The KDE meeting had the usual monthly meeting yesterday. After a long discussion we decided to switch to add Trinity ebuilds finally in tree. There has been a lot of time we were working on those ebuilds, we consider them mature enough now for end users. Since we lack the manpower to provide support for two DE’s, we will have to move KDE 4 ebuilds in a user-maintained overlay, called kde4-sunset. A Gentoo KDE 4 team may suffice of course, but until that happens, we are obliged by our QA team’s policy to remove any non-maintained / obsolete ebuilds away from our users, especially for security reasons. The following actions will take place in the following days:

Software in the making edition

Gentoo Linux is proud to announce the availability of a new LiveDVD to celebrate the continued collaboration between Gentoo users and developers. The LiveDVD features a superb list of packages, some of which are listed below.

• System packages include: Linux Kernel 2.6.37 (with Gentoo patches), Accessibility Support with Speakup 3.1.6, bash 4.1, glibc 2.12.2, gcc 4.5.2, binutils 2.21, python 2.7.1 and 3.1.3, perl 5.12.3, and more.
• Desktop environments and window managers include: KDE SC 4.6, GNOME 2.32, Xfce 4.8, Enlightenment 1.0.7, Openbox 3.4.11.2, Fluxbox 1.3.1, XBMC 10.0 and more.
• Office, graphics, and productivity applications include: OpenOffice 3.2.1, XEmacs 21.5.29 gVim 7.3.102, Abiword 2.8.6, GnuCash 2.2.9, Scribus 1.9.3, GIMP 2.6.11, Inkscape 0.48.1, Blender 2.49b, XSane 0.997, and much more.
• Web browsers include: Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, Arora 0.11.0, Opera 11.0, Epiphany 2.30.6, Seamonkey 2.0.11, and other favorites.
• Communication tools include: Pidgin 2.7.10, Quassel 0.7.1, Mozilla Thunderbird 3.1.7, Claws Mail 3.7.8, Qtwitter 0.10.0, irssi 0.8.15, and many more.
• Development applications include: KDevelop 4.2, KDESvn 1.5.5, qt-creator 2.1.0, Bluefish 2.0.2, and many more.
• Multimedia applications include: Amarok 2.4, MPlayer 1.0_rc4, DVDAuthor 0.6.14, LAME 3.98.4, ffmpeg 0.6, GNOME-MPlayer 1.0.0, SMPlayer 0.6.9, and several others.
• Special Features:
  • Writable AUFS support so you can emerge new packages!
  • Persistancy for $HOME is available; press F9 for more info!

The LiveDVD is available in two flavors: a hybrid x86/x86_64 version, and an x86_64 multilib version. The livedvd-x86-amd64-32ul-11.0 version will work on 32-bit x86 or 64-bit x86_64. If your CPU architecture is x86, then boot with the default gentoo kernel. If your arch is amd64 boot with the gentoo64 kernel. This means you can boot a 64bit kernel and install a customized 64bit userland while using the provided 32bit userland. The livedvd-amd64-multilib-11.0 version is for x86_64 only.

And now some KDE specific words: the LiveDVD was finished the same day that KDE SC 4.6.1 was released, but we decided to give it some testing before adding it to the LiveDVD (of course it is available in the tree, you can even update it from inside the LiveDVD). As for KDEPIM, although we initially installed 4.6beta4, we saw too many objections and went with the old good 4.4.10, but I really hope to have a KDEPIM 4.6 (or a separate LiveDVD flavor) soon included. Apart from KDE SC, you’ll find a huge list of KDE / Qt applications (and you can always emerge the ones you want that we didn’t include), of which some are even maintained by Gentoo Developers, like Trojita, Avogadro and qTwitter. If you have any suggestions for packages we should include, feel free to contact me.

Please select your architecture to be redirected to a mirror for download:

• x86
• amd64
• Torrents are available at http://torrents.gentoo.org

Please read the FAQ on using the LiveDVD.

We have also started a discussion thread in our forum. Please post any bugs you encounter.

Thank you for your continued support,
Gentoo Linux Developers, the Gentoo Linux Foundation, and the Gentoo-Ten Project.

Since random people poke us in IRC about the same questions, I decided to redistribute the last meeting’s summary in my blog.

0) Elect new lead

Wheee I am the new Leader! I am the head, the boss, the godfather, the lord of the rings, the bourne identity (joke stolen from The IT Crowd). I can’t see how that affects anything though, in my opinion team leaders are useless positions, the council is enough.

