Last call for ….

I haven’t posted anything in a while on this blog, and now I made the decision that this will not change: it is unlikely that this blog will be updated anytime soon. The reason is actually twofold:

Job

I’m working full time as an Open Source/Linux consultant these days – and after work I do not really have the time nor the energy to invest even more time into Open Source (besides the Fedora packaging).

Company’s Blog

I was successful in convincing enough people in our company to start a blog – and I blog there since then, so when I get home I usually already have blogged about whatever comes to my mind.

That means effectively that you will not receive any more new posts here. It hurts my heart and kills kittens, but you can remove the blogfeed. @planets where I might still be listed at: please remove this blog feed as well.

However, if you *do* want to keep up with my thoughts: credativ’s company blog is working quite nice these days. Btw., in case you don’t know, credativ is an Open Source/Linux company and the one behind the Open Source Support Center (OSSC) and the Open Source Support Card (yeah, “catchy” names, I know). They are focussed on Open Source support (Linux-Support, PostgreSQL-Support, etc.) and have offices in DE, UK, US, etc. So the general topics are pretty close to this blog. If you look close you will recognize my style: short italic introduction, eye catcher on the upper right side, special headline markings for Howtos and Short Tips, and so on. Also, the categories are quite the same, and it is actually available in German and English. Also, I am not the only person writing there – one very active PostgreSQL developer keeps blogging there, if I want it or not.

However – it is a company blog, so you will (!) find information regarding the company itself, or newest marketing things. You are warned!

So this is it: the last post. Thanks everyone for wonderful years full of blogging, discussions, news, Howtos and good tips. So long, and thanks for the fish!

Short Tip: import larger sets of ics files into kontact

While migrating to Kontact it might come up that a large set of ics files have to be imported into Kontact. There is a GUI way to do that, but that involves a large number of clicks for each file. Easier is the command line way:

$ ls *.ics | xargs -n 1 konsolekalendar --file ~/.kde/share/apps/korganizer/std.ics --import

Another way is to copy all ics files to a directory. A new calendar can be created with this new directory which afterwards contains all the data from the ics files. This calendar can again be exported as one single ics files which can be easily imported everywhere.

The Open Source Year 2009

Every year Open Source technology is improved and extended. This post sheds some light on new technologies which might arrive in 2009.

Btrfs

With ext4 a new file just left the developer corner. However, ext4 is an old-style file system and does not offer “hot” features like on-line snap shots, versioning and so on. ZFS does, but it is not an option for Linux due to licence reasons. Here comes Btrfs into play: it is in development for quite some time now and many Kernel developers already asked to include Btrfs in the Kernel to speed up the development process. Additionally, several Kernel developers already mentioned that they expect Btrfs to be the next generation default file system for Linux in the mid-term.

In 2009 Btrfs will most likely stabilize its file system format and publish a beta version for testing purposes.

oVirt

oVirt is a small host image that provides libvirt services and hosts virtual machines. Additionally it also has a well designed web based management system. The aim is to provide an enterprise ready VM management console capable of managing large sever clusters hosting large numbers of virtual machines, but is also supposed for single users.

In 2009 oVirt will hopefully see its first beta release ready for first real-world-like tests. Additionally, with some luck, it might be bundled with openfiler to ease the storage management. Last but not least it could include support for Xen in a future version.

OpenGL 3.0

The release of OpenGL 3.0 this year was rather surprising: it was delayed for almost a year without any notice at all, which is usually a clear sign that a project is dead. However, left aside the question if the OpenGL 3.0 release is the beginning of a new era or or just a last breath of the project, OpenGL 3.0 is now out in the wild and the Free Software community will adopt it sooner or later.

While Nvidia has already released a first version of an OpenGL 3.0 capable driver the FLOSS OpenGL implementation Mesa hasn’t released anything yet. But Mesa is alive and vibrant again since 2007 and a new release can be expected in the near future. Also likely is that AMD/ATI will release a new version of their OpenGL stack featuring the newest OpenGL spec. I would like to see AMD/TI team up with Mesa on that one but that’s just a wish, I’m afraid.

So in 2009 we will see OpenGL 3.0 coming to the masses – in proprietary as well as in Free drivers. This way newest graphics card technology will come to Linux and application developers can built upon that.

Gallium

Simply said, Gallium3D is an attempt to make graphics card driver development on Linux much easier: it abstracts the driver development from the underlying graphics standard implementation (for example OpenGL). Due to that abstraction, switching to another graphics standard should also be fairly easy. That way it should be easier to write one single graphics card driver for different devices (which do often need something else than OpenGL). And in case OpenGL is really dead, it could be a way to more or less painlessly replace it with something new.
Right now Gallium3D is in heavy development and we yet have to see it in the wild. There are only few drivers ported to it and I haven’t seen any distribution shipping it yet.

