It was a worm afternoon in Madrid, the meeting I attended was so intensive I didn’t get to login into the KDE Plasma Workspace session but instead I let the laptop on the KDM login page. Once the session finished I closed my laptop and put it in my bag full of battery.

I’m not sure about the amount of time, but probably between 3 to 4 hours later I arrived home, opened my backpack and there it was, I found my laptop burning, hot as hell I even had to grab a cloth to open the lid and move the laptop to some place cool. From that day my new battery went form 98% of capacity to 90.

That night, I  sent an email to some KDE mailist asking for this issue, until today nothing has been done to fix it.

I don’t want anybody to pass from the same I went through, that’s why now with lightdm-kde the computer will suspend if the lid is closed.

Next thing I want to do is show the battery remaining somewhere and suspend the computer after 2 minutes of idle time.

With that, lightdm-kde will have great power management support.

Once I fixed all those damn crashes I proceeded to do bug triage and managed to fix all of the confirmed bugs, or said in another way BlueDevil is virtually bug free bug list :)

There are still a couple of bugs with iPhones, but I will need one of those to be able to confirm and fix the issues. Any donation?

The changelog looks as follow:

Fixes for 1.0.7, 1.1.4, 1.2.3 and 1.3-rc2

• BUG: 298633 // Crash in kded daemon (ObexFtp module)
• BUG: 279911 // Crash after receiving a file
• BUG: 297785 //Not confirmed if it is fixed
• Updated pin databse for more automatic experience

Fixes for 1.1.4. 1.2.3 and 1.3-rc2

• BUG: 286466 // Be able to pair WiiMotes (needs BlueZ 4.96)
• BUG: 276911 // Pairing Keyboards with SSPairing (Bluetooth 2.2)
• BUG: 291708 // Now we show again the small overlay icon

Fixes only for 1.3-rc2

• BUG: 284052 // Nasty crash every time adapter is unplugged

Now I can proceed and create new bugs by continuing with BlueDevil 2.0 and Screen Management.

libbluedevil 1.9.2
md5sum: b492db1825b239e5185c543badb21c26
sha256sum: 00d56fc671fecda1e60aa8231ba167f11002148098d6510df0a409d19e840d59

bluedevil 1.0.7
md5sum: 27e48595679bac72f6ea0d1f496ce524
sha256sum: 2294f921de0a2920dbfe8b3f824abd8b7d468da71a8bce5e4575be311bc0af65

bluedevil 1.1.4
md5sum: b485e0a710146536362cd607bcc3a418
sha256sum: c0bab0d6a505dbe96d3f6acaad8bdf4aea4de84c342e0e6e59b47e0d5bcba6d6

bluedevil 1.2.3
md5sum: e792576d34956d27cd0c3eb3c81a5923
sha256sum: 7744e0544d27960f21073cf4b48ba865162a2643b7e33f7f21fff43705b4e624

bluedevil 1.3-rc2
md5sum: 20452c528ab04c0551f3d8bfc5075c4b
sha256sum: db6735d5a66634ce5d761c70df4ad7c4f39295ac4a6f9b59bcc25777dc720dd5

Cheers !

As far as I know this is the first PA sprint where a lot of community members external to the project attended, this is really great for opening the project to other areas of KDE, such Solid or KDEdu.  My work focus were:

Getting to know the inside of the project
Every project structure is different even between close projects such PowerDevil and BlueDevil. In the case of PA there are a few big differences that have to be taken into account:

 It is important that you agree with the rules of the game before you start to play it, I find PA a really good example of how a professional project can be done together with the community without sacrificing anything. I agree with this rules so I will play this game

• Share/Like/Connect for the desktop must happen
• Having a centralized place for Sharing is important (probably in the shell)
• We need a centralized place to store Web/Online account information
• We need to have a shared platform for streams (twitter, identi.ca, facebook…)
• Having libkpeople finished is crucial, we must have unified personas to work with

I will probably be working on the first point, but we will see about that later.

Finally, a mandatory picture took by Martin K.

• look for bookmarks,
• change your IM status
• execute an action contained in the menu bar.

KRunner can do a lot of stuff in both global and active application scope (though it tends to offer more global features) , just to mention a few: Math, Bookmarks, Files, Calendar, Contacts, Emails, Devices, Change IM Status, Recent documents…

I have to say that I’m glad to see Unity going into this direction since it is something that we (KDE Community) have believe in for years, so having Canonical and its designer team walking into the same direction may indicate that we are not wrong or at least we are not the only ones mistaken

Despite KRunner being able to do a lot of things it couldn’t do something the HUD does, execute actions contained in the menu. No less than 7 months ago I did my first attempt on achieve exactly that and of course I blogged about it. I didn’t continue with the effort mainly because: kdelibs was frozen, it worked only for KDE applications, it worked only if the menu bar was shown within the window.

