Recently in KDE Category

With the help of a number of folks, I'm happy to announce the latest KDE/Mac snapshot, based on KDE 4.1 Beta 1. Also, while it's been available for a while, I'd like to point out that KDE/Mac now has an official website, at mac.kde.org, using Benjamin Dietrich's pretty design.

Torrents are all seeded, and downloadable.

Note: Apparently bittorrent doesn't preserve executable flags. :( Before installing, run, in a terminal:
chmod a+x *.pkg/Contents/Resources/postflight

As always, questions are welcome in the comments, on the kde-mac list, or in a bug report. =)

So I've been slack in posting to my blog, for any number of reasons, but I've been busy busy with lots of crazy stuff.

First, I've been spearheading the OpenNMS involvement in Summer of Code. Aside from one unfortunate incident things have been going well. I'm really looking forward to getting to know our students and seeing what they can come up with. It will be a learning experience for all of us. =)

We're also starting to gear up towards another beta on the road to OpenNMS 1.6. We've already got a bunch more bugs finished off, but also plenty to do still.

If you haven't noticed, my blog looks a little bit different. I'd been limping along with pretty much unchanged templates from upgrade after upgrade of Movable Type since version 3.1 or so. It's a testament to their software that everything's worked swimmingly without any major surgery for all of that time, but I've been itching to take advantage to the much cleaner HTML and CSS they're using in newer default templates, and other spiffy features which I have not been able to use without a ton of work. So I finally took the plunge and exported all of my existing data, and started over, making a CSS theme and only very small changes to the default templates. There's a bit more to do, but in all, I'm very happy with how it's gone. I should be future-proofed for another 6 years of blogging now. ;)

What's next? More OpenNMS bugfixing, to start with. I also have some Fink packages to update, as well as a few Rails-related packages to release (Mongrel and it's supporting cast of characters). It's also time to pick up my on-again off-again work on KDE/Mac, they're working towards and alpha of 4.1 and I still have a number of things I'd like to do before releasing somewhat stable packages.

Ah, well, a geek's work is never done. ;)

Now that KDE 3.5.9 is out, I've updated all of the Fink KDE/X11 packages to match it. Nothing new specific to Mac OS X or Fink, just a version bump with some bugfixes and a significantly updated kdepim.

It also includes a few things that are updated to understand Chris's new libflac package.

As always, let me know if you run into any issues.

Had a good time at SCaLE -- seemed like a lot of folks were interested in OpenNMS there. Of course, we found a bug in 1.3.10 as soon as it was out the door so I actually did another release during the conference. Fun!

Also fixed a long-standing bug with kdepim building on leopard; It should work now. If there are any other KDE3 build issues on Leopard, please let me know. I'm in the process of updating the packages to the upcoming 3.5.9 release.

Also, I see qt-copy is now a 4.4 snapshot so hopefully if I can get another snapshot build going, we'll have native QuickTime audio. (woot)

I've submitted some patches to D-Bus to allow it to auto-launch on Mac OS X. This should let me remove some completely awful and distribution-specific code from kdelibs.

It's got a few quirks to work out, but on 10.5, it's rockin'! Even scarier, I wrote C code. I think it might even be halfway decent C code. Time to look out, Armageddon is clearly happening any day now. :)

Oh, and as an aside, this is the first time I've actually had to break down and finally learn how to use Git, since that's what dbus uses, and it's friggin' amazing. Lightning fast, and well-suited to sending patches upstream.

If there's one thing I know about people who are involved in network management, it's that they're stats junkies. Case in point. (Hah, I mean, how cool is it to poll the weather in OpenNMS...) I put that to the test in the last week, most definitely.

I got slashdotted (and ars technica'd, and dugg) a few days ago, and despite being under the weather, it fired me up to do 2 things.

First of all, it got me excited about working on KDE more. I had a great time at the KDE 4.0 release event and for the first time got strong feedback from KDE folks on what I've been working on. I got a little bit of that at aKademy but I also still felt quite a bit like the outsider there. This time around there were a number of people who gave me great feedback, encouragement, and all-around made me feel like a part of the community.

