KDE SOC projects published

The list of the Google Summer of Code projects for KDE was published. The list has several interesting entries to make the life for KDE users much easier.

The results for this year’s Google Summer of Code are out, and several KDE ideas were picked up.

Going through the list I found some items which immediately rouse my interest:

• Media Device Support in Amarok 2 with Collections - This will bring support for collections/playlists to different media devices.
• Amarok and UPnP - UPnP is used in today’s media streamers, and native support for it in Amarok would help integrating such media servers with KDE.
• Notes and Presenter View Support for KPresenter - All big proprietary solutions have such a presentation view and even OOo works at it. So developing one for KPResenter is just sensible to do.
• Easy monitor hot-plug support in KDE - The presentation view requires a second video output device, but to setup such is not easy on KDE - yet.
• Integrate Decibel into the KDE 4 environment - Decibel is so far in a basic shape, but not integrated with KDE atm: think of Plasma applets, KRunner support and similar “glue” to make communication on KDE possible everywhere.
• Jingle video and voice chat in Kopete. - I had great hopes for jingle, and for certain reasons I still think that it is essential to support it everywhere in the FLOSS world.
• KMail enhancements and porting to native Qt4 - KMail is one of the most important apps on the KDE desktop for many users. Therefore having a fully ported, well polished version of KMail is essential for a good user experience on KDE.
• Integration of the QtWebKit based KPart - It is helpful to switch between two engines without a big hassle to compare these or to use one engine when the other doesn’t work.
• Integration of WebKit SVG library with KHTML - Sharing code between KHTML and WebKit does make sense when it is productive and helps both. And that’s the aim of this project.
• StepGame: educational game based on Step - The Incredible Machine as a native KDE game would be awesome!

Of course this is just a small list of the accepted applications - and an accepted application doesn’t necessarily mean that the project will be a success. Additionally, this year the process around the applications and slots wasn’t perfect, but maybe the KDE e.V. can step up there to make the rejected projects possible nevertheless?
An idea would be to collect money through the KDE e.V. to sponsor other applicants, given that KDE finds their applications worth a try. I would be willing to donate some money for a stand-alone, KDE integrated browser based on WebKit, for general video input device support in Phonon or for a full featured Sonnet.

News wrap-up: Google and OIN, new btrfs versions, Qt and licences

Recently Google joined the Open Innovation Network. Also, Btrfs saw two new development versions these days, and Qt’s licence terms were modified to allow linking to other licences as well.

Google and the OIN

Some days ago Chris DiBona announced that Google became a Open Innovation Network licensee.
Just like Orcale (which became a licensee in March) Google now promises to not use their (maybe Linux related) software patents against any of the other licensees. In return they don’t have to fear the patents of the other licensees. I wonder if Google has so many patents in this area - I never read anything about Google patent portfolios.

Nevertheless, with Google the list of licensees just got another important name. But some names I’m still missing are Yahoo, SAP and Amazon. Microsoft won’t join anytime soon as long as they follow their ridiculous patent strategy.

New Btrfs releases

Chris Mason has just released the versions 0.6 and 0.7 of his file system Btrfs.
The 0.6 release introduces an improved way of deleting old snapshots and a function to defrag the file system to improve the performance. The defrag code unveiled a performance bug which led to the release of 0.7 which is now much faster:

Time to create 1 million files, 512 bytes each:
v0.4: 3m17s
v0.7: 2m32s

Time to run find . on the directory:
v0.4: 21.60s
v0.7: 3.27s

Nice numbers indeed. But of course Btrfs is still in an Alpha state, and first stable versions are not expected before next year.

Qt 4.3.1 was released with GPL extensions

Qt 4.3.1 was released recently. As usual for these minor releases the changelog of this version contains bug fixes and performance improvements but no new technical features, except for the new Intel Compiler 10 support.

However, in political terms one feature was added: beginning with Qt 4.3.1 Qt can now be used together with other licences due to GPL exceptions. The additional rights granted by Trolltech are pretty handy for any Open Source developer:

The right to use Open Source Licenses not compatible with the GNU
General Public License: You may link software (hereafter referred to as “Your Software”) against the Licensed Software and/or distribute binaries of Your Software linked against the Licensed Software

There is no need now to release your software under the GPL, you can also use another licence if you have to/want to.

Interesting in this regard is however also that the GPL 3 is not included. This is already a bit of a problem for the KDE project since the next versions of Samba will be released under the terms of the GPL 3 while KDE is - due to Qt - GPL 2 only. But there are rumours that the next Open Source Qt version might already be released under the GPL 2 and GPL 3.
I do wonder however if KDE could switch to GPL 3 - several hundred developers contributed over the year, making such switches difficult.

Google Desktop Search available for Linux

Google has just released the Google Desktop Search for Linux.

Google has released the Desktop Search for Linux. Packages are available in native formats (rpm and deb) for various distributions and there are even native package repositories available.

Here are two screenshots you might be interested in. The first one shows the fast search which pops up when you hit ctrl two times, the second one simply shows the system tray icon:

The feature list is nice, but could be better. For example, I’m missing Windows file formats as well as KMail mails or Akregator news. But I guess such things will be implemented over time.
What I miss however is an information if inotify is supported - the main advantage would be that after the first complete indexing Google would not need to update regularly but could rely on internal messaging services to discover if a file has been changed.