After watching the HUD video I got inspired and motivated to create a Runner which will use the same technology as HUD (and the oxygen-appmenu or the plasma-menubar plasmoid) to look and execute menu bar actions, this is the result:

Direct link

There are a few things to work on but I hope to put this in KDE Plasma Worksapce 4.9 if the Plasma teams like it of course.

The code is in:

git://anongit.kde.org/scratch/afiestas/appmenu.git

Kubuntu packages are WIP
Would be nice if somebody can write a manual of how to setup appmenu in Qt and maybe other toolkits.

• AppMenu KRunner (you will see it tomorrow)
• Finish new RandR supoprt 
• libsolid in Frameworks5
• BlueDevil 3.0
• Kamoso-QML
• Community work on Solid
• Community work on KDE-España

I hope to get all finished before Akademy-2012 and with a little bit of luck be able to work on more stuff. I promise, next post will be my “usual” post with pictures and videos !

If I had to sum up in one word what I have done this year in KDE I’d say BlueDevil. In the first entry from 2011 I’m asking for help on testing the 1.0.2 version, now 12 month later we are ready to release 1.3 which fixes “all known bugs” and we are preparing ourselves for 1.4 and 2.0.

Let’s take a look month by month on what happened in this blog:

• January: we ask for help on testing 1.0.2, we’ve fixed SSP pairing which is a super important Bluetooth feature.
• February: Aleix and I release first snapshot of Kamoso 2.0 which uses QtGstreamer and is demonstrated to be rock solid. By the end of the month we release BlueDevil 1.0.2.
• March: BlueDevil 1.0.3 is released improving stability.
• April: BlueDevil 1.0.4 is released and a lot BlueDevil 1.1 features are presented to the community.
• June: Aleix and I release Kamoso 2.0, currently it only has 1 reported bug we can’t reproduce. Also I’m part of Platform 11 which for me was an turning point, since then I really feel part of the KDE community.
• July: I explain my priorities for the next 6 months, I consider that I’ve done 5/6 which is not a bad rate. I spent one weekend fixing a few bothering bugs. A few days after I sat down and decided to fix the current XRandR code before I start to write the new one, patches are included in 4.7.1. BlueDevil 1.0.5 and 1.1.1  are released. I finish the firsts improvement of BlueDevil 1.2 [1] [2] and made a video of nepomuk awesomness.
• August: Apart from attending Berlin Desktop Summit, BlueDevil 1.2 RC1 is released.
• September: New plans for BlueDevil are done while I continue to work on it.  Another weekend fixing annoying bugs in kuiserver and KDirWatch. Forge 2011 take place,
• October: The month started while Forge was taking place, we continue with usability changes, and though I didn’t mentioned it in my blog I manage to understand a lot better libsolid as well of fixing few bugs here and there. Finally BlueDevil 1.1.2 and 1.2.1 are released.
• November: I attended to UDS (damn I have to blog about this) and found little time to release BlueDevil 1.0.6, 1.1.3, 1.2.2 and 1.3-rc1. During this month I confirmed that I was moving back from Madrid to Barcelona.
• December: Even though I haven’t blog that much I have been working on XRandR and more recently in some Calligra bits I will explain in a future post.

I’d say this year has been quite intense in the KDE front, I have done less than I wanted (which is normal) but more than I expected so I’m happy with the result. Also it is worth to mention that I’m now “Solid Overlord” though I haven’t done much yet I know for sure that 2012 will be the year to amend that.

Happy new year 2012 which for sure, Is going to be a good year for KDE as it was 2011

I have been moving from Madrid to BCN, cities which are around 650km away and that is keeping me busy because I can’t neglect work time for doing it and even if I could the process put pressure into your head so you spend more time procrastinating than before. Nevertheless the moving is almost complete and I’m going to be using more and more time in KDE.

In what I’m going to use my KDE time:

BlueDevil:

• Finish 1.3 release
• Bug triage, fix’em all
• Fix a known bug in Wizard

When I started the bug triage process, I realize that we had too much crashes so I decided to sit down and fix’em all, well I think I did and because of that we’re releasing new versions for each branch including a new one (1.3) which is the only one that includes a huge change in the KDE Daemon that fixes a bunch of crashes.

