Nov 122010
Today, is the last day of my holidays, I could say that it is pity, but it is not, I’m addicted to my work :$
During this relax vacations, I’ve dedicated a part of the time into analize the current situation of KDE, and with that try to find my spot between all the work that needs to be done. Probably during the next days I will publish some blog entries with the cloncusions got, but this entry is about what I’m going to do in KDE in the follow 6 months. I think that having an agenda and try to achieve it is very important to do not get distracted in the way. KDE is a big community with a lot of work to be done, is important to have clear where you want to help, and try
to find the balance between “What have to be done” and “What you want to do”.
One of the best and most impresive facets of KDE, is our implication in a lot of fields, from office applications, to “The cloud”, passing trhough PIM. With all these options, is not trivial to decide where to collaborate, again find the balance between “Where I’m needed” and “Where I want to be”.
Taking into account all of that, this is my conclusion:
Hardware:
One of the most frustrating things when you install KDE in a PC, is not been able to use some kind of hardware, for example: Webcams, Bluetooth, Printers… This is somethign weird since all mentioned before have an excelent support in GNU/Linux. A lot of this things are more or less supported (printers for example), but they don’t have the elegance we are looking for. Other types of hardware like the finger readers are not supported at all althought there are some work done there. This is my TODO list:
- Continue the BlueDevil development (Bluetooth)
- Revive Kamoso (Webcam)
- XRandR support (Screen management).
- LibSolid asynchronous API
Zeroconf and friends:
A few weeks ago, I was using empathy when I noticed somebody called “Alfredo Rollan” in my contact list. I started to wonder who was that guy, and what was he doing in my contact list… After a while I remembered Bonjour, so I ran trhough everybody using osx to see if any of them was the so called “Alfredo”, and indeed I found him. That event started my curiosity about Bonjour, Avahi and Zeroconf. I started to perform the typical searchs: “Avahi KDE” “Zeroconf KDE”… Then I discover our kio network:// and that kopete actually supports Bonjour (but you’ve to create the account yourself). After seeing the potential of this, I think that is very important for us beeing able to support these technologies. Image for example being at akademy and just after you connect your computer to the network you start to see a lot of people in your contact list, everybody wil be able to share the akademy photos just by clicking in one button, and you will be able to reach them just by using your file browser, all of this without configuring anything. I don’t have clear what I want to do in this topic, so before do anything I will:
- Investigate Avahi, and what KDE supports
- Investigate UPnP, and what KDE supports
- Investigate Samba, and what KDE supports
- Investigate NFS, and what KDE supports
Small things here and there:
Something that is annoying me from the current status of KDE software is that some things are “half working” or at least they are for me, and some other things are lacking the “Elegance” we want to achieve. List of things I want to do:
- Investigate CUPS and all the “printing” thing.
- Investigate PulseAudio and KDE Sound system (kmix, phonon)
Documentation:
As some of you may know, where I work we have the fridays free to work on what we want, the idea is to give something back to the community. After much thinking, I belive that the best I can do in that 8hours is improve the documentation in KDE. This is not a final TODO:
- Understand how doxygen work
- Take a look at how KDE uses doxygen
- Take a look at how Qt and other projects does it
- Understand the current techbase layout
- Trace a plan.
A lot of things to do, and only 6 months ahead, beter stop talking and start to do some fresh autumn hacking 
Happy hacking!
sounds great
you spoke what is in my mind. Thank you for developing Bluedevil. I don’t know if asking this here is appropriate, I can’t pair my Nokia 5800 using Bluedevil, i tried with other Nokia mobiles but no success. can you support Nokia mobiles please.
Nokia cellhones should work, can you report a bug at https://bugs.kde.org/ so we can track it down?
Thanks.
great stuff! looks like most the infrastructure is there, but we don’t get to use it… it would be very cool if all this was made more accessible to simple users!
We’re going to try
Hey,
Here is a bookmark that you might find useful : http://kodeclutz.blogspot.com/
Would definitely love to see a UPnP media server though… currently Rygel seems to be the best one out there…
Good Luck
kamoso +1
Sounds like a plan.
I hope you have a lot of fun doing this!
Christian
Mueheh thanks, I will
Well stated.
Hardware support doesn’t end with a fancy library exposing an API.
It’s up to applications to show the hardware capabilities to the user!
Let me know when you get to the Printing “thing”, we can try beat Qt into submission together, or start sharpening our forks…
Sounds like a lot of work is needed to be done, good luck with all of the various improvements. By the way, good job on BlueDevil!
Sounds great. Especially the zeroconf stuff is interesting. I always thought there was a lot of potential there but that KDE (and Linux in general) wasn’t really making much use of it.
I knew about network:/ but right now it seems to be of limited use. It will detect and display the administrative web pages associated with my router and printer for example (although the icon doesn’t really give a good hint to what it is exactly) but other things will just give an “unknown service” or won’t do anything at all. My printer shows up for example with a printer icon, so it’s obvious it gets recognized as being a printer, but it won’t let you do anything with the icon.
The same happens with PulseAudio on my main computer, all the sources and sinks show up with nice icons and such… but you can’t do anything with them.
You’re my personal hero!
bluedevil works perfectly, the problem was in my Bluetooth dongle, i found that its a cheap Chinese duplicate. sorry for the wrong report. Thanks for your good work
[...] Alex Fiestas: Mi trabajo para KDE en los próximos 6 meses. Vía: AFiesta’s Blog [...]
Hiya,
As the only person (that I know off) doing PulseAudio integration in KDE, I’d certainly welcome any contributions you care to make!! I’m usually fairly reachable on IRC #pulseaudio and #kde-devel and of course via email too
@Quintesse I’d love to know more about your PA problem. Drop me a line with screenshots and a better description if you can.
Cheers
Col
[...] Alex Fiestas: Mi trabajo para KDE en los próximos 6 meses. Vía: AFiesta’s Blog [...]