Libre Application Summit 2018

Earlier this month i attended Libre Application Summit 2018 in Denver.

Check out the great group photo at #LASGNOME! Thank you for all the participant and speakers for posing for us :-) pic.twitter.com/v7pPmcCBV1

— LAS GNOME (@LASGNOME) 8 de setembre de 2018

Libre Application Summit wants to be a place for all people involved in doing Free Software applications to meet and share ideas, though being almost organized by GNOME it had a some skew towards GNOME/flatpak. There was a good presence of KDE, but personally I felt that we would have needed more people at least from LibreOffice, Firefox and someone from the Ubuntu/Canonical/Snap field (don't get annoyed at you if I failed to mention your group).

The Summit was kicked off by a motivational talk on how to make sure we ride the wave of "Open Source has won but people don't know it". I felt the content of the talk was nice but the speaker was hit by some issues (not being able to have the laptop in front of her due to the venue being a bit weirdly layouted) that sadly made her speech a bit too stumbly.

Then we had a bunch of flatpak related talks, ranging from the new freedesktop-sdk runtime, from very technical stuff about how ostree works and also including a talk by our own Aleix Pol on how KDE is planning to approach the release of flatpaks. Some of us ended the day having BBQ at the house the Codethink people were staying. Thanks for the good time!

Soon, @tsdgeos tells us all about KDE Applications releases in @LASGNOME. @kdecommunity pic.twitter.com/ODnxEZ77xv

— Aleix Pol (@AleixPol) 7 de setembre de 2018

I kicked off the next day talking about how we (lately mostly Christoph) are doing the KDE Applications releases. We got appreciation of the good work we're doing and some interesting follow up questions so I think people were engaged by it.

The morning continued with talks about how to engage the "non typical" free software people, designers, students, professors, etc.

The @kdecommunity and @Codethink people having interesting discussions over sushi at #LAS2018 pic.twitter.com/O5lH1hPTlk

— Albert Astals Cid (@tsdgeos) 7 de setembre de 2018

After lunch we had a few talks by the Elementary people and another talk with Aleix focused on which apps will run on your Plasma devices (hint: all of them).

The day finished with a quizz sponsored by System 76, it was fun!

The KDE spies team wasn't very successful at #LASGNOME trivial, but had lots of fun :) @tsdgeos @AleixPol @maru161803399 @albertvaka pic.twitter.com/k0172A3Vk1

— Albert Astals Cid (@tsdgeos) 8 de setembre de 2018

The last day of talks started again with me speaking, this time about how amazing Qt is and why you should use it to build your apps. There I had some questions about people worrying if QtWidgets was going to die, I told them not to worry, but it's clear The Qt Company needs to improve their messaging in that regard.

Learning about Qt in the @LASGNOME from @tsdgeos @qtproject pic.twitter.com/Vr5Raj10Su

— Aleix Pol (@AleixPol) 8 de setembre de 2018

After that we had a talk about a Fedora project to create a distro based exclusively in flaptaks, which sounds really interesting. The last talks of LAS 2018 were about how to fight vandalism in crowdsourced data, the status of Librem 5 (it's still a bit far away) and a very interesting one about the status of Free Software in Research.

All in all i think the conference was interesting, still a bit small and too GNOME controlled to appeal to the general crowd, but it's the second time it has been organized, so it will improve.

I want to thank the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my flight and hosting to attend this conference. Please Donate! so we can continue attending conferences like this and spreading the good work of KDE :)

Come meet KDE in Denver - September 6-9

This week, Aleix (KDE eV Vice Predisdent), Albert Vaca (KDE Connect maintainer) and me will be in Denver to attend the Libre Application Summit 2018.

Libre Application Summit is unfortunately not free to attend so even if i'd urge you to come and see the amazing talks we're going to give I can see why not everyone would want to come.

So I'm going to say that if you're in the Denver area and are a KDE fan, write a comment here and maybe we can meet for drinks or something :)

PSA: Use SASL in konversation

You probably have seen that Freenode has been getting lots of spam lately.

To protect against that some channels have activated a flag that only allows authenticated users to enter the channel.

If you're using the regular "nickserv" authentication way as I was doing, the authentication happens in parallel to entering the channels and you'll probably be rejected from joining some.

What you want is use SASL, that is a "new IRC" protocol that will first authenticate and then join the server/channels.

More info at https://userbase.kde.org/Konversation/Configuring_SASL_authentication.

Thanks Fuchs on #kde-devel for enlightening me :)

And of course, I'm going to Akademy ;)

KDE Applications 18.08 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 18.08 release to them :)

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 19 of July.

