Power outage

Here is the promised summary of the last days at Nove Hrady.
On Sunday morning there were two interesting talks about the KDE Build system by coolo (unsermake) and David Faure. After lunch i listened to a talk about KCachegrind. Looks really colorful and mighty. Unfortunately it relies on valgrind, so it will not be available on FreeBSD. After that there was a talk about KDE’s internal organization by Andreas Brandt which resulted in an interesting discussion with various people. The day finished with a talk by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer about the History of KDE.
On Monday I only attended the Keysigning and had to travel home after that. I took the train with Chris Lee and Andreas Brandt to Linz.
Unfortunately i lost my Notebooks Powersupply somewhere in N7y. I hope someone finds it, but I already tried to get a replacement, since I am leaving for holidays next week. Medion has them still available at a more or less reasonable price, but they refuse to send them to Austria :-(.

Kdoomload

Ian Geiser showed me today some funny applet, he programmed a doomloadmonitor. The standard face from doom is modified like in the game in relation to the system load. Unfortunately the Icons are copyrighted by ID software. He asked me if it compiles on BSD. I made it compile with much help from Stefan but unfortunately it won’t run on my KDE HEAD.
I also configured my desktop to use the new transparent Kicker feature. It looks really nifty, but it is not yet perfect. The clock background isn’t adapted and some other items aren’t adapted right.
Of course I also went to a lot of talks, but I am too tired to write something about this now. Perhaps tomorrow.

Nove Hrady continued

Don’t worry, I am still alive, since I finally found something to eat. So I am here to keep you informed about the second day at Nove Hrady. Yesterday, after I found something to eat I kept on hacking in the Hackcenter, which was quite crowded, although the Organisators planned not to open it before Monday.
After a short night Saturday started with a breakfast at the monastery.
Then the conference was officially opened and various talks started. See the Conference program.
After the opening I attended Harald Fernengel talk about KDevelop/Gideon. It was quite impressive, perhaps I should try to compile it from CVS. Although I normally don’t like IDEs.
Later I attended the talks from Marc Mutz about Design Patterns and Gunnar Schmidts talk about KDE and Accessibility.
After the Lunchbreak at the monastery Holger Schroeder demonstrated KDE on Cygwin. The Highlight of the Afternoon was David Faures talk about KTrader.
After the coffeebreak there was a talk about Usability and the last one was Talk about TaskJuggler a project management program from Chris Schlaeger. Although Chris claimed that “every good distribution ships a TaskJuggler package” there is no FreeBSD port. I should change that when I am at home again.
I did not attend the overcrowded talk of Havoc Pennigton about Freedesktop.org and people told me that I did not missed much.
The evening started with a 2 hours talk from Matthias Ettrich about new features in QT4 and ended with the social event, a Barbecue in the garden of the Kastle.
A strange local band played czech Dixieland music but later they luckily switched to Ballads. Everybody had a nice time drinking, eating & socializing.
The local Organizationteam is very hospitable and are very proud that so many international guests are visiting their institute.
Now i finally found the way back to the Hackcenter getting my Weblog up2date 🙂

Hooked in a maze

I arrived at NoveHrady. On the train I met Jowenn and Lucijan Busch.
At the Station, Rudi Ettrich awaited us and drove us to the Kastle.
There is a very nice banner across the entrance telling everyone that the KDE
Developers Conference is there.
The Kastle is quite old and a real maze. I needed quite some time to find my room, the toilet, the Hackcenter, the Conference room everything. What I still haven’t found is something to eat….

Final Countdown

No entry the last three days. I have been busy preparing my laptop for n7y and packing my bag. Today I am travelling to Novehrady. My train will leave in 2 hours. Hopefully there will be a net connection, so I can add some blog entries. At the moment nobody is online from NoveHrady, so I don’t know what to expect.

It compiles!

At around 20.00pm I had a feeling of success. Finally kdelibs cvs compiled. *YAY!*
There was only one minor nit, that could be fixed easily. Some parts of kdelibs use meinproc to build their documentation. But meinproc is (unnecessarily?)linked with some KDE libraries, that were not installed at the moment they are needed. I worked around this by installing them manual before continuing the build. But frerich also posted a patch. I think I will try this on sauna after I successfully finished the installation on annamirl :-).

Adventures with kdecvs

I got stuck with kdelibs yesterday. Today I first considered installing qt-copy, but then I found the problem. If I pass a CFLAGS value to make it overrides the CFLAGS determined by configure.
Now my Laptop is happily compiling kdelibs and I wait until it breaks the next time :-). Unfortunately there is no distcc environment at work so it will take some time. (No, I will not update my work-station to 5.1)
BTW this is the first entry posted from work.

Preparing for N7Y

When I woke up today, I decided that it is time to prepare annamirl, my Laptop for Nove Hrady. I need to get a KDE CVS version running, so that everybody thinks I am a 1337 KDE H4x0r. I am probably the only one with FreeBSD over there and I would like to show some of the FreeBSD specific problems to interested (or not) developers.
What comes into my mind are:

  • Toolchain problems. How do I get gmake -f Makefile.cvs going with autoconf257 & Co.
  • Klaptopdaemon FreeBSD ACPI support. Although the Klaptopdaemon Developers will probably not be there
  • aRts problems. There are several issues with aRts on FreeBSD.

If I could resolve one of these issues at N7Y, it will be a great success.
To get KDE CVS going I need to do the following:

  • install ccache and distcc. 600Mhz are too slow to hack on KDE
  • install autoconf257 and automake17
  • install kdelibs, kdebase, arts, kdemultimedia, kdeutils, kdeadmin and perhaps kdenetwork into a seperate prefix

Of course everytime I try to get something done, some people send my patches for ports that need to be committed…

ObComment

le notified me, that it was not possible to post a comment to my blog due to misconfiguration. I used my local hostname instead of my official hostname.
Please try to post a comment to this article. It should be fixed now.