What´s going on at Camp KDE?

As everybody else is blogging about Camp KDE here in San Diego I think I also should give you an update whats going on here.

I think it is a fantastic conference, perfectly organized with very high level talks. It is great to meet all the old and new friends and discuss various aspects of world domination. Thank you to Jeff and the team at UCSD to make all this happen.

Rain

It rained a lot the last few days here which is unusual for sunny southern california and it seams that we have to live with this weather for all the week. Which is bad because we can´t enjoy the beach that much and I have to cancel my motorbike trip I have planed for later this week. Our hostel is also fighting with the rain. We have power and internet problems and on monday we even had a small river running through the entrance area.

So it´s not true that it never rains in souther california. ;-)

Keynote

I´m happy with the feedback I got for the keynote I gave on sunday. Everybody seams to like my crazy ideas about KDE in a world of cloud computing. You find the slides here: slides

There will be a dot story soon to summarize the announcements.

Open-PC progress

I´m still busy with making the Open-PC ideas reality. I updated the Open-PC.com website with new stuff. We now have a partner to do the telephone and email support and I fixed the final hardware configuration and the price together with our hardware partners. Remember that this is only the first version of the Open-PC. The idea is of course to have different models designed and manufactured by different people and partners.

I´m happy that Slashdot and other major news sites picked this up. It is great how many people are exited about this project. I´m getting lot´s of emails from interested people. This is amazing.

I must confess that I underestimated the work especially because I do basically everything alone. I think the Open-PC should be a real community based project to take off.

So if you want to help, please contact me. I especially need an SUSE Studio / Buildservice expert. :-)

Pleasant Surprise

I´m working for a few month now on improving the relation of KDE with big players in the IT industry. Yesterday it seams to payed of. So Jos and me did some serious business clothing shopping and today we will present KDE to somebody who could bring KDE to millions of devices.

I will keep you informed about the progress.

Small Cloud Survey

I will give a presentation at Camp KDE as some of you might know. The topic is KDE and cloud computing. The idea is to give an overview over the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing compared with native Qt applications. I plan to give some ideas how we as a free software community could combine the best of both world and see what we have to do to create something which is better than Chrome OS combined with the traditional KDE Desktop and still have control over our own data.

I would like to have some input from you how you see the advantages and disadvantages of web based applications and storages compared with KDE Desktop apps.

So the questions are:

1. Advantages and Disadvantages of web based application for developers

2. Advantages and Disadvantages of web based application for users

3. Advantages and Disadvantages of KDE Desktop application for developers

4. Advantages and Disadvantages of KDE Desktop application for users.

Please post you answers below this blog post or send it to karlitschek@kde.org

Thank you for your help.

Happy holidays.

Cheers

Frank

openSUSE BuildService Integration, Security and 150000 registered contributors

openSUSE BuildService Integration

As you know KDE-Apps.org and openDesktop.org are repositories for KDE application. At the moment over 3600 KDE applications are listed on KDE-Apps.org.

You can search applications and rate them, add comments, become a fan of an applications subscribe to an application to get notifications about updates or use the integrated knowledge base system for the apps.

The problem starts if you want to download an app. Most apps are only available as source file or binaries for one or two distributions. It is a lot of work for the developers of the applications to compile and package the apps for every distribution.

So an end users can´t download an interesting KDE application from KDE-Apps.org most of the time and has to use the distribution package manager. But not all distributions provide all the available apps and not always in the most current version.

As you know the openSUSE build service is a great service for developers to automatically build and package software for most Linux distributions and even for Mac and Windows in the future.

Since over a year I talk with our friends from Novell about a possible integration of the Buildservice with KDE-Apps.org and openDesktop.org.

Today I can announce that the first step is finally done.

You can add your buildservice project and package id to your application on openDesktop.org and all the available packages for the different distributions automatically show up on the application page. I think this a good first step to help our users to get our great software and also make the life of the developers easier.

This is not the end of the road of course. Soon you will be able to upload you application directly from Qt-Create or KDevelop to KDE-Apps.org and the openSUSE Buildservice. The application will be build for all supported platforms and our users can download the apps via the KDE-Apps.org website or GHNS.

I´m really exited about this improvement.

What do you think?