In 2009 this could switch: a first testing release for the broader masses is likely, and it could speed up the development of drivers for Gallium3D.

Gem and KMS

Speaking about graphics, there are other things which are in development and which are already surfacing here and there: the new graphics memory manager GEM. Using GEM the graphics cards does not have to be re-initialized as soon as you switch to another application. Also, everything will be written to the memory and the composition manager can simply access it there, avoiding some problems current drivers have when for example running videos on AIGLX.
Besides, Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) will move other tasks of the graphic subsystem away from X towards the kernel. As a result it will be much easier and flicker-free to switch from X to a tty console, and the graphical system will be able to show kernel oops. Linux will get its own blue screen capability, finally!

These features have partially found their way into newer Fedora releases, but only for specific hardware and under certain conditions. In 2009 it can be expected that the current FLOSS/Nvidia/AMD drivers will switch over to GEM and KMS to provide a much saner graphics experience to the user.

KDE 4.3: Pimp your PIM

Curently KDE’s PIM is in a difficult situation: Kontact is one of the best free groupware clients out there, but it was never designed to be one, and using it as such today can be an adventure. To fix that Akonadi was created. It was shipped with KDE 4.1 to back up Mailody, KDE 4.2 will see it the first time together with Kontact. This will give the developers quite some time to sanitize and improve the Akonadi service as well as to add new plugins to provide something revolutionary right in time for KDE 4.3.

In 2009 we will finally see a FLOSS groupware client which is working with a broad range of groupware servers, has a maintainable code base – and is perfectly integrated on all major platforms.

Qt on the mobile mass market

This year almost started with the news that Nokia acquired Trolltech. Recently it was announced that Qt now runs on Symbian S60. Also, with the iPhone, Google’s G1 and even a new Blackberry Nokia seriously needs a cool new device with fancy graphics and an appealing software platform.

Now put two and two together. With a bit of luck we will see the first Qt-Nokia devices with multi touch screen in 2009. With even a bit more of luck, it will be shipped in a way that Qt developers can use the tools they are used to to develop software for the new platform. Think of running KDE on these devices.

Gnome 3.0 development

In summer this year the Gnome developers started planning their next big release – Gnome 3.0. Currently not too many information have surfaced, but such breaks need their time. A state tracker for the Gtk+ changes is online and shows that indeed some work is underway already.

In 2009 first Alpha release could surface to show in which direction Gtk+ and Gnome are heading, and how the transition progress works out. That will definitely be an interesting time – the transition was a major task for KDE, and the Gnome team better takes a close look at that to learn from KDE’s experience.

Conclusion

While I already called 2007 the Year Of Open Source Graphics, 2009 can become a good candidate for it as well. In this post it got three paragraphs, and if everything comes true, 2009 will revolutionize the world of Linux graphics. This will, however, happen mostly under the hood. The users will not notice several fixes, but not the large underlying changes, which is different to 2007.

But in general 2009 will be exciting in almost all FLOSS areas. Keep in mind that this list is not and cannot be complete! So I ask every reader to drop a comment here containing his or her tip for revolutionary changes or news in the FLOSS world in 2009!

Kontact and Citadel – experiences

While there are many FLOSS Groupware servers out there, hardly any one them is reliable working with any FLOSS client. Recently my company had to bring Citadel and Kontact together, and we used the opportunity to patch while we go.

Background

Recently my company, the credativ GmbH, was faced with the task to sync the usual groupware data (calender, tasks, addresses) between a mobile phone and a PIM client – using FLOSS and via Internet. The natural solution of course is Funambol to get the data of the phone. The next step is to connect that one to a groupware server and access the server via a well known KDE 3 groupware client.

However, having a closer look at the currently available FLOSS groupware solutions was quite disillusioning. While there are many nice servers, there are hardly any solutions where a server works correctly with a client. The best working example is maybe Kolab-Kontact, but Kolab doesn’t work easily together with Funambol. Actually, the current groupware-Funambol connector only supports three groupware servers: Citadel, OpenGroupware and eGroupware. For various reasons we settled on Citadel, and now the task was to check how well this works together with Kontact.

Citadel

Citadel is rather unique in the groupware world. It is one of the oldest projects, and started off as something different than it is today. For that reason there are many historically grown things – like the room concept. However, once you get used to that the server is quite usable, and the developer community was very helpful.

