KDE4 Progress

I’ve been making good progress on getting KDE 4.4 (release candidates) working. It’s been quite an interesting ride, in both a good and bad way. =)

First, there’s the fun of 10.6 making it even harder to have code that forks without it accidentally exploding on the CoreFoundation fork-without-exec prohibition. I was able to solve this with a combination of fixes from macports’ kdelibs4, and some of my own code which changes things to use low-level POSIX APIs instead of Qt APIs for some bounds-checking before execution.

Next, there’s the fun of Phonon. KDE 4.4 requires a newer version of Phonon than what ships with Qt (even Qt 4.6). On OSX it gets even hinkier, since the QuickTime plugin for Phonon requires private Qt headers, so the only sane way to build it is to build the Phonon included with Qt, rather than building it as a separate project.

I ended up adapting a patch the Kubuntu folks use to inject a modern Phonon into Qt 4.6. In the process, I finally got around to learning my way around Git (and gitorious), and have set up my own . . . → Read More: KDE4 Progress

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Fink and 10.6

It’s been a crazy couple of weeks, with Snow Leopard out, people are scrambling to fix packages that haven’t been already. I was a slacker in running the seeds this time around, and haven’t really had much chance to give my packages a serious look until recently, but FYI, I am working on getting everything building everywhere I can.

Some notes on popular stuff:

KDE3: There were a number of annoying things blocking KDE3, but with the approval of some of the other maintainers, I’ve got a lot of the deps that were failing fixed up, and I’m working my way through a full KDE build and hope to have everything hunky-dory in unstable in the next few days. KDE4: First of all: there will not be KDE4 on x86_64 in the near future. Qt4/Mac 64-bit does not have the Qt3Support framework, which plenty of KDE4 bits still depend on. I’ll definitely be making sure that KDE4 builds fine in 32-bit mode, and in 64-bit X11 though, and after that, well, we’ll see how much work it is to excise Qt3Support from at least the base libraries. In the process, I’m going to try to . . . → Read More: Fink and 10.6

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KDE 4.2.4 Released to Fink Unstable

Just a note to say that I’ve released KDE 4.2.4 to Fink unstable. And now it’s time for the fun part: big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff.

KDE4/X11 Plasma Desktop on Mac OS X in Xephyr   Working KOffice file asociations

Actually, that was just the text saying that I was going to have big bold red text telling you it breaks stuff. Here’s the real thing:

It breaks stuff!

But let me explain: it makes things better! Because of some esoteric stuff relating to case-sensitivity, existing packages, and bugs in Fink dpkg, there were issues on a number of people’s systems with the existing KDE packages and conflicting paths. Of course, the root of the issue is that Fink didn’t have a proper “/opt” type directory, so a number of packages for quite some time have been using “/sw/lib” for that purpose (/sw/lib/qt4-x11, /sw/lib/flex, etc.)

Since I was going to have to move things around anyways to fix this issue, I decided to do it right. As of Fink 0.29.7, the package . . . → Read More: KDE 4.2.4 Released to Fink Unstable

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KDE 4.2.2 in Fink Unstable

I’ve just committed all of KDE 4.2.2 to Fink Unstable.

There’s still a lot of rough edges, but it’s definitely at least beta quality, and a lot of apps work great. It includes a number of fixes, including updated scripts to register all of the desktop files properly with ksycocoa on post-install, case-sensitive filesystem fixes, and a number of other packaging fixes. I’ve also finished packaging all of the “core” KDE distribution.

I’ve got Amarok working in my experimental tree, I just need to do a little more testing before I can release it (It’s based on a snapshot of what will become Amarok 2.1.0, since 2.0.x has some build issues on Mac OS X that are difficult to resolve). Also, the KOffice folks just put out a release candidate that I’m working on finishing up packaging on. Hopefully I will have that out soon.

As always, please let me know if you run into issues. I’ve test-built on 10.5/i386 and 10.4/ppc so I’m sure some 10.4/i386 and 10.5/ppc users will give bug reports soon. 😉

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KDE4 Fink Unstable Releases

I’ve had a chance to get a few more of the KDE4 packages polished up into what I hope is a releasable state. 🙂

Please give them a shot, let me know if you have any issues, if things don’t work as expected. I know one major thing to look into still is to get document-opening working. Right now the KDE desktop files describe which apps should open different document types, but that is not being translated to OSX’s document-opening APIs.