1) Status regarding hal

Since KDE SC 4.6 is out, we don’t need it anymore. As soon as 4.6 gets stable, hal can die

2) Should we try to form a “stable KDE devs” team? Meaning just call for volunteers on the gentoo-dev mailing list?

dilfridge stated that since most of the kde team members use ~arch, stable seems to lag behind. The problem is very obvious now, mainly because we haven’t stabilized 4.4. The problem will go away as soon as 4.6 gets stable though. Apart from main kde, the misc apps are also slow in stabilization. We expect users to request for stabilizations in bugzilla.

3) kde-git/eclasses migration and status, move kdepim 4.6 beta in tree masked

reavertm, Sput, and scarabeus did a major cleanup in our eclasses and added git support to eclasses and ebuilds. In order to migrate the eclasses to tree we will need to get git-2.eclass in tree first (it is now in kde overlay as well). ETA: not less than a month. As a side note, we decided to remove koffice-specific codeout of the eclasses.

4) Shall we drop useflags kdeenablefinal and/or kdeprefix to simplify code?

First of all, both useflags are masked. We agreed to keep kdeenablefinal, since it is an upstream feature. About kdeprefix, the problem is that bindings are not prefixed, and a possible fix (proposed by reavertm) would be to slot sip. tampakrap said he’ll work on this, and bring the topic back in next meeting.

5) Dropping of semantic-desktop useflag with guide update (mostly even kdebase needs it on now)

This entry is invalid, semantic-desktop is not needed by kdebase. The problem is in our ebuilds (plasma-workspace is semi broken, kdeplasma-addons is completely broken). We have open bugs for those, the problem is clearly in our side.

6) Making +consolekit and +policikit or removing the useflags as whole (non working stuff run-as is annoying)

scarabeus and dilfridge are in favour of dropping them, since it caused a lot of trouble debugging various user reports. reavertm prefers adding it to IUSE defaults. No consensus was succeeded, the topic will be continued in the gentoo-desktop mailing list (Here is the topic).

7) HT/overlay/bugzie access policy

Since we don’t have a clear list of who is an HT and who isn’t, we decided to compile a list, and state what priviledges the HT has. (HT = Herd Tester). Some people don’t have time/motivation to complete their ebuild quiz, thus we’ll have two groups of people: * full HTs (overlay access, editbugs, access to ktown, IRC cloak) * overlay commiters We decided to drop the KDE HT Lead title, seems rather useless. (As a side note, we always welcome new members, either for HT or for full developer status, feel free to contact me).

8 ) LiveDVD issues

LiveDVD comes with KDE SC 4.6 as default DE, and we called likewhoa (the guy behind it) to report any issues. He said that everything seems to be fine, but random users wanted the cool gentoo graphics to be applied to in-tree ebuilds as well. The KDE Team is willing to do that, likewhoa said he’ll provide us some artwork and we’ll discuss again the USE=”branding” issue.

9) documentation status

There has been a major improvement in the guide, added some 4.6 specific tips and troubleshooting parts, we need to add a hal->udev migration guide (there is a draft in my devspace, based on this forum post), and migrate some texts that are in kde overlay to guidexml.

10 & 11) 4.6 (and misc apps with 4.6) status / Early discussion about 4.6 stabilization

KDE SC 4.6 is going fine, we all agreed that 4.6.1 could be a good candidate, we’ll discuss it again after its release. About a 4.6 KDEPIM version, no idea yet, we’ll have to wait on upstream moves first. Most misc apps seem to be fine with 4.6 as well.

*) Open floor

One major issue is digikam, it comes with lots of bundled libraries, which violates the Gentoo QA Policy. We heard that Debian has same thoughts on the matter, we’ll have to bring them to table. Relevant bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=265328

Desktop Summit! We were invited last year to Akademy to give a talk about Gentoo-KDE, noone made it. Some of us expressed interest for this year’s event, which combines GUADEC and Akademy. Also, some of our gnomies may be there, which is a perfect opportunity for some in-person trolling.

