In case you hadn't heard, Amarok 2.2.0 (Sunjammer) is now officially in the wild. I won't bore you with details, other than to say... it's quite nice, and I digg it.

Fedora packages are prepared and queue'd for updates-testing now. and will hopefully find their way to a mirror near you very soon. In the meantime, if you just can't wait, I've put copies of the builds (amarok, taglib, taglib-extras) into the kde-redhat/testing repos too.

Enjoy your Sunjamming... or something like that.

Looks like we'll not be able to ship a Fedora 12 KDE live spin free of a kde3 runtime after all.

The reality is that the kde4 ports of both k3b and koffice aren't quite ready, and not recommended for use by either upstream. So, our plan is to revert to the tried-n-true k3b-1.0.x and koffice-1.6.x (as in Fedora 11).

Don't fret however, we'll continue to provide unofficial kde4 builds of k3b and koffice in the kde-redhat/unstable repos. Testing and feedback will continue, and with good confidence, we'll be able to include both of these in Fedora 13.

Was parallel parking at work today, and when I got out, a nearby observer commented "wow, that was a tight fit, perfect.  you must be a driving instructor". 

I cracked a wide smile, thinking of how well my father tought me almost everything I know about driving, especially about good use of mirrors. 

Thanks dad.

p.s. Well, Mr. Thelander in driver's ed class had a hand too, particularly about driving in slick/icy conditions.  I'm not an ice-ace (self-proclaimed) for nothing. :)

Yes, I'm a bit hooked. I admit it. I just can't stop playing Race For the Galaxy. Please help me spread the love to other fedora users, by participating in the rftg fedora package review.

UPDATE: moved the package review rpmfusion->fedora Package review was rejected, due to non-redistributability of the included artwork.  :(  In the meantime, I'm planning on collaborating with the author, to distribute rpm source/binaries on his website.

As a followup to my last blog about auto-installation of plasma dataengines, here's an incremental step in getting there, a straw-man implementation for generating kde service-related dependencies during rpm generation.

The latest version of what I'm working on is at:
http://rdieter.fedorapeople.org/rpms/kde4-service.prov

This is for the Provides side of things.  A harder unsolved problem still is the Requires side, which currently requires perusing of code (or writing packagekit hooks or finding magical ponies).  I'd much prefer if this sort of metadata was more easily available, say, also in service .desktop files, but I'm not picky.

Enjoy, discuss, frolic.

From a recent conversation on irc (log below), there's an opportunity for someone to help implement some packagekit hooks in libplasma.  Anyone interested?




[08:58] <rdieter> was just digging into some rpm packaging for plasma applets, data engines... found it relatively easy to grok service .desktop files to determine data engine providers, but short of digging through applet code, not obvious to me to determine consumers of plasma data engines.

[08:58] <rdieter> Is there a way?  if not, could/should there be? :)

[09:02] <notmart> rdieter: yeah, i think the only way is to look for dataEngine("foo"); calls in the code

[09:04] <rdieter> notmart: I was just holding out hope for an easier, ideally automated/codeable method to extract such dependencies

[09:06] <notmart> seems quite possible to automate it, just a couple of regexp..

[09:06] <rdieter> would folks be receptive to adding such dependency metadata to applet .desktop files (or something equivalent)?

[09:06] <rdieter> notmart: preferably automate'able on the installed files, not the source.

[09:07] <notmart> not sure if it's realistic to expect that all the old plasmoids will immediately compile properly the desktop file...

[09:07] * rdieter was thinking about writing rpm autogenerators for Requires/Provides plama applets/dataengines, ultimately

[09:07] <notmart> rdieter: oh :/

[09:42] <aseigo> rdieter: that could be done in libplasma i think

[09:43] <aseigo> rdieter: when an engine is requested, if it doesn't exist we could do a lookup using packagekit or whatever the kde wrapper for that is, and see if it's available there instead
[09:43] <rdieter> I like the sound of that.

[09:45] <aseigo> rdieter: should probably cache which engines have been looked up in the package db unless it becomes a cheap operation...

[09:46] <aseigo> rdieter: but the work should probably happen in ... *looks* hm.. DataEngineManager::loadEngine() .. maybe..

[09:46] <aseigo> hm.

[09:47] <aseigo> probaby that should still return NULL on failure immediately (since this process would need to be async, i think...

[09:47] <aseigo> so maybe a new method in DataEnigneManager that checks to see if the engine can be installed (and does so if possible?)

[09:47] <aseigo> and then use that in DataEngineConsumer (in kdelibs/plasma/private/dataengineconsumer_p.h)[09:48] <aseigo> sth like that anyways

[09:48] <aseigo> and if it is available ......

[09:49] <aseigo> then we'd probably need a special dataengine that can create dummy sources on request and then when the REAL engine is installed, request those sources in the new engine and become a "repeater" for it

[09:53] <rdieter> sounds evil enough, neat.  I'll go poke around #fedora-*, see if I can find anyone interested in helping implement any of that

[09:55] * aseigo is happy to mentor :)

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).