Quite a pleasure to be slammed into a conference room with many like-minded individuals... all united to the common goal to make things suck less.

After day one of brainstorming about all the ways fedora falls short of anything resembling an ideal, I felt more than a wee bit... down.  The challenge here was to persevere to find commonalities, and the best path forward to find the light again.  By day 3, I think the collective group did just that, hammering out some interesting proposals.

Now it's time to elicit even more community input and feedback.  Together, we can all help to finish what was started here.


For giggles, can you guess who said each of the following?  Sorry, I wasn't smart enough to record or remember enough to get a choice quote for everybody, but here's what I've got:

we all know you have the internet in your pocket...

please excuse me, I'm having a release moment

#$##! google, I can't use my #$#!!@# phone.

<girlish laughter>Yay!  It's my spiffy new laptop!

There's a boot on my car!

(waving hands in a large arc...) I'm erecting my SOP (someone else's problem) shield

Your connections are all fine

At long last, koffice-2.0.0 is released. Congratulations all around.

For fedora users interested in trying it out, current plans are to include koffice2 in Fedora 12, and unofficial packages are available from the kde-redhat project for Fedora 10/11 (currently in the unstable repo, as these replace the official/stable koffice1).

During some juicy irc discussion earlier today, I had a need to check the access stats of our very own kde-redhat repos, and lo and behold there were ~30k unique ips monthly (since the beginning of 2009).   Whoa.  Who are all you crazy people?  :)  More importantly, fedora users, I'd like to hear from you why you are using our testing and unstable repos so much.    Feedback here or on fedora-kde list most appreciated.

My own self-serving guesses are that folks just love helping us test out all the latest-and-greatest in fedora-kde land, but I'd still rather hear it from the horse's mouth.

p.s.  At the risk of loosing my geek membership card, no, I have not yet seen the new Star Trek flick.  Yet.

Many thanks to all involved tracking down the qt/svg rendering regression I saw yesterday.  Heros, every one. Funny how a one-line patch can make all the difference (now in qt-copy and our own fedora qt-4.5.2-2+ builds, by the way).

Saw qt-4.5.1 released, woo! went to try it out, not so woo. ):

Upgraded my once-happy qt-4.5.0/kde-4.2.2 box (using oxygen), lots of weird rendering present, including biggies like kickoff/lancelet/krunner drawing empty boxes/frames. screenshot:
http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/qt451_oxygen_borkage-2.jpg
Seems the oxygen plasma theme is affected more than others I tried (including Aya, o3, which were mostly ok).

Oddly enough, the empty boxes persisted even after downgrading back to qt-4.5.0... need to further analyze my plasma*rc files before/after upgrade/downgrade.

Any ideas? Anyone else with good/bad experiences using qt-4.5.1 (esp against kde-4.2.2+)?

I thought I'd take the opportunity to fill my lack-of-recent blogs gap by giving a small shout-out to Ben, my bestest bud of the week.

Why? I'm glad you asked. MathStuf has been the kind of fedora/kde contributor dreams are made of (ok, overboard, but I'm on a roll). He's taken on many odd jobs and unsexy tasks. One great example being beating fedora's kdebindings packaging into shape, and now, how shapely it is. Seriously, that's dedication.

Many kudos and thanks to you, my friend.


and in a completely bogus attempt to garner blog comments, my runner-up this week is any and all plasma developers. hugs all around. you all deserve it.

I'm happy to relate that kde-4.2.0 has recently landed on fedora's stable update repositories. While happy, the fedora kde-sig isn't resting either, with continuing work to squash bugs and regressions.

For added fun over the weekend, I spun a new f10/kde42-based live image, based only on official fedora bits, available at the usual place:
http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/torrents/

One item that still needs packaging work is soprano's sesame2 backend. Slow and painful, that is, rebuilding it from from source. Good news: We have a couple of contributors actively working on it. Bad news: They estimate it'll take another ~2 weeks of java packaging love to make it happen.


With the recent call to arms for testing qt-4.5 and kde-4.2.x, we're taking the plunge for fedora, see my post: "qt-4.5(rc), rawhide, and you":
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-announce/2009-February/msg00008.html

Aaron, as usual, cuts through the crap.

First off... my apologies. Fedora didn't communicate plans and intentions clearly or loudly enough.

Fedora's mission and target audience is key: ... leading the advancement of free, open software.... While I've made light of the whole F9/KDE-4.0 thing in the past, It's still clear that "... if our efforts weren't publicized enough to land on your attention radar, I guess that's at least partially our fault."

I will also freely admit that the "process" by which we made the decision to ship as we did leaves a lot to be desired.

Fact is, there wasn't all that much process. We made the decision, and then worked our collective butts off to make it happen. Conspicuously absent was an analysis of the KDE-4.0 desktop experience, especially against previous KDE3 offerings... which seems to be a metric many folk use. Seems to be kind of "duh" thing to me now.

Sure, there was some short-term pain with the GA F9 release, but as planned and expected, the situation improved quickly over time with subsequent updates.

Live and learn.

A belated congratulations to Kevin Kofler for being approved as a fedora sponsor. It's comforting and rewarding to know the KDE SIG is in such capable hands.

Houston, the eagle has landed. Err, KDE 4.2 has. Exciting times.

Many thanks and kudos to all who contributed to making this happen!

In Fedora land, we continue to have experimental/test builds hosted at the http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/ project, as well as producing livecds, http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/torrents/

Work is also ongoing to bring KDE 4.2 officially to Fedora. It will be included in the upcoming F11 Alpha release, and F9/F10 updates will follow shortly while we sort out a few remaining issue:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=kde42