More interesting dates
August 2: KDE Applications 18.08 RC (18.07.90) Tagging and Release
August 9: KDE Applications 18.08 Tagging
August 16: KDE Applications 18.08 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.08_Release_Schedule

Qt Contributor Summit 2018

About two weeks ago i attended Qt Contributor Summit 2018, i did so wearing my KDAB hat, but given that KDE software is based heavily on Qt I think I'll give a quick summary of the most important topic that was handled at the Summit: Qt 6

• Qt 6 is planned for a November 2020 release
• Qt 5 releases will continue with the current cadence as of now with 5.15 being the last release (and also LTS)
• The work branch for Qt 6 will be branched soon after Qt 5.12
• Qt 6 has to be easy to migrate from Qt 5
• Qt 6 will use C++17
• Everything to be removed in Qt 6 should be marked as deprecated in 5.15 (ideally sooner)
• What can be done in Qt 5 should be done to Qt 5
• Qt 6 should be a "boring" release user feature wise, mostly cleanup and preparing for the future
• Qt 6 should change things that break at compile time, those are easy to fix, silent runtime changes are scarier
• Qt 6 will not use qmake as build system
• The build system for Qt 6 is still not decided, but there's people working on a qbs build and noone working on any other alternative

On a community related note, Tero Kojo the Community Manager for The Qt Company is leaving and doesn't seem a replacement is on sight

Of course, note that these are all plans, and as such they may be outdated already since the last 10 days :D

Call for distros: Patch cups for better internationalization

If you're reading this and use cups to print (almost certainly you do if you're on Linux), you may want to contact your distribution and ask them to add this patch.

It adds translation support for a few keyword found in some printers PPD files. The CUPS upstream project has rejected with not much reason other than "PPD is old", without really taking into account it's really the only way you can get access to some advanced printer features (see comments in the same thread)

Anyhow they're free to not want that code upstream but i really think all distros should add it since it's very simple and improves the usability for some users.

Akademy 2018 hotel and flight booked!

I just booked my flights and hotel for Akademy 2018.

If you're planning to come you should too! [1]

You can find information about the recommended accommodation here.

See you in Viena!

[1] unless you're applying for sponsored travel+accommodation

KDE Applications 18.04 branches created

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 18.04 release to them :)

We're already past the dependency freeze.

The Freeze and Beta is this Thursday 22 of March.

More interesting dates
April 5: KDE Applications 18.04 RC (18.03.90) Tagging and Release
April 12: KDE Applications 18.04 Tagging
April 19: KDE Applications 18.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.04_Release_Schedule

Akademy-es 2018 in Valencia - 11-13 May

This years Akademy-es will be happening in Valencia from 11 to 13 of May. The call for papers is still open so if speak Spanish and have something interesting to share with your fellow KDE people send a talk :)

We'll open registration shortly, be sure to attend and say hi!

Okular gains some more JavaScript support

Andre Heinecke did some patches [1][2][3][4][5] over the last few weeks that finally got landed this week.

With it we support recalculation of some fields based on others. An example that calculates sum, average, product, minimum and maximum of three numbers can be found in this youtube video.



This code will be available for the Okular version that will ship with KDE Applications 18.04

KDE Applications 18.04 Schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/18.04_Release_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in 5 weeks and Feature Freeze in 6 weeks, so hurry up!

Akademy 2018 site visit

Last week I was part of the expedition by KDE (together with Kenny and Petra) to visit the local team that is helping us organize Akademy 2018 in Vienna.

I can say that I'm very happy :)

The accommodation that we're probably going to recommend is 15 minutes away by train from the airport, 20 minutes on foot from the Venue (10 on metro) so kind of convenient.

The Venue is modern and centrally located in Vienna (no more "if you miss the bus you're stranded")

Vienna itself seems to be also a nice city for late evening sight-seeing (or beers :D)

Hopefully "soon" we will have confirmation of the dates and we'll be able to publish them :)

KDE Edu sprint 2017 in Berlin

I had the privilege to attend the KDE Edu sprint in Berlin that happened from the 6th to the 9th of October.

There i mostly worked in the KTuberling port to Android. If you have children (or maybe if you want to feel like one for a few minutes) and an Android device please try it and give some constructive feedback ;)



Though of course that's not all we did, we also had important discussions about "What is kde edu", about how we should be involved in the "Making KDE software the #1 choice for research and academia" KDE goal and other organization stuff like whether we want a phabricator rule to send email to the kdeedu mailing list for a set of projects, etc.



Thanks go to all the people that donate to KDE e.V. that made sponsoring the trip possible, and to Endocode for hosting us and sponsoring all kind of interesting drinks and pizza on Sunday :)

Sorry for Spain

Today the Spanish police has committed in Catalonia what can only be described as barbarism.

Beware of the videos, they may hurt your feelings.