Fixed in 1.0:

• 270064: Crash in bluedevil-wizard while broswing a device in dolpin
• 280908: Crash in bluetooth input helper
• 282280: Crash upon removing bluetooth device
• 269814: kde service krashed on blueman-manager start
• 271427: bluedevil crash renaming a disapeared device
• 277992: Removed mouse from device list in KCM while using the connection wizard crashed the KCM
• 273144: Crash after recieve a file
• 274772: Cancelling transfer from mobile phone results in technical error message
• Fixed pairing when the PIN is asked from outside (this happened only some times)

Relevant posts about BlueDevil 1.2 (with videos and pictures  :p):

• BlueDevil 1.2 RC1 released (changelog here)
• Support for DUN and PANU (use device as modem)
• kio_bluetooth improved

• Network Management
• Power Management
• Places View

The day has been a little weird since sadly some metalworkers were not able to make it :/ but we had to start so, this being a “Ervin driven sprint” we started creating a kanban.

That took us a few hours, good thing is that now all we have in front of us is hacking, thats it!! 3 days of non-stop hacking

At dinner time our usability messiah arrived, showing us the light in how to do an “user centred development” model, I will blog about it if nobody else does :p

I’m arriving at the office so the rest of the blog entry will have to wait until later.

Happy Hacking !!

Ps: Donations of high quality Sticky notes are welcomed :p

Yesterday I pushed a couple of fixes that fix annoying bugs and because of that I belive that you may want to backport them to 4.6.5 or even to 4.7.1 if you don’t want or you can’t wait until 4.7.2.

Folder contents are not refreshing:

This happens only when using a kernel with two digits uname such 3.0-ARCH for example, commit to backport is:  kdelibs 7df5a79fb9f09e4a4a80cd541cc478b5fa6df00f

Empty jobs:

Some times jobs are shown empty though the job itself is working fine, this happen in a random situation depending on the system load etc, it was no easily reproducible but thanks to my slow and lovely computer I could then I fix it.

commits to backport are two in kde-runtime: 329a4fe6fe7b8a9262d5ef7fefba255e9c29fade and d769c74a5cab576e124666174a0b2bc5e2af8cde

These two fixes will be released with 4.7.2.

Cheers!

These last tree weeks have been crazy, apart from being busy sorting things out where I work, I have been doing an strict diet + sport to see if I can get rid of my extra weight, so far I’m not less Alex than I was tree weeks ago, exactly 10Kg less (22 pounds says google…). Well stop of talking about myself, let’s talk about BlueDevil!

BlueDevil 1.2:
Probably tomorrow we will be releasing the 1.2 version, since we released RC1/2 we have good good feedback, no new bugs seems to be reported so we think that we’re good to go.

BlueDevil 1.3:
This version was not in the plan, but after starting to work in the 2.0 version we found something we think that have to be “backported” to the 1.X branch. Basically more than a year ago when we started to work in the new stack, we found ourselves in a situation where the use of a thread  seemed correct and needed, so we use it. Now after a year 100% of the crash reports we get apparently came from that thread and so far we have not been able to find a solution since the crash is kinda random… I can’t reproduce it so I can’t fix it basically. Well the good news are that we found a way of removing that thread so in theory after this change we will be virtually crash free, yay!

So, to summarize: The 1.3 version will have only one change, which is the removal of the “AgentListener” thread in the BlueDevilDaemon (kded).

BlueDevil 2.0:
This is the next big version of BlueDevil, don’t worry we won’t be breaking anything Currently we’re using obex-data-server for a few things such receiving files, the problem is that it is almost un-maintained for example this bug which is quite critical for kio_oebxftp has not been touched though I pinged the author via bugtrack and email. But not worry, the BlueZ community has been working in a replacement for months or even years it is called obexd. We are already using obexd for sending files and so far it is working great so the idea is to port everythiing that uses obex-data-server to obexd.

There is one problem though, obexd is not done by desktop in mind so we will have to do some patching there in order to add the needed settings we need.

Dates, dates, dates, everybody love dates…  this is the non-strict non-hard schedule:

1.2: Tomorrow
1.3: Next Friday
2.0: By the end of the month

I will be focusing myself in BlueDevil the entire month, the sooner we finish these changes the sooner we can work in other stuff, personally I will work in KRandR.

Cheers!

Changelog:

Action Plugins

• Added support for DUN
• Added support for PANU
• A few description changed
• Fixed the Category mess we had in the .desktop

kio_bluetooth

• Show known devices first
• Perform discovery in the background
• Fixed the mimetype mess we had
• Will work when started without Bluetooth activated

Wizard

• Added another OUI for Apple Wireless Mice
• Auto select Mouse’s

Agent

• Be able to use Return or Enter to introduce PIN

Monolithic

• Use Configure icon on the configure option

KCM

• Use KMessageWidget if compiled against 4.7

According to Apple a smart folder is:

With Smart Folders, you can organize files by what they have in common, instead of by their location on your disk. Because they use Spotlight, Smart Folders can organize files by their contents, as well by attributes that describe those contents and how they were created. For example, you can create one Smart Folder with all your spreadsheets, another with the documents you modified today, and another with the presentations that mention a specific project.

