Yesterday I woke up to the news that Canonical are no longer going to fund Riddell to work on Kubuntu. I've trying to figure out what that means for KDE and for community Linux generally.

Disclaimer: I work in the same role as Jonathan at SUSE, a competing Linux company that sponsors the openSUSE project. This is my personal opinion, not that of the openSUSE Board or SUSE Linux GmbH.

I'm sad for Jonathan personally. He has put a lot of his lifeblood into Kubuntu over the years, at no little cost to himself, and to be pulled off one's favourite project hurts. The same thing could happen to me if the powers that be decide, so I can easily empathise with him.

In the bigger picture, I have to say that this doesn't surprise me at all. For Canonical, Kubuntu fulfilled its purpose a few years ago already. Kubuntu, and the other official Ubuntu derivatives, have always been a spoiler move to tie up community contributors who believed in the early community-centric image of Ubuntu, but who didn't agree with the main Ubuntu's direction. Otherwise, there was the risk that Ubuntu design decisions would polarize the Linux community and send people towards Ubuntu's competitors. With the derivatives, they are safely occupied under the big tent of the Ubuntu brand.

If we look back at the Ubuntu game plan as history neatly lays it out for us, we have

1. Establish the Ubuntu brand amongst early adopters (check, by about 2005)
2. Expand it to the wider Linux user base (check, by about 2007)
3. Make Ubuntu the default Linux for non-technical users (2009)
4. Tie up a paying market. Initial targets have been enterprise desktop Linux (maybe next year ;)) or consumers in the massmarket netbook segment (but that was squashed by tablets and Microsoft rounding up the manufacturer back to the XP prison), and now they are aiming at embedding into consumer electronics (TVs) and will probably snare a tablet OEM as a cloud OS (hell, if KDE can do it...) or a bookseller or someone who wants a platform to digitally sell something else off of.
5. Profit
6. Buy more spaceflight (Probably. For some, 5) is enough)

Somewhere after 1), the massive demand for KDE on Ubuntu in KDE's main territories (Germany, via the ubuntu.de forums, which IIRC threatened an unofficial fork) caused Canonical to realise that it was better to control a large dissenting minority with some token gestures than to have them really doing their own thing. So Jonathan, at that point a KDE packager at Debian, was hired, and Mark Shuttleworth did his salesman job at a couple of KDE events making some insubstantial promises (If I had a dollar for every KDE eV board member at the time who told me "But Mark has promised to install and use Kubuntu on his workstation" multiplied by every Ubuntu developer overheard chuckling that "But they don't know that Mark never uses his workstation, he's always on a notebook"...), a few community people got flights to events, and Kubuntu was born, and legitimised by the then-leaders of the KDE community.

Once 2) was consolidated, Kubuntu was redundant to Canonical, but on the average professional Linux hacker's salary, Jonathan was an affordable luxury. Now, I suspect that with the trend at Canonical to develop more and more in-house to chase 4) rather than just distribute what the FLOSS community provides, putting paid man-hours on a mature product is no longer a good way to spend engineering budget.

By cheaply tying up competitors' resources, Kubuntu has hindered KDE's overall growth via other distributions and balkanized the KDE community. It can be argued that Kubuntu has brought users and contributors to KDE as part of the rapid initial growth of Ubuntu, and Kubuntu has been a success in focussing their developers on improving KDE, but this came at the price of cementing KDE in the role of a second class environment in the eyes of everyone who came to Linux via Ubuntu. I suspect that the GNOME community, which previously surfed the wave of Ubuntu's growth, will feel the pinch of necessity as Canonical moves towards its endgame, and having already been displaced as the default desktop for an inhouse development, will move further towards just being an anonymous organ donor to Unity and subsequent productisable UIs.

Why am I writing this? I don't want to be so crass as to just say 'come to my project instead'. I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest that you should have no illusions about what your community Linux distribution means to the businesses that sponsor it.

For openSUSE, it's some engineering contribution to and testing of SUSE enterprise products' codebase, and supporting the enterprise brand via a halo effect from the community brand. In setting up the openSUSE project, SUSE has been militant in giving the community complete control of the project and the distribution that comes out of it. Call it an insurance policy or a lifeboat, but by opening and freeing all the tools that create openSUSE (as well as the source code), we assure that the results of 20 years of work are indefinitely available. SUSE is secure enough in its business and believes strongly enough in free software to do this with the rootstock of its enterprise products, because the modular, federated Open Build Service allows SUSE to derive enterprise products from openSUSE without having to steer it.

Hola.

Resulta que en azares diversos del destino, tenia un par de laptops: una "pc", con linux y windows y una macbook unibody (de las metalicas que no eran pro). La primera ya tenia casi un par de años, mientras que la otra ya tenia casi 4 años. Por ello, intente buscar opciones para venderlas y renovar los equipos.