Security:

In the last few days an old discussion about the security of third party packages for Linux heated up again. The problem is that we don´t have a good signing, sandboxing oder other security system for binary packages in Linux. Solutions as AppAmor or SELinux are not used at the important places. So it is a risk for the user to install packages from third party webites. You never know what you get and if the package is safe.

This is not a specific problem of the openDesktop.org sites. It is the same situation for packages from the openSUSE Buildservice, from Sourceforge, Freshmeat, Ubuntu PPAs or any other place.

So the question is what can we do to improve the situation. Markey already blogged about a suggestion for Amarok plugins. Having everything in a central repository is a good idea for Amarok but I´m not sure if this works for all kind of packages.

I will organize a BOF session at Camp KDE in January to discuss this problems with everybody who is interested. I´m sure we can come up with good solutions to fix this security problems.

Everybody is invited to join the discussion.

User registrations:

A few days ago we reached a new record of registered contributors. At the moment over 150,000 users are registered on the openDesktop.org site. This are all people who are contributors. User who are only interested in reading and downloading stuff don´t have to register. This is really impressive, expecially because we have 100 to 150 new registration every days.

Intern wanted

Hi,

during the KDE e.V. board meeting this weekend we decided that the KDE e.V. wants to hire an intern to help Claudia with organizational tasks.

So if you are interested in working on KDE related topics like event management, marketing and communication here in our great new office in Berlin together with Claudia please apply for the job. If you know somebody who might be interested in this opportunity feel free to forward this job offer.

You can get the details here: http://www.opendesktop.org/jobs/?id=74843

Please note that coding is not part of this internship. The main topic is administrative and organisational work. If you are more interested in coding openDesktop.org is also looking for an intern of course: http://www.opendesktop.org/jobs/?id=109 :-)

Cheers

Frank

Open Collaboration Services

I´m very exited about the progress we are doing for the Social Desktop at the moment. Because of the great work from Eckhart, Frederik and Jeremy we will have very good support for a lot of new features in KDE 4.4 I will blog about the details soon. But the most important thing is that we will move libattica and all the backend functionality into kdesupport/kdelibs for KDE 4.4. This means that every application can access the Social Desktop features transparently without taking care of authentication, different service providers or the REST protocol.

So we hope that a lot of apps will integrate social features soon.

Another very big news is that maemo.org will use the Open Collaboration Services API for their application store and social features in the future. The KDE implementation can handle different service providers automatically so applications aren´t locked in to one service provider. This is open social networking how it should be.

I just released the Version 1.4 of the Open Collaboration Services Specification. As usual all the new features are already implemented on all the openDesktop.org sites.

New features are:

account registration

You can register a new user account via the API.

config

There is a new config method which you can call to get some basic information about the current API.

extended attributes

Applications can store extended attributes as key values to your user profile. You can find other people with specific attributes via the search method. This is useful for example if application want to show other people who use the same application. This was a feature request from Frederik who will do cool stuff for Parley with this feature soon. :-)

event write support

You can add, edit and delete events via the API now.

friends management

You can do complete friends management via the API now. So invite people, accept or decline friendship requests, check your send or received requests and more.

improved activities

We improved the activities so you get more data via the API. So you can show more interesting information.

categories knowledge base

the knowledge base API supports categories now.

other

many bugfixes and documentation improvements.

And now for something completely different:

I just got the first prototype of the Open-PC. There is still work to do but we are making good progress. I will post about the status of the Open-PC soon.

Now I´m on the way to Freiburg for the Nepomuk Developer Sprint to integrate the Social Desktop with the Semantic Desktop. ;-)

The Social Desktop Winners

Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

There have been many new ideas and innovations coming from the community in the Social Desktop area and we received a large number of really good submissions. This made it obviously hard for the jury, as you can have only so many winners.

After combining the community votes with the votes from the jury we have 4 winners. We are especially trilled that the winning submission of the contest, the "ExtendedAboutDialog for KDE apps" is not only fully implemented and working, it already ships with Amarok 2.2! So you probably already have it on your hard drive...

So without further delay, we present the winners of the contest:

1st place - "ExtendedAboutDialog for KDE apps" by Téo Mrnjavac
This is an enhanced KAboutDialog which gets developers' data from openDesktop.org. It enables direct interaction with the development team and can be used in any KDE application.