Regarding the described setup there were only smaller things to fix, and the Citadel guys did that for us, so thanks to them. Citadel still desperately needs a theme which is pleasing the eyes – the current one looks horrible. But that is a task for a web designer and can come after the code basically works.

Kontact – solved problems

Kontact has quite some problems on many levels. The main reason behind all these problems is the protocol: there is no single open standard for doing groupware stuff, there are many different. There is though Groupdav, an attempt to create such a common standard, but until now Groupdav is still a proposal, and besides some missing main functions (no notifications when the content was changed, for example) it wasn’t accepted by everyone. As a result, the current Groupdav support in Kontact is mixed, and we tried to check what worked, what didn’t, and what was fixable for us.

The first problem was that Kontact of KDE 3 has problems with special characters like German umlauts. That is described in Bug #159795, and the patches necessary to fix that behavior are added to the bug report. This is fixed in KDE 4 anyway, so the patch is only interesting for people who are working with Kontact of KDE 3.x for some more time.

The second problem was that tasks flagged as complete were not synced properly – at least, the complete flag part wasn’t synced. When in Kontact a task was flagged as completed it didn’t show up as such on Citadel and vice versa. The problem seems to be that Kontact looks at the percentage value of the completion while Citadel looks at the parameter ‘COMPLETED’. See Bug #171905 for more details – and a patch.

The base for the third problem lies more in the groupdav protocol than in Kontact: there is no mechanism defined to inform the client that the content on the server has been updated. That is sad – and requires the client to pull for changes. This is not properly implemented in Kontact. Therefore we settled on a hack: whenever a resource in Kontact (addressbook or organizer) is deactivated and again activated, the content is reloaded. We decided to trigger exact that action with a refresh button.
Immediately the question comes up if that should not be triggered by time, but the usual work flow in an office is: “Hey, Joe, it’s me, John, have you seen the new appointment I just added to your calendar?” – a time base pulling would confuse the user, a button to pull would not. The bug to this problem is Bug #175409 – including the patches.

Kontact – problems still valid

While we were able to fix some of the problems (hurray Open Source) there are still some things left: we were not able to properly implement a working Free/Busy system with Kontact and Citadel. This is definitely due to some rather strange bus in Kontact, and will require quite some rewrite of Kontact’s resource plugins. But since Akonadi will be out soon the question is if that should be fixed now or if we should wait until Akonadi is out and then have another look at it.

Final words

Kontact and Citadel do work together somehow. And the bits which are missing can be fixed. However, it is clear that Kontact developed into something which was not planned originally, and that a revolutionary change is needed.
Akonadi will hopefully bring this change, but currently it is not there yet.

But even if Akonadi arrives right in time – and with plugins for all the needs we have – the underlying problem of the broken groupdav protocol remains. It is sad somehow that there are so many fine FLOSS Groupware servers out there but that there is hardly any protocol which is supported by all of them and delivers all the features the users want. No wonder that Outlook/Exchange has such a strong position right now.

KDE-Bluetooth for KDE 4: first test release

One of the main 3rd party packages for KDE is the KDEBluetooth suite. It is the graphical interface to Bluetooth for KDE. The KDE 4 port was now released in a first test version.

Managing Bluetooth on Linux is actually pretty easy – bluez, the Open Source bluetooth stack is certified by the Bluetooth group itself and is therefore fully supported. However, bluez needs a GUI to be used by users. For KDE, KDEBluetooth delivered a well working solution for years.

With the release of KDE 4 the KDE 3.5 version of KDEBluetooth can of course be used, but a KDE 4 suite would be better integrated. The porting efforts took some time, but now the first version is there: KDEBluetooth4, version 0.1 (also see the project page at kde-apps.org).

While I currently have a KDE 4.1Beta running, that machine does not have bluetooth, so I can’t test it myself right now. However, the release notes on kde-apps.org list the features (and has screenshots), but also the yet missing points. And indeed almost all basic functions are already implemented:

• Trayicon to manage all functions
• Passkey and Authorization Agent to handle requests from remote devices
• Bluetooth Adapter configuration
• Bluetooth Device-Manager
• Bluetooth Device Wizard, to add new Devices
• KBlueLock, to lock your screen, when your mobile phone is out of scope
• Send Files to remote devices (obex-data-server)

Quite nice for a first test release! However, currently the kio-browsing is still missing. Also, support for requesting capability information (for example if it is an audio device or a pointer device) are missing as well as support for audio devices. From my point of view the most hurting point is that there is currently an obex-data server missing so that files cannot be received. But that is only a matter of time.

In case you run a recent KDE 4svn version, give it a test! As usually the developers welcome any kind of (polite) feedback and of course any help development wise.