Afiestas Blog

Fixing mtp support for various pieces of the workspace I realized a small paper-cut I could do to improve the experience when handling external devices such pendrive or usb hard drive.

The paper cut is quite simple, before these patches we were using the “device description” for all devices, which make sense for devices always plugged into the computer for example the normal Hard Drive where your operating system is usually installed, but it doesn’t make sense for removable devices.

You will understand this better and quicker with the following screenshots:

 and after 

Patches are under review, if everything goes ok and I’m not breaking anything (little bit concerned about freeBSD support) will backport this to 4.9.

Cheerz !

First of all, excuse the super late release of this post, I have been super busy up to the point where I couldn’t use 15min to spellcheck this post, now I had to adapt it a little bit, change times etc.

From 11jun to 18jun we had an amazing sprint in a small town near Barcelona called Pineda de Mar. This sprint was organized to gather all the developers highly motivated in move the Desktop forward, including those working in areas not strictly related to what the user sees or not strictly known as part of the desktop. We had a week of fun and work lead (as usual :p) by Kevin Ottens.
We had endless discussions about our weak and strong spots , hacked a little bit (some more than others), played table tennis (Yay for the Southern European team vs the British Empire), and enjoyed good quality food done mostly by Dario Freddi (let the italians cook we say) though more people worked in the kitched to prepare delicious disesh (Kevin, Sebas, Clemens, Marco Martin, Lluis Eskerda…).

It is hard to describe what the environment of a sprint is like, just imagine that you are with your best friends a whole week doing what you love only stopping for eating and having fun. In this case KDE is the people and what we love is our software, full week non-distractions equals super productivity of all kinds. It is hard to summarize the whole week, but these are my personal highlights of the sprint:

• Almost everybody attending the sprint would like shorter and more dynamic releases (à la chrome or kernel).
• Everybody agrees that we must be careful when modifying the Desktop, we don’t want to make it worst !
• Common agreement that we have to start looking for alternative to the current windows 95 paradigm.
• Our current notifications suck and we know how to fix’em (1) (2) (3).
• Virtual desktop are a thing from the past in its current state.
• Activities are a super awesome concept, yet we are nowhere close to make them appealing in the desktop (as they are in the tablet)
• Knowledge about Plasma terminology was shared and kind of agreed on (did you know that Plasma Active is about all form factors? yes! that includes the desktop !)
• We need better PulseAudio support
• We need a better screen support
• Lots of stuff to clean and polish! papercut program by Agateau on the way
• Lot of people using icontask (this is more of a personal note :p)
• WebAccounts is supermegaultraimportant, we need it now.
• We want KTp or even better “KPeople” everywhere, it will become one of our new pilars.

On this list (I hope quite close to the reality) you can see more or less the feeling of the Desktop developers, and especially that it is alive in all senses.

Photos taken by Martin Klapetek

I hope you could see a glimpse of how intense a sprint is lived and how useful they are.

Bye !

There was a time, years ago when computer users only needed to keep all their files in one place, and occasionally make some backup to a CD or DVD. Then the mp3 players appeared and those users had to copy the music from the computer to the player usually via USB, that’s all we needed we thought… well we were wrong

The amount of devices we have and we use is increasing and so does the amount of data we manage, some may think that a regular non geek user has few files but if you take a closer look you will see that the average user actually has hundreds of pictures, hundreds of sounds, hundreds of films, dozens of documents… So we have to ask ourselves a question: Can we continue with the model of copying that data around? the answer is no.

Motivated by that need users are starting to setup a central computer or a device such a NAS with the only propose of  storing data and make it available to any device that may need it such: cell phones, players, ebook readers, tv’s, other computers etc. Some times that central place is not even a computer dedicated to do that job but instead the daily used computer, I’m specifically thinking on a laptop.

The file transfer are usually done with protocols such nfs, webdav, ftp or samba being this last the most common at least in commercial devices. The need for supporting this is clear as users of these systems increase, so how well do we support Samba?

We have had a kick ass technology called KIO for years, I believe it was developed in KDE 2 and basically it allows to use remote files as if they were local,  meaning that you can use files in an ftp for example without having to use any special programs for it. Even with KIO, we have identify some issues that need to be solved before we can say that our remote file support has no gaps, for example streaming or support for applications not supporting KIO.

Let’s say for example that we have a collection of music in a NAS device and they are shared through Samba, can we reproduce them using any KDE application? or better, can we stream and reproduce them? the answer is sadly no.

There are a series of technical problems that we have to fix to make KDE software fully capable of streaming music, I won’t bother you with technical details just know that actions are being taken to fix this situation and because of KIO we should be able to stream music on applications that use it in no time hopefully in 4.9.0 or 4.9.1.

What about applications not using KIO, is there any way for making them work ? short answer is it depends.

There are technical mechanisms for making Samba remote files look like local for all applications, for example for this protocol we have cifs, smbnetfs and fusesmb. According to the tests we performed only cifs is fast enough to provide a good experience but still you usually need to know some command or edit a file you are not supposed to modify in order to have a good experience so it is not a solution by itself.

We are designing a solution that will make KIO available to any application, but that will take months of developing and testing  and we needed something fast, something to include in Netrunner 4.2 Dryland SE… So we created samba-mounter.

Samba-mounter is a small piece of code that makes easy the usage of cifs, improving the experience of those who need to access files shared through samba.

Take a look at the following video:

Direct Link

You can download the code from here:

http://quickgit.kde.org/index.php?p=scratch/afiestas/samba-mounter.git

I expect to write a blog post explaining the long-term solution in the following weeks.

A few months ago it almost happened to me. It was horrible. I was traumatized. I wonder, how can that happend in 2011? why me? why to my laptop?

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.

A few days ago I attended to the PA3 sprint in Darmstadt, as always I enjoyed a few days with my friends not only working but also taking beers, going dinner etc. I have had a really good time there as I always do when KDE is in the formula.

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.