My space in the world

Following the first Kourse which is still hot 8) Kourse 2 is already out into wild. Do you want to contribute to KDE, but not sure whether to jump into coding straight away? Then this is what you must check out!

Kourse 2 will be focussing on creating Plasma screencasts. Have some questions in mind? Let me answer a few of them

What are screencasts and how are they useful?
For those who don’t know already, screencasts are video recordings of your desktop, aimed towards creating (audio) visual HOW-TOs of anything, say configuring a widget to perform in a certain way.
Why and how are they useful? Well, screencasts can be thought of an easier way to demonstrate a tutorial, maybe in some way an alternative to extensive documentation. Imagine reading a 10 page guide to setup your desktop or watching a 5 minute video: guess which one’s easier?
Want to see an example? Take a look at this.

How will we proceed with this?
Your mentor for the kourse will be einar, who will guide you through the whole process. This kourse will not need any coding (programming) skills. All you need is the recordmydesktop program and a vague idea how things should go in a screencast. If you think you need help with that, be free to ask for guidance, your mentor will be ready to help in the best possible way. Where should you ask? Let the kourse begin first..

What else should you know?
Well, you’d know most of the things as einar publishes his kourse draft. That would cover how to record your screencast (not only record it but make a good screencast). He would also explain to you other important characteristics of a screencast.

Where do the screencasts go once completed?
The screencasts will be uploaded to blip.tv – which hosts both free (OGG) and non-free (Flash) version of videos. You have to give your videos a kde4.2 tag on blip.tv video tags. Further instructions on einar’s draft.

How do I participate?
To participate in the Kourse 2 programme, you have to reply to this thread here: http://forum.kde.org/this-weekend-kourse-2-plasma-screencasts-t-22515.html (you have to register on the KDE Forum to do so)

Please note that we have kept a limit of 6 students who can participate in this programme. After we have 6 names on that thread, the thread will be closed, and so will the entries for this session. Unless we have a situation where one or more participants decline to contribute beforehand, we would not make any changes to the selection. Also, if we have more than 6 requests in the thread (in case we are not available to close the thread), the first 6 requests will be considered for participation.

Kourse 2 will not only be fun, but you would be contributing to a very aspect of KDE — documentation. So hurry!! Apply now before the entries are closed!

For any questions related to this programme, feel free to start a topic at the Feedback area of the forum. You can also find us on IRC – Channel #kde-forum on network freenode.

KDE Forum Klassroom Kourse 1 is in progress! This kourse is being led by msoeken & the topic for this is “Fixing KSnapshot bugs”.
The Kourse started with 5 bugs as aim. Students would be required to fix them and will be guided by msoeken while doing so.
But thanks to the KSnapshot developers, three of those bugs were found fixed already! Beta 2 indeed has many bugfixes.
msoeken came up with 4 wishlist bugs he had in “stock”, just in case if they are needed. So presently, Kourse 1 has 6 open challenges for it’s participants and the kourse is in progression. We have 5 students participating, among which, 2 of them found us on IRC and were willing to contribute. Since now there is a significant amount of work for the participants, the kourse may extend for a few days.
After the patches would be checked and found effective, msoeken would do what is planned.

So stay tuned!

References:

• Kourse thread: http://forum.kde.org/-klassroom-fixing-ksnapshot-bugs-t-16626.html
• Mentor: http://forum.kde.org/msoeken-u-494.html
• Participants:
  1. http://forum.kde.org/comawhite-u-795.html
  2. http://forum.kde.org/dhanasekar-u-2963.html
  3. http://forum.kde.org/jernejovc-u-229.html
  4. http://forum.kde.org/linex-u-2985.html
  5. http://forum.kde.org/peterix-u-2947.html

I made a small KDE 4.2 counter. The small icons in the counter indicate (left to right) a great interface, security (good ol’ *nix), ease of usage, customizability and support that KDE offers.

This one is just a static image. Click on the image to view the counter on my webserver.

You can download the counter from here. Please note that the counter would suit on pages with white background only. As I made it in a bit of a hurry, the oxygen tooltip was not given a transparent background.

Also, special thanks to Arne Kamola for helping out to make it better.

I’m pretty much excited about KDE 4.2, though beta 2 has been more than satisfactory

Changelog:
As I realized that one with a transparent background was needed (2 mails and a blog post asking for a dark background compatible one), I have changed the archives to work with any background color.

Enjoy!

For all those who don’t know already, we have the channel #kde-forum (Network: irc.freenode.net) set up.

What is the purpose of this channel?

• #kde-forum is not for technical support related to KDE and it’s applications (#kde is for that purpose).
• #kde-forum is a team channel for Forum Staff and it’s members (as well as non members).
• It is also the home for our forum’s IRC bot sKreamer

What can I ask/discuss there?
Any forum related queries are welcome. You can discuss about all activities going on at the forums, Klassrooms and kourses (though the best place for kourse discussions would be at the kourse discussions area within the Klassroom forum), forum design as well as forum teams. You can definitely discuss registration problems, MyBB bugs (KDE Forum is powered by MyBB boards), forum/subforum requests, as well as user specific issues.