Finalmente, cuando las vendi, comence por comprar una pc, dado que por en el trabajo tengo asignada una mac. Hoy fui a la Microsoft Store en California, que de hecho, esta en un "mall", frente a la Apple Store.

Les quiero contar la experiencia.

Primero, las instalaciones son muy amplias, tan amplias como las Apple Store. Sin embargo, como siempre pasa en PCs, el numero de opciones era mucho mas grande.

Estaba buscando una nueva "ultrabook", que es muy similar a la macbook air, un esfuerzo de ingenieria que Intel esta impulsando con diversos vendedores, precisamente para poder tener un estandar tan alto como mac.

En lo personal, Acer me ha salido muy buena marca, por lo que buscaba una S3 de Acer. La S3 tiene la particularidad de un disco duro hibrido, es decir, tiene dos discos duros, uno de estado solido para el sistema operativo y algunas operaciones como el vaciado de la memoria actual al disco de estado solido, mientras que el disco de datos es precisamente un disco de 320GB normales. Dicho sea de paso, el disco de estado solido es de 20GB, suficiente para el sistema operativo y el sistema de recuperacion.

Para no hacer mas largo el choro, me la encontre a un super precio. A solo 799 dolares, pero con una tarjeta de 200 usd de regalo. Entonces en terminos reales, salia en 599. Una ganga. Los 200 de regalo lo ibamos a invertir en una serie de accesorios que ya pensabamos comprar, por lo que "nos lo ahorramos".

El proceso fue bastante bueno, y el sistema traia incluido una instalacion de Microsoft "especial", llamada Microsoft Signature (que basicamente, es una instalacion nueva, sin bloatware ni madres de esas que instala el fabricante --como ofertas de antivirus que son choro--) y la maquina vuela. El Windows 7 va con madre con esta configuracion.

Ahorita ya le instale lo necesario para correr el sistema de desarrollo para Windows Phone, y estoy en proceso de instalar lo necesario para el desarrollo en Android.

Solo le falta poder correr el Snow Leopard en una maquina virtual y ya estaria del otro lado. Ojala se pueda.


En resumen, si tienen oportunidad de visitar una Microsoft Store, haganlo! Es una experiencia interesante.

It is time to step back and look again at few applications that I use.

KMail2, the most recent incarnation of a mail client software KMail, is slow on pretty current hardware that consists of Quad Core 2.66 and 8 GB RAM. I have to wait longer to see an email then with single core 1250 MHz Athlon on 1.5 GB RAM. 

I can see my Inbox filling up while mail filters struggle to deal with incoming emails  and deliver them to respective folders. That never happened in old KMail, in other words serious step back.

Transition is not completed as all mails are not imported.  I guess that my mix of mailbox and maildirs was too much for simple mind of KMail migration tools. I landed with mix because on old computer mailbox storage was far faster then maildir, so all large folders were converted to mailbox.

For instance migrating Thunderbird based mail system is just a bit longer then plain move of its directory from one installation to the other. 


Apper, the latest rewrite of PackageKit frontend for KDE, managed to annoy me more then any previous. With its default settings and bugs, it was more distraction then help.

In normal circumstances YaST Software Management, or zypper, when they spot that package management is locked, they will:

• give you warning that is locked
• ask you if you want them to ask another process to quit
• if you want, they will send  appropriate signal to process
• another process quits and releases lock

This works fine between zypper and YaST, but not with Apper. You see every time the same PID that ignores messages. In the moment it was asked to quit it was refreshing repositories metadata and that process  can be stopped at any moment with only drawback that you have to repeat it later. 

When you attempt to stop it manually with:
it will be restarted by KDE service manager and start scanning for updates extending package management lock. In this case PID is changing, as previous Apper instance actually exits, but new is started almost instantly, preventing you to use YaST Online Updates (YOU) needed to actually run updates that Apper was unable to do. To end daily wrangling I removed Apper from installation. 

In a recent email is mentioned that it can be disabled using configuration utility Configure Desktop, which in email is called systemsettings. Also, I took time to explain this in a wiki page  http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Apper_troubleshooting .

To be clear, I'm not opposing to refresh package management with design that is easier for new users. My problem is that new software must have very easy to find Quit button, not some option buried in depth of System Settings, that even experienced users have trouble to find. 

PS. Apper is back on my computer, although it is not used right now, not even as notification daemon. 
I see some improvements in the interface, like list of repositories, which is very cute, but also usability glitch with configuration hidden behind wrench, with no text, while other settings have text :) 

I found out late that openSUSE Edu is on a SourceForge main page as a project of the month.

Congratulations to small, but skilled and diligent team that is keeping high quality of openSUSE Education since its beginning.