The following packages were released to unstable today:

digikam-mac and digikam-x11 kdeaccessibility4-mac and kdeaccessibility4-x11 kdeadmin4-mac and kdeadmin4-x11 kdeartwork4-mac and kdeartwork4-x11 kdeedu4-mac and kdeedu4-x11 kdegraphics4-mac and kdegraphics4-x11 kdemultimedia4-mac and kdemultimedia4-x11

Big ones left on the hitlist are amarok2 and koffice2. Amarok2 I’m starting work on again as a snapshot of the 2.1.0 build, since there are some issues with 2.0.x building on OSX. KOffice is actually working pretty well in my experimental tree, but 2.0 release candidate is due out in the next week or so, so I’m going to wait to update to that before doing a release.

Share on . . . → Read More: KDE4 Fink Unstable Releases

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This Week in OpenNMS: Moving to a New Home

Since this blog is more about my own personal development on OSX, Fink, KDE, and OpenNMS, and This Week in OpenNMS is about, well, all of OpenNMS development, I figured it was high time to move it to somewhere more official.

Without further ado, I present to you: This Week in OpenNMS. Same bat-time, different bat-channel.

RSS is still available, but the url has moved here, rather than getting everything through my blog.

Please, update your links!

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KDE 4.2.1 in Fink

Yes, that’s right, a post to my blog that isn’t about OpenNMS. 😉

As you can tell, I’ve been pretty busy having fun hacking on OpenNMS lately. While I have been keeping up with my Fink work to some extent, one major thing was still looming: finally getting all the work I did on KDE/Mac released in Fink, now that things have stabilized.

If you’ve been watching the commits for the last few months, you’ve seen the beginnings of that work. Updates to Qt, releases of support things like strigi and soprano… The big hurdle was getting D-Bus in a state where it plays well with KDE/Mac. After some initial hiccoughs, the D-Bus updates have been released to Fink now, and seem to be working well for people.

Today, I released the base packages for KDE 4.2.x into fink: kdelibs4, kdepimlibs4, and kdebase4.

Because of the cross-platform nature of KDE, I’ve released them in 2 variants: mac and x11, so you can run konqueror as an X11 app, or as a mac app. 🙂

Some things will only . . . → Read More: KDE 4.2.1 in Fink

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Mono 2.0 in Fink Unstable

I’ve got Mono 2.0 updated and packaged up for Fink unstable. It includes Cocoa#, Gtk#, and MonoDevelop 1.0, all tested and working.

Congratulations to the Mono team on getting 2.0 released!

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Google Chrome on Mac OS X (In Wine)

Just a quick note to say that based on these instructions, I was able to get Google Chrome running on Mac OS X, using Fink.

You’ll need to enable unstable (“fink configure”, followed by “fink selfupdate-rsync”), and then do a “fink install wine cabextract”. Then start at the “offline installer” part of the instructions.

Woot!

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And Now For Something Completely Different — Raccoon Fink Music

So if you’ve followed my blog for a long time, you might have noticed me mention that I have, on occasion, written music.

I’ve finally found some time to really work on getting everything set up again so I can write more music (and, in fact, I’ve got a guitar on the way as a birthday present from my wife!). This past month, I’ve worked really hard to do something I’ve meant to do for a long time: release an album.

Now, my music has always been freely available, it’s a part of the demoscene culture, not to mention my open-source roots, working with OpenNMS, Fink, and tons of other stuff. One thing that’s very hard to do, however, when writing tracked music, is get that “finished” sound.

I’ve spent the last month going through my catalog, dumping everything to Garage Band and ProTools, and re-mixing, remastering, and all-around cleaning up my tracks.

Without further ado, I announce my first single, Pointillize, available immediately on Amazon MP3 download, and soon on iTunes, Rhapsody, and other music download services.

On May . . . → Read More: And Now For Something Completely Different — Raccoon Fink Music

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