A new course is now open for participation over at the KDE Community Forums. This time the students will use a KDE utility called Krazy Code Checker to improve the code quality of a KDE application of choice, mentored by our own administrator (and System Settings maintainer) bcooksley.

The course requires basic C++ knowledge and a KDE development platform (kdelibs) >= 4.4 (self-compiled or distribution packages). If you want to get a feel of how it’s like, you can take a look at the previous krazy course.

Interested? Head over to the forums and read the course description. If you want to participate, post a reply with the subject you want to work on. Have fun!

Klassroom – Krazy fixes 2 »

Being an Arch Linux user, I know how helpful a good wiki can be. Userbase, however, has never felt like the wiki for KDE software users to me. Don’t get me wrong – I very much appreciate the work of the Userbase contributors – but being part of both communities, I see a clear difference in how both wikis are used.

In the Arch community, it’s common praxis to check the wiki before asking a question. Many users also contribute to the ArchWiki by adding content, translating pages and whatnot.

The number of Userbase contributors are growing, but getting on the top list is still very easy – a few edits will do. The wiki is still unknown to a large part of the user base; it doesn’t feel like the natural place to seek and add information about KDE.

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Just a quick note: The Plasma HowTo has now been updated for 4.4. With short screencasts encoded in animated GIF files, it shows how to perform common tasks in Plasma Desktop. For example:

Plasma HowTo - Move Widget

The screencasts are small and can be played in almost any graphical web browser, at the expense of reduced image quality. Given that the screencasts are meant as HowTos and not for showing off Plasma Desktop, I think the lacking quality is acceptable (for now) considering the advantages. In the future, with HTML5 and whatnot, the format will probably be Ogg Theora.

If you want to create your own animated GIF screencasts, I have written a small guide here (updated yesterday).

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On Thursday 4th February 2010, the KDE Community Forums is holding a new event called Answer Day. The event will start 00:00 UTC (ends 23:59 UTC), and everyone can participate! We’ll focus on doing the following two things:

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Today I finally succeeded to build KDE trunk (development version of KDE SC) after previously struggling with some Phonon-related problems. I decided to start from scratch, and while the overall process was quite smooth, I managed to hit some bumps along the way. Below I’ve shared my experience.

First I want to remind you that this isn’t a comprehensive guide to build KDE SC from SVN – you can find those on Techbase. I followed much of the Getting Started/Build/KDE4 guide to get started.

Introduction

I’ve found it easiest to build KDE trunk using a tool called kdesvn-build. From its Techbase page:

kdesvn-build is a tool to allow users and developers to easily download and build the latest versions of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) from the KDE source code repositories. It automates the following tasks and more:

• Performing the initial checkout.
• Handling updates for modules that are already checked out.
• Setting up the build system for the module.
• Performing the build and install.
• Specifying your CMake options or configure flags (so you don’t have to remember them every time).

It’s basically a script that does the hard work for you. And it’s pretty, too.

kdesvn-build in action

Since I want to keep my stable KDE SC version, I have a special user called kde-devel to run trunk. Everything will be install in this user’s home directory – no root access is needed, and if something breaks, the risk is minimal that it’ll affect my whole system.

You can do the same with your usual user and some scripts, see Increased Productivity in KDE4 with Scripts for more information.

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I’m a long term KDE user and would like to contribute back to the community. Unfortunately donations isn’t an option (I’m a poor student), and my free time is also very limited – there’s no time to learn KDE programming. 😦

Surely you’ve seen similar comments floating around. Want to do something about it? Then here’s your chance!

Introducing Klassroom

Klassroom is an initiative from the KDE Community Forums to give new contributors a small push in the right direction. In the Klassroom forum, students work on various KDE-related real-life tasks during courses under the supervision of mentors. You can read more about it here.

The first three courses were very well received by the community. Many looked forward to future courses, but due to a lack of mentors Klassroom had to be put on ice for a while.

Until a few days ago, when the continuation of Klassroom was announced. Now we’re looking for mentors to hold courses – it can be about coding as well as document writing, promo work, translation, bug hunting or pretty much any KDE-related task you may have in mind.

To make it clearer what kind of courses we’re looking for, here’s a small example:

• Course on how to use Plasma – out of scope of Klassroom
• Course on how to use Plasma, and then let the students write a Userbase article about the things they learned – OK!

Most courses don’t required much effort from the mentor, but will be much appreciated by people who wish to contribute but don’t know how. If you’re interested in holding a course, check the general guidelines for mentors and let us know. Questions can be posted in the comments section here, or you can talk to the forum team directly in #kde-forum on freenode.

By the way, we’re looking for an icon for Klassroom – if you think you can make one, please post a comment below.

Note: Activities in KDE Plasma Workspaces have changed a lot since this post was written. For example, activities now affect all screens and not only one screen as it is described here. In 4.5 it became possible to associate windows with activities, and this became the default behavior in 4.6.

As a response to this, I wrote a post about my vision of how activities can change the way I use my computer: Activities – A change in workflow?

A recent topic in the KDE Community Forums asks KDE users how they use activities in Plasma, or more specifically “Do you use activities or plasmoids extensively?”. It seems like many users don’t see why you would want plasmoids on your desktop (“they’re covered by the windows most of the time anyway”) or how activities can be helpful. So I thought I would share my setup here and in the forum – maybe it’ll give you some inspiration.
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