You might still remember some of my blogs about our new and shiny MS Visio import filter in the upcoming LibreOffice 3.5.0.

But what about 3.6.0? Is it going to be an exciting version too? Well, the answer depends on what kind of things excite you generally, but for sure, there will be a lot of goodness as usual to make the best free office suite even better.

In my free time, I have been working for some time already on the next graphics import filter for LibreOffice. This time it will be a CorelDraw import filter. The horse-power is a library, libcdr. In the same way as libvisio, libcdr reuses the API of libwpg and thus is easily pluggable into LibreOffice reusing all the ODG generator classes of the current writerperfect module. The importer is currently part of the git master tree.

You might be already shouting: "Where are the screenshots?" I know that a picture speaks louder then hundred words, and so here you are served:

Simple and more complex shapes in CorelDraw 7

The same shapes imported into LibreOffice Draw.

As you can see, it is an initial implementation, which cannot but get better. If you want to participate in this adventure, you can drop around at our IRC channel #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net where a community of smart and friendly developers can direct you.

Stay tuned for more nice pictures as this project advances.

It’s been a little over a month since the last update and as always there has been progress :-) First let’s get some of the numbers out of the way, currently we have 4202 packages built successfully, with 120 failed which is leading to 582 unresolvable. Remember this is for a full openSUSE Factory (12.2) build. Not bad, but we still have a way to go if we want to have an ARM port ready for 12.

FOSDEM 2012 is just round the corner and, as you might know, LibreOffice will have a DevRoom this year too. And, as it was already publicized, your servant and Eilidh McAdam of libvisio fame will attend too. The goal of this event will be to help you to become a LibreOffice developer, by helping you to get your first contact with the code from inside.

How to prepare for the event?

In order to give as many community members the possibility to speak, the presentations will not take more then 15 minutes each. But we will be there for one-to-one contacts and hacking goodness. If you are interested in contributing to our new Visio import filter, or the upcomming Corel Draw and MS Publisher filters, here is what you can do:

1. Find a bug that is bothering you in the current Visio import filter, or some simple feature that the importer currently does not support
2. Check out the following libraries:
   • master branch of libwpd (git clone git://libwpd.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libwpd/libwpd)
   • STABLE-0-2-0 branch of libwpg (git clone -b STABLE-0-2-0 git://libwpg.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libwpg/libwpg)
   • master branch of libwps (git clone git://libwps.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libwps/libwps)
   • master branch of libvisio (git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/libvisio), and
   • master branch of libcdr (git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/libcdr)
3. Build them as system libraries and install them in the same order.
4. Then build LibreOffice according to these instructions. The important thing is to use those system libraries that you just built. To do so, be sure you added to the configure flags
   • --with-system-libwpd
   • --with-system-libwpg
   • --with-system-libwps
   • --with-system-libvisio
   • --with-system-libcdr

With this kind of build, you will be ready to make the most from your Brussels weekend. Nevetheless, you can drop around at our IRC channel #libreoffice-dev channel at irc.freenode.net for more information and ideas.

Starting to do it instead of planning to do it ...

... is the best way to enter the FOSS development. That is why your servant and Eilidh will be around to hold your hand with debugging and finding way to implement your favourite features. We will answer your questions about the library design. We will point you to the place in the code where your bug might linger. And for more complicated stuff, we will debug it with you.

Don't expect us to give you a fish, but we will certainly teach you how to catch it by yourself. And in the same token, you will become a contributor inside a community of smart people that is fun to hang and hack with.

See you in Brussels the 4^th and 5^th of February 2012.

:set expandtab

Bazekiel 25:17 - The path of the righteous coder is beset on all sides by the stupidity of management and the tyranny of evil code. Blessed is he who, in the name of efficiency and good builds, migrates his work through the valley of changesets. For he is truly his project’s dev’er and the tester of new modules. And I will strike down upon thee with git blame and revert those who attempt to check in tabs to my projects. And you will know I am the Nerd when I post crap about you.

Not sure who wrote this little gem, paraphrasing a quote from Pulp Fiction which in fact is a paraphrased verse from the christian bible. I can’t recall who really posted this (“first”) but last time i saw it it was shared in #vim by Barry Arthur (bairui).

Beim Versuch den Simfy Desktop Player zu installieren überraschte zypper gerade mit folgender Meldung:

2 neue Pakete zu installieren.
Gesamtgröße des Downloads: 22,4 MiB. Nach der Operation werden zusätzlich 47,5 MiB belegt.
Fortfahren? [j/n/?] (j): j
Ungültige Antwort 'j'. [j/n/?] (j): j

Bleibt die Frage, was er damit sagen wollte:

• Diese Software willst du eigentlich gar nicht verwenden?
• Heißt ja, wirklich immer ja?
• …