Téo Mrnjavac has won a Dell Inspiron Mini 10v netbook with Ubuntu.

2nd place - "Knowledge base widget" by Marco Martin
This is a plasmoid which lets users query an online knowledge base for support without the need to visit a forum or subscribe to a mailinglist. This widget will be part of KDE 4.4.

Marco Martin won an external 1TB hard disk.

3th place - "libopengdesktop" by Guido Roberto
A simple Glib-oriented library which easy access to Open Collaboration Services providers. Still under heavy development, it will be useful for other people which want to bring the Social Desktop on Gnome and XFCE platforms.

Guido Roberto won an Amazon.com Gift Coupon worth $50.00.

4th place - "PyContent" by Ni2c2k
A plasma widget written in Python to show the newest contents from specific content categories from a content provider.

Ni2c2k has won an Amazon.com Gift Coupon worth $30.00.

Congratulations to all the winners from the jury members!

- Aaron Seigo from the KDE community
- Luis Villa from the GNOME project
- Alexandro Colorado from OpenOffice.org
- Frank Karlitschek from openDesktop.org

Bringing together APIs and people

We launched interesting new features on openDesktop.org lately and made progress on the Social Desktop. So I think I should blog about the news and give you all an overview over the cool new stuff and the plans for the next few month.

One idea is to integrate openDesktop.org, KDE-Look.org and KDE-Apps.org more with existing social networks and other services.

So if artist or developers publish their work on KDE-Look.org or KDE-Apps.org their friends and fans get notifications. We do this be integrating Microblogging like Twitter and identi.ca and by launching a Facebook App.

Microblogging

All new artwork and applications are published on this feeds

twitter.com/opendesktop

identi.ca/opendesktop

You can follow this feeds if you want to stay up to date about the latest stuff our community creates and develops.

Facebook

We have a new Facebook App. If you are an openDesktop and a Facebook user you can install this App on your Facebook profile. If you release a new application or artwork on KDE-Look.org, KDE-Apps.org or any other openDesktop.org site the announcement will be automatically pushed to your Facebook page. Your Facebook friends get notified about your work. So this is OpenSource Marketing 2.0 :-)

Go to apps.facebook.com/opendesktop

Social Desktop Contest

The Social Desktop Contest is over. I must say that I´m very impressed by the work of all participants. Lots of great stuff was implemented and submitted. The contest also produced a lot of new ideas and concepts. I´m really looking forward to all the exiting new upcomming features.

It was a difficult choice but the jury members decided about the winner of the contest and I will announce the winners of the Netbook soon.

The Social Desktop in KDE 4.4

A lot of interesting stuff is coming together for KDE 4.4 and the Social Desktop idea. I think this will be a really great release where we begin so see the potential of the integration of people and social networking principals with desktop applications. I´m especially exited about the new GHNS uploading and downloading features. where Jeremy, Frederik and Eckhart are working on at the moment. This will be really powerful. Other Stuff like notification, friends management, messaging and fan management is also growing nicely.

We will also have a central place where users can configure their different content providers and identities. So every KDE application can access the social features in a transparent way without caring about providers, login or passwords.

I will give a talk at the Open Web Conference at the end of October. And I hope to give a preview about the new cool features there. You can find more information about the Open Web Conference here: www.nluug.nl/activiteiten/events/nj09/index-en.html

Event API

I´m constantly working on new API features. Today I published an improved version of the Event API. It is now possible to create, edit and delete events via the API. Read support is of course possible since a few month. This is useful for integration with other event databases, Desktop Widgets or even Akonadi. You can find the documentation here is you want to use the API: www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/open-collaboration-services

Social Desktop Sprint

I´m planing a Social Desktop Developer Sprint for later this year. We meet for 3 days here in Stuttgart and work on ideas and code together. Please send me a email if you want to participate. The KDE e.V. has probably some money for sponsoring.

By the way. A few days ago we reached a new traffic record on the openDesktop.org sites. Over 42000 simultaneous visitors. This is a really impressive number.

So if you want to help or have some ideas about the Social Desktop vision please don´t hesitate to send me an email.

Cheers

Frank