They have hit people on the street and fought catalan police over it https://twitter.com/jaumeclotet/status/914484855450333184
They have hit people sitting on stairs https://twitter.com/LaVanguardia/status/914447807754448896
They have hit old ladies https://twitter.com/asiercorc/status/914395993193504768
They have hit people standing on the street https://twitter.com/julia_otero/status/914466508570595329
Did i mention they hit people on the street? https://twitter.com/isaacfcorrales/status/914508531654676480
They also hit someone that was already injured and walking away https://twitter.com/Ulldebou1/status/914497525033390080
They have broken (on purpose) all the fingers of a woman that was already on the floor https://twitter.com/hectorjuanatey/status/914538706299707392
They have hit some more people https://twitter.com/QuicoSalles/status/914504909508218880
They have hit firefighters https://twitter.com/Jorfs_/status/914482953954177024

Currently we're officially speaking of more than 800 injured people https://twitter.com/emergenciescat/status/914584719060275200 but i wouldn't be surprised if the count was much higher.

Meanwhile a dude voting wrapped in a spanish+bull flag gets a round of clapping https://twitter.com/JoseJPriego/status/914485977158209536

And I'm saying sorry for Spain, because it's obvious that after today Catalonia will leave Spain, sooner or later but it's going to happen, but the rest of Spain will have to live with these beasts ingrained in their police and politics.

Sorry and good luck.

How to check if your touch screen is really sending touch events

I've had this problem twice in the last year, I'm testing something related to touch in my laptop and I'm stuck trying to figure out if it's my code that is wrong or if my screen is misconfigured and it's only sending mouse events.

Thanks to Shawn of Qt fame for having helped me the two times and explained me how to test if my screen is sending touch events, I'm writing this blog so i don't forget and ask him a third time :D

First step is figuring out the xinput id of the touch screen of my laptop

tsdgeos@yoga:~:$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Wacom Co.,Ltd. Pen and multitouch sensor Finger id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ETPS/2 Elantech TrackPoint id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad id=14 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Wacom Co.,Ltd. Pen and multitouch sensor Pen id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Integrated Camera id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=12 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ ThinkPad Extra Buttons id=15 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]

In this case would be id=9

Then you can do

tsdgeos@yoga:~:$ xinput test-xi2 9

and if the output contains RawTouchBegin and RawTouchEnd events, it means that the screen is correctly sending touch events :)

Next you probably want to check if Qt actually is seeing those events, for that there's a few ready to use demos in the qtdeclarative source code, so I would do

tsdgeos@yoga:~:$ qml qt5/qtdeclarative_58/examples/quick/touchinteraction/multipointtouch/multiflame.qml

And after putting my five fingers on the screen I would see

So all is good, the bug is my code and not in Qt or the configuration of my touch screen :D

Big day in poppler-land

Today in Poppler:
* Poppler 0.57 got released
* We agreed to stop supporting openjpeg 1.x at the end of the year
* We agreed to stop supporting Qt 4.x at the end of the year
* We merged the better_object branch

The last one is the one that is really big, since it introduces a big rework of the Object class, a central component to Poppler. Object is much used like a QVariant, i.e. it can hold various kind of data inside and you can pass it around.

Unfortunately the Object implementation we inherited from xpdf was kind of hard to use, having to basically do the memory management by hand. i.e. destroying the object was not enough to free the memory, you had to call free() on it.

Thanks to C++11 now we have an implementation with move semantics that greatly simplifies the use of Object and will hopefully make for less memory management mistakes.

Let's hope we didn't break anything in the process though :D

KDE Applications 17.08 Schedule finalized

It is available at the usual place https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Applications/17.08_Release_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in 4 weeks and Feature Freeze in 5 weeks, so hurry up!

Okular 1.1 released!

Today KDE Applications 17.04 was released.

It includes Okular 1.1, it contains a nice set of features:
* Add annotation resize functionality
* Add support for auto-calculation of form contents via JavaScript
* Allow to rotate the page view using two-finger pinches on a touchscreen
* Change pages in presentation mode by swiping on touch screen
* Added support for Links that change the Optional Content visibility status
* Allow to disable automatic search while typing
* Allow to create bookmarks from the Table Of Contents

This release was brought to you by Albert Astals Cid, Oliver Sander, Luigi Toscano, Martin T. H. Sandsmark, Tobias Deiminger, Antonio Rojas, Burkhard Lück, Christoph Feck, Elvis Angelaccio, Gilbert Assaf, Heiko Becker, Hrvoje Senjan, Marco Scarpetta, Miklós Máté, Pino Toscano, Yuri Chornoivan.

Akademy 2017 Call for Papers deadline is in a week!

The Akademy 2017 Call for Papers ends April 10th at 23:59:59 CEST.

Surely you have interesting stuff to share with the community, so go to https://akademy.kde.org/2017/cfp and submit a proposal!

Okular table selection mode is amazing

I case you didn't know ;)

Okular has a amazing table select mode where you select an area and Okular will auto detect rows and columns on it (you can fine-tune it afterwards) and then you can directly copy&paste to a spreadsheet :)

It's mostly tested on PDF files, but should work the same on any of the formats we support text extraction.

Update: This feature is not new, just i got to use it today ;) Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8XWI06tltY