Gentoo KDE team meeting Summary and Log

My college’s team was the first team in Greece that organized a KDE Release Party, we are so proud of this. Special thanks to Claudia and the Promo Team for sending us some fine KDE materials. We didn’t have much attendance, which is very reasonable given that we organized it during our exams, without giving it much thinking. Apart from the usual talk about how awesome KDE is, we also had a little presentation, where I talked about the history of KDE, SC and Extragear, PIM (Akonadi, Nepomuk, Strigi), and my colleague Giorgos Tsapaliokas (twin brother of Antonis) talked about Plasma and Activities, and did a quick live demonstration of those. Apart from the usual LinuxTeam guys, two guys of the greek openSUSE community came to our small city, and a teacher also attended the presentation, who showed great interest and expressed his impression especially about Nepomuk. Let’s hope we’ll see more KDE desktops in the future. After the event, we went to consume some tsipouro, where we spend a few more hours talking about FOSS in Greece.

Photos can be found here

I’m pleased to announce the availability of KDE SC 4.6.0 to another distro. You will find it in main portage tree, though currently hardmasked until bug 353129. Every major update of KDE gets inserted as hardmasked in Gentoo, as it lacks some keywords for new packages (all but amd64/x86). So, currently at least users of amd64/x86 can safely unmask and use it. I have updated the KDE guide, it now explains in detail how to install KDE SC 4.6.0 and the KDEPIM options. There is no ETA for the unmasking, since it doesn’t depend on us. As for a stabilization, KDE SC 4.6.1 is a good candidate, but we’ll have an official decision after its release and a regular meeting.

In case you find a bug regarding the installation, please take a look first at the Hints and Troubleshooting section and the Gentoo KDE buglist. Feel free to open new bugs or talk to us in #gentoo-kde (Freenode).

As a side note, KDE SC 4.6 doesn’t need hal any more. Samuli wrote a nice guide to replace it with udev and friends.

Enjoy

PS: A small graph that shows our recent activity

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Some colleagues and I decided to host a KDE Release Party in our LinuxTeam Lab. It will take place on Tuesday 8 Feb, at 1100 UTC+2.

We’re going to give a small presentation about Plasma, Akonadi and other notable KDE technologies, and about some KDE apps. Furthermore, we’re going to distribute live CDs/DVDs/USB (OpenSuse, Kubuntu and Gentoo so far, others that will be available next week?) stickers with KDE 4.6 distros and of course chat about it while drinking coffee

I am pretty sure it is going to be the first KDE release party in Greece, and we are all pretty excited about it. We hope to see (apart from students) more teachers in this event, and maybe people irrelevant to the school.

Links: Announcement in our LinuxTeam website and the entry in the KDE Community Wiki

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My colleague Antonis Tsapaliokas (kokeroulis) gave an interview in dot.kde.org about his KDE contributions while being rather young and pretty new to development. I was really excited to see this and wish him a productive and successful future.

And a little spamming: Here is my college’s Linux Team website which is one of the most active foss teams in Greece (site is only in Greek)

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Another 4.6 Beta Release, another BugSquashing week! The second pre-release of January’s upcoming major release, 4.6 Beta 2, is out now, and the KDE BugSquad team is having the second BugSquashing week to follow the success of the first one. This makes it the best opportunity for non-developers to give back to the community, by wrangling as many bugs as possible to help the KDE Team with the vision to have a solid final release.

KDE SC 4.6 is going to bring huge changes, especially in the KDEPIM area, as Kontact and individual applications are ported to the Akonadi Storage Framework, thus excessive testing is needed. Since the first set of beta releases two weeks ago 1318 bugs have been reported and 1176 bugs have been closed. Let’s see if we can beat that this time!

When will it happen?
The Bug Squashing week will take place between Saturday, December 11th and Friday, December 17th.

How can you help?
You can help the KDE BugSquad team in two ways:

• By trying out Beta 2 (see below on how to do that) and reporting all the bugs you find in it.
• By helping us triage the incoming bug reports to make sure they are valid, detailed and there are no duplicates.

You do not need to be a developer or have specific skills to help.

What needs to be installed?
You should preferably be running either 4.6 Beta 2 or a checkout of KDE trunk. It is possible to use a Live CD with 4.6 Beta 2, and some distributions even provide packages for the beta release. For instructions on running KDE trunk, please see the guide on the TechBase wiki. You can also help with a recent stable version, such as 4.5.4, at this point.

Where are people going to meet?
The Bug Squashing activities will be coordinated on IRC, in the #kde-bugs channel on Freenode. Further instructions and lists of bugs being triaged are available on TechBase as well.

Bug triaging is a very nice way of getting involved with the KDE community. Join the BugSquad team — you’ll have a lot of fun and will be contributing to make a more successful KDE release day!

