http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/devel:/tools:/scm/).
Feedback is always welcome!

Next, my plan is to improve the speed of an update of a single package
working copy (again by reducing the number of http requests).

[1] http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-buildservice/2014-06/msg00067.html

Si si, sincronizar las notas-tareas de GTG con Dropbox. Rapidamente, los pasos que copie de otro blog Despues de instalar gtg y cargar algunas tareas, hacer estos sencillos pasos: mkdir ~/Dropbox/gtg mv ~/.local/share/gtg/* ~/Dropbox/gtg/ rm -rf ~/.local/share/gtg ln -vsf ~/Dropbox/gtg ~/.local/share/gtg Y listo, a probar si funciona la sincronizacion Robado desde El AtareaoMás