As a result, the thing I'd hoped would happen most after getting the press did happen -- the kde-darwin IRC channel is hoppin' with people not only willing to help test things and give bug reports, but willing to dig into the code, and help out in other ways. (One guy is designing a sweet web site that will hopefully be at mac.kde.org when we can get the administrative stuff handled.) And as for testers... well, there've been at least 1200 people who have completed downloading the "everything" torrent!

Second of all, I obsessively watched my web page and download stats. I can't help it, I love watching the graphs go crazy.

We, of course, monitor my web site with OpenNMS. However, I've recently switched to a new server at my hosting provider and I hadn't noticed that I wasn't monitoring the new machine. So thanks, ars technica, for getting me to monitor my new server. The cobbler's children finally got some shoes. ;)

I also use Google Analytics for web-site tracking. You can see in the graph on the right the difference between last week and this week. (Last week is the little green bit at the bottom of the graph...) This week I've had over 13,000 unique visitors, when about 1,500 is the norm. That's just crazy!

And on that subject, Tarus and I were talking about a bug reported to the discuss list related to my recent changes to the OpenNMS RPM packages. Tarus joked that "at least two people are running nightly snapshots" which, of course, got me thinking, "Hmm, our Yum downloads aren't recorded on SourceForge, I wonder how many snapshot users we do have..."

I figured it would be maybe 20 or 30 people brave enough to run the nightly version of OpenNMS. Boy was I wrong. A quick grep through the logs shows that since we started doing snapshots, we've had almost 8 thousand snapshot downloads, from 900 unique hosts. That's not people running the latest release, that's people running whatever nightly code got checked in the day before. Granted, we do a pretty good job of making sure trunk is always usable, but "usable" is not the same as "regression tested" nor "proven in the field."

All I can say is, thanks to everyone willing to try things out, it's great to see that we've got that many people willing to be on the front lines making sure our software works.

The future, Ranger Rick?

That's right, dear reader. Let's look to the future, all the way to the year 2000!"

So, in preparation for working on becoming an officially-supported part of KDE, I'm starting to move "my" project information into someplace that makes it easier to get the community's involvement.

First, I've gone ahead and moved the wiki stuff to KDE techbase.

Next up is starting to offer up the torrents on ftp.kde.org, but I need to get access to it again.

And hopefully soon, we can get a proper KDE mailing list set up, rather than the occasional post to kde-nonlinux.

Just in time for the KDE release event (grin) -- a new KDE/Mac snapshot is available. I will be demoing it at the release event, thanks to Google and the KDE release coordinators for arranging free lodging, and my employer, OpenNMS, for covering my travel!

On to info about the snapshots.

Qt is updated to 4.3.3, and my build tools have been updated to use the KDE 4.0 branch now that 4.0.0 has been tagged. This does mean that kdepim and kdevelop are no longer being built (for now). Also, I'm not building Amarok right now since it has some compile issues, and I need to get with the Amarok folks to figure out what to do about some architectural issues (no Plasma on OSX).

Nothing huge code-wise has changed from a Mac point of view, other than all of the general updates that have gone on in the KDE codebase since the last snapshot. It appears that kdeinit4 and kded4 both have some crashing issues related to something deep in Qt, I will be investigating it when time permits. In the meantime, a lot of apps still work. Notably, KOffice apps appear to work now! In fact, KSpread is looking pretty darn good.

The torrents are still in the process of uploading to my seed servers, I've got most of them finished but a few are still going, and the "everything" torrent is still going, so if you're impatient, grab the individual packages of the stuff you want for best results. Note that I will be traveling to San Jose for the release event today, so you may see the torrents stop updating for a while but I will resume them as soon as possible.

As always, comments and questions are welcome, just send me an e-mail or reply in the comments here.

(No, it's not a suppository.)

Trolltech has released phonon backends for GStreamer, DirectShow, and QuickTime/CoreAudio, and will be maintaining them in the KDE codebase!

I guess it's time to start another build and see how Amarok sounds with nice CoreAudio output.

I've finished getting everything set up so that you can run OpenNMS on Mandriva Linux. It is now possible to install using URPMI with a minimum of fuss.

I've gotta say, it's been a number of years since I've tried out Mandrake Mandriva, and it's definitely grown from just a KDE-themed RedHat into a pretty sweet and polished Linux distribution.