How to install it in Gentoo
As usual, there is installation instructions in the Gentoo KDE Guide

KDE SC 4.6 Beta 2 is available in the kde overlay as 4.5.85, and it is masked, both because of its state and its many masked depedencies. For any questions/problems regarding installation and build issues, feel free to ask in #gentoo-kde or open bugs in bugs.gentoo.org (please add [kde overlay] in summary).

(To other packagers: Please repost the above announcement in your distro planet, replacing the last chapter with your distro-specific notes)

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A little introduction about the problem: When trying to build the embedded MySQL (and MariaDB) library, the build system produced a static linked instead of a shared library (libmysqld.a instead of libmysqld.so) which caused build failures (on 64bit systems only, it doesn’t affect 32bit) to all applications that depend on the shared library, most importantly Amarok. There was a dirty workaround for this though, export CFLAGS="-fPIC" before building MySQL and Amarok. This is very nasty though, as Robin explains, although most distros chose that way. The other option would be to disable the embedded feature from Amarok and force users to use an external MySQL instance instead. As a result, this led up to lots of argues, flames and yelling. After some time, three Gentoo Developers (Diego E. Petteno, Jorge Manuel B.S. Vicetto and Robin H. Johnson) managed to create a patch for MySQL 5.0 series that could produce a shared library, and while it was reported upstream, it got stuck somewhere in the middle and never made it to MySQL’s source code.

With the release of MySQL 5.1 we had to face the same problem, but it was twice as hard to deal with our users, as MySQL 5.1 got a fast stabilization because of security bugs, and the KDE Team suddenly got a million of complaints about a regression in Amarok. After some time, Maciej Mrozowski took the old patch over over and did a significant step in getting it ported to MySQL 5.1.51, creating a patch that while it creates a shared library it failed all tests. Out of the sudden, MariaDB developer Kristian Nielsen left a reply on our bug report that he committed a patch to MariaDB based on ours, and with his precious help on IRC we were able to have a working patch for MySQL and MariaDB as well, with the MySQL one reported upstream again. Let’s hope that this time it will be accepted, we don’t want to go through this again MariaDB will have the shared library patch in their next release,

In Gentoo land, MySQL 5.1.51 and Amarok 2.3.2-r1 will be stabilized soon (because of security bug 339717). The only blocker is bug 335995. Gentoo users can normally put dev-db/mysql-5.1.51 and media-sound/amarok-2.3.2-r1 in their /etc/portage/package.keywords file and enjoy the default embedded USE flag (by popular demand).

Bug reports:

• MySQL bug 39228
• Gentoo bug 306317: (Contains the patches)
• Gentoo bug 310897
• Gentoo bug 306155
• Gentoo bug 339717
• Gentoo bug 335995

Patches:

• MariaDB patch
• Gentoo patch for MySQL
• Gentoo patch for MariaDB

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"Linux Team of TEI of Larissa is participating in the celebration of the Sofware Freedom Day. The event is open to the public and will be held at the Central Square of Larissa, Saturday the 18th, September 2010."

Software Freedom Day is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. We (my college’s Linux Team) participated last year as well. What we did was to set up a booth at the most popular place of our city, the "Central Square", with a bunch of linux stuff, and talk to people about Free Software. We had about 4-5 laptops with various Linux distributions installed for live demonstration, a bunch of distro LiveCD’s, a custom made CD which included Free Software applications for Windows, 2 OLPCs, stickers, flyers, and much fun! Many people were curious to see what we were offering, and how that can help them either professionally or in their everyday life. All kinds of people stepped by: students who could learn how Free Software can help them with their education, kids that enjoyed the OLPCs, professionals of various areas who asked how they can use Free Software in their business to save money/time (as an example, there were graphic designers and photographers who were impressed by the GIMP), even old people and guys that don’t make an exaggerate use of their computers were tempted to try or install a Linux distro.

So, since it was that exciting last year, we decided to repeat it. Same place, the same geeks will be there to educate the curious passengers, outside the boundaries of our school. The sad thing is that this year we couldn’t get many official liveCD’s from the greek distro communities, but this gave me the opportunity to burn KDE 4 only liveCD’s (and spread the virus to the others): Kubuntu, Suse, Fedora (KDE 4), Sabayon (KDE 4), Mint and of course my beloved Gentoo. Below is the poster that also contains other Greek cities that are going to participate. (In case there is a Greek city that is going to participate to SFD and isn’t included, please mail me ASAP).

Happy Software Freedom Day!

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