So all those who participate (and also those who don’t ) at KDE Forums are welcome to join us there.

We now have badgets for KDE Developers that go with your profile information next to your posts.

So if you want to be added to the Developers group, visit Group Memberships in your UserCP and select to join the Developers usergroup, explaining your role in KDE Development in the Reason area.

This weekend, KDE Forum will have it’s first Klassroom session. This one would be involving coding (patching/bug fixing).
msoeken will present 5 KSnapshot bugs and will help the participating students to fix them.

As this is the first session, a limit of 5 students has been kept.
If you wish to participate in the session, reply to this thread as soon as possible. The thread will be locked as soon as there are 5 participants (or in any case, the first 5 will be selected).
Also, don’t forget to read the prerequisites mentioned in the thread.

The drupal based Ideatorrent (developed by Nicolas Deschildre) which will be used by the next version of Ubuntu Brainstorm, has been adopted by BBC at it’s idea store:

http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com

Nicolas (nand) is now an admin on the above mentioned BBC Idea Store.
Congratulations Nicolas!!

Not long from now, KDE Forum will start it’s Klassroom sessions.

What is it about?
Each Klassroom session will be held with a pre-defined aim. It would help all participating users to make use of existing documentation and guidance from “Mentors” to work on small projects related to:

• Coding
• Documentation
• Artwork
• Translation etc.

Who are the mentors?
Following are the mentors who will be starting the Klassroom sessions:

• einar
• msoeken
• sebas
• Zarin

How do I participate?
So if you always wanted to contribute to KDE but didn’t know how to, here’s the best chance for you! And if you’re feeling confident enough already, don’t forget to subscribe to the Klassroom as soon as the first one is out.

You can find the official announcement here.

Not as much as the last time, but this time, we have the following set up.
1. An official forum for project Eigen has been set up. The developer himself would be moderating the forum. The forum can be found under: Developers -> Libraries & APIs -> Eigen.

Link to developer/moderator’s profile: http://forum.kde.org/bjacob-u-2883.html
Link to forum: http://forum.kde.org/eigen-f-74.html
I also posted an announcement on the forum itself. Find it here.

2. We now have a new bar plugin at the forums. So anything dropped in by out bot “aggregator” at the releases area and/or all forum announcements will be displayed at the forum homepage.

3. Oxygenation: Oxgenation of the forums is almost complete. If you are a member of the forum and you feel that we missed out something, please open a thread at the Feedback section or PM me or neverendingo.

KDE 4.2 beta 2 is out! The official announcement can be found here.
Got this upgrade to KDE 4.2 beta 2 (KDE 4.1.85) on 18th midnight. After a ~108 MB upgrade and a reboot, there have been many positive changes. Of the numerous upgrades, I noticed these:

1. The systray notification daemon fix. Earlier, the daemon showed a green up/down arrow in the systray for showing/hiding the daemon. Clicking on the notification window/pausing the transfer would crash the whole plasma workspace. Now, there is a modification to the appearance of the daemon. The notification is *much* stable. It does not crash anymore. I can successfull stop, pause and resume my transfers from the daemon itself.

2. Thumbnail previews for folder-view have been fixed. Earlier, it would not successfully show thumbnails for some png’s and jpeg’s. Now everything looks perfect. I can choose which thumbnails to display and which not (choose, as in select the file formats to display the thumbnail for).

3. Keyboard shortcuts have been fixed. Now all my global shortcuts work. That means I can take screenshots by pressing “Prt Scr” … yay!!

4. The calendar plasma widget has been modified to look better. Earlier, it was a cluttered look, but now, it looks better. What I see is the spacing has been increased and made uniform:

5. Gwenview crop tool has also been fixed. Now when I crop a portion of an image, the selector does not go out of the image scope (boundary). Earlier, I had to be careful in cropping a portion of an image close to it’s boundary.

6. KWin effects: Significant changes have been made to the kwin effects. They now work smoother with EXA rendering method. I have now removed the forcing of XAA. Even gtk apps like firefox also do well with EXA.
I also see a bunch of new plugins working, like the desktop sphere, cylinder, the magic lamp (though this was working in beta 1 also).

7. Grouping has been polished. Manual grouping still is broken, but forcing of rows and auto grouping works perfectly.

8. The plasma menu (the cashew at the top right side) has also been fixed. Now it does not become bigger each time it is opened!

9. KRunner has added functionality viz spell checking, web-history, a smart unit converter, calculator and many more:

10. Pinheiro‘s AIR wallpaper looks great. With the latest trunk, you would see this wallpaper as a new addition.


^^ This was a screeny from my friend neverendingo‘s desktop posted here at the KDE forums.

So that would be what all I could notice in a day. With added stability, beta 2 is a must try. It has so much more than the 4.1.x releases that you will definitely be surprised and more importantly, pleased! It works like a charm on this old laptop of mine with a GMA900 onboard
Now I’m eagerly waiting for the final release