This release is an interesting move - I admit that I would have preferred Google Talk because we need free software there more than in the desktop search field were there are already plenty of tools available. Still, it is nice to see that Google really tries to push the Linux desktop by providing the Windows applications for Linux also.

As a side note I think the provided repositories also deserve attention: it looks like Linux starts providing the applications in native binaries instead of *.bin-files like Google Earth. I estimate that rpm files for Google earth can expected in the future as well, making it much easier installing these applications.
On the other hand I hope Google will now push standards which deal with easy installation of additional repositories. That is something the Linux desktop also really needs!

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Coverage - Part II: Slides

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is over. There wasn’t too much official press coverage while it took place, but the blogosphere was alive, and now the slides are available also. This post gives a summary about the slides which are now available.

Following Part I about the “coverage” of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit which had a look at the blog posts this post gives an overview about where to find available slides.

The main problem is that there is no central place where you can download the slides, but that they are a bit spread: While the LSB Face to Face meeting and the Open Printing Summit linked the slides directly from their schedule the Desktop Architects Meeting created a dedicated page just for the slides.

The other meetings have not published any slides at all - yet. Also, the slides of course only cover the presentations given at each meeting and of course not the outcome. So for example if you are - like me - interested in the outcome of the “LSB 3.2 and 4.0: Owners and Key Issues” discussion you have to wait until someone else tells you.

Still, some slides are worth reading. For example Google’s Linux wishlist (PDF):

• file manager: xdg-open-folder-highlight-file
• screen saver interface: xdg-add-screensaver
• web: xdg-add-mimetype, xdg-add-protocol
• pkg manager interface: xdg-add-trusted-repo
• 32 bit library pkgs on 64 bit ubuntu
• Stable, fast CJK fonts
• Stable OpenSSL abi
• Easier inotify (cf. FindFirstChangeNotification)

Note the heavy dependency on an xdg/Portland tools extension!

Also interesting is Adobe’s presentation about Flash Player 9 (PDF) development: it shows the decisions Adobe was faced (which GUI toolkit, which Audio toolkit, etc.), and shows how they decided each time. Most often the decisions where to take solution xyz because “Works for today’s devices”. It is a pretty realistic approach and does not try to artificially push or support anything.

I was however a bit confused by the Helix Community presentation (PDF). I do like Helix and helped testing the newest player - I even had great expactations for it to become the standard backend on Linux. However, today Helix doesn’t really play a role in the Linux desktop: current stable neither supports x86_64 (!) nor Alsa, and the next release will only fix the Alsa part, not the x86_64 problem. A possible Linux multimedia backend would at least have to support x86, x86_64 and ppc!
Of course you might argue that we should not give up hope, but in the meantime Gstreamer is shaping up quite a lot, and Xine became more and more interesting in the last months since it was spilt in free and non-free parts.

But read the slides for yourself, mabye I don’t get the point. Also, have a look at the other meetings pages, maybe the slides will appear there as well in the next days.

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Coverage - Part I: Blogosphere

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is over. There wasn’t too much official press coverage while it took place, but the blogosphere was alive, and now the slides are available also. This post gives a summary about interesting blog posts about the topic.

The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is over. I’m a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more press coverage - but it might also be that some news sites wait with a summary till Monday. I’m especially curious how Phoronix will cover the topic.

Until then you have to go with the blogs covering the event - and the slides slowly appearing at the collaboration page (which I will cover in the second part).

It looks like it was not allowed to blog too much about the event:

kudos to the Linux Foundation for explicitly stating that the first day here is 100% bloggable

Could be an explanation for the fact that I mainly found information about the first day in blogs.

However, judging from the different blog news there was quite some interesting discussion. For example it looks like the power consumption is a real issue in the corporate world - much more important than it is for home users for example. I wouldn’t have thought that. Less surprisingly is that the coopeartion has to be improved: think of bug reports which have to be shared down- and upstream. There is no cool collaboration tool yet, but it would help a lot.
Another important topic seems to be mobile devices: hardware vendors like Nokia and Motorola put quite some money into this area and exepct Linux to become a main platform here. I like that!
Also positive is the information that Microsoft didn’t play the role they might have wanted to at the summit: according to the different blog posts most people were interested in other things at the law and IP panel discussion. Good to see that not even the corporate members take Microsoft really serious here. Also, the GPLv2/GPLv3 issue was more interesting since the GPLv3 will be released soon, and many people and companies have to deal with it.

The thing I am interested most is of course how to install software on Linux. That topic was also addressed by the question how to get more software to the desktop. However, I haven’t seen more information about the outcome of these discussion or if for example the idea of the last Desktop Architects Meeting to create a unified installation API was picked up.

But anyway, here is an unsorted colleciton of blog posts regarding the summit:

• Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit Update by Jeremy, the founder of LinuxQuestions.org
• Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit by Novell’s Bruce Lowry
• Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit by Glenn Seiler from Wind River
• Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (day one- morning) and Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (day one- afternoon) by Danese Cooper
• Live from the Linux Collaboration Summit by Andrew Updegrove from consortiuminfo.org
• d00d I am totally blogging this right now: kernel panel at LF Summit by LinuxWorld’s dmarti

Last but not least some quotes I’d like to share:

If you’re a small ISV and you’re only platform is Linux, it SUCKS being you

I cannot agree more! Remember: Linux is hostile to small applications and niche software!

When the GPLv3 is final…just CHILL !!!

Probably the most quoted sentence of the summit…