Well, you know what? we already have this and we’ve had this for a few releases, let me show you proof:

Direct Link

And as an extra:

Direct Link

So as you can see we’re only lacking a few GUI pieces to complete the puzzle, any takers? would be awesome to have this for 4.8 don’t you think?

Cheers!

So, the easteregg was a small Network icon showing up in Dolphin at 03:02 which in BlueDevil 1.2 will allow you to launch the DUN or PANU configuration.

While I’m writing this post, only DUN support is implemented since I don’t have a device that support PANU, but don’t worry as I say in the following video support for PANU will be implemented in a few days, it is just a couple string replaces.

Mandatory video:

Direct Link

Hope you like it, and see you in the next blog post!

The feature I’m going to introduce may sound kinda useless for some people, but in all KDE software we offer different ways of doing things, so you can find which way integates better with your workflow.

In BlueDevil 1.0 and 1.1 when you use the kio_bluetooth (bluetooh:// in your browser), what it did was start a bluetooth discovery, meaning that the only devices going to appear into the file browser were those who had the visible mode activated. This behavior is totally counterproductive since you have to: wait 10 seconds until the scan ends and/or turn on the visibility in your device. Well you won’t have to do this anymore.

Now the first thing that is shown in kio_bluetooth are the configured devices allowing you to quickly select one device, at the same time a discovery is perform in the background so new devices will appear when found (and not when the 10seconds scan ends).

A picture say more than thousand words:

And now the mandatory video, watch it careful! I’ve put an Easter egg on it which shows about what I’m going to talk tomorrow.

Direct Link

Cya and remember, this feature is going to be available in BlueDevil 1.2, to be released in 4/6 weeks.

BlueDevil 1.0.5:

• Fixed bug: 277451
• Fixed some bahaviors in kio_obexftp while copying files
• Show the file size and the speed in the file transfer (in kio)
• Start/Quit bluedevil-monolithic in online/offline mode
• Improved layout to look good in all Qt Styles
• Huge i18n improvements (fix’s and more translations)

http://download.kde.org/download.php?url=stable/bluedevil/1.1.1/src/bluedevil-1.1.1.tar.bz2

Enjoy!

After a few days of working, I’m pleased to announce that for KDE-Workspace 4.7.1 the “Screen/Display/Whatever configuration” has been hugely improve, all bug fix though but now it even seems to work!

The bugs I’ve fixed are hard to explain with words but I’m going to try anyway:

KRandRTray:

• Won’t react on external changes (won’t force its configuration)
• Will update the menu (If you remove the VGA cable, VGA won’t appear)
• Will show disconnected outputs as disconnected in the popup)

• “Unify Output” option has been added (aka you will get always the expected behavior)
• Preview/Options will update on external changes

Direct Link

Though the reasons why I was unmotivated (or how I like to call it, kde-depressed) are still there, last Friday after finishing 3 important projects at work I felt again the adrenalin boost that makes me hack like crazy, no matter on what, but I have to hack on something. This is how one of my most productive weekends begun :p

The very same Friday at night I started hacking on some work stuff, nothing I can say here (because it doesn’t matter at all) but I can assure you that my partners will be happy once they know :p

Saturday, I started to hack on KDE stuff and decided that instead of developing BlueDevil or Solid I was going to fix these small details that annoy me every day, and so far I fixed everything I wanted to fix:

Plasma:

Panel auto-expand on XRandR events (probably will go into 4.7)

KWin:

Not let any window off screen on XRandR events (This will have to wait until 4.7.1)

After fixing these two bugs was time to give some love to the old BlueDevil :p

BlueDevil:

• Bug triage, quite a trivial task but time consuming
• Fixed bug 277878
• Fixed bug 277451
• Partial rewrite of kio_bluetooth (I will explain further in another post)
• Fixed bug 245538
• Fixed bug 253810
• Fixed bug 277665
• Show only “connection title” in systray if there are more than one service to connect to

That’s for Saturday :p

Then today, Sunday I started the journey with some XRandR hacking, the plan to’em all is almost done and it will include a coulpe of fixes for 4.7.1 (though I’m not sure of it).

Aaand finally another bug fix of these small annoying things:

Fix notification behavior

Now time to rest, who knows if tomorrow I will continue with this adrenaline boost.

Cheers!