I just got an e-mail with some great news. It looks like I am among the lucky ones who are selected to receive a grant under the Qtopia Greenphone Innovation Grant program. This means that I will soon get a full Greenphone mobile phone SDK, with the phone itself, connector cables and development tools. Greenphone is one of those mobile phones of the new generation which are based on an open platform. Another well known example from the new generation is OpenMoko. Apple iPhone on the other hand still belongs to the old closed platform generation.

And why will I get Greenphone? Well it looks like judges from Trolltech found my proposal for a new mobile phone application interesting. In this rather short time (submission deadline is October 31) I will try to create a free and open source mobile phone client for playing turn-based 4X space strategy games which are based on servers and the protocol of Thousand Parsec project. A C++ library for the protocol is already available and I hope I’ll be able to reuse it as much as possible. If all goes well most of the work will involve the user interface and use of the C++ protocol library. The work will also be of use with my other project, which is to create a game client for KDE 4 desktop, which heavily uses Qt toolkit and framework, which is very similar to Qtopia used on the mobile phone and other mobile devices.

Can’t wait until postman brings me the package. In the meantime I should start reading more about Qtopia development. I also need to come up with a name for the game and the way a user would interact with it. Any suggestions are welcome.

Tags: greenphone, qtopia, trolltech, mobiles, mobile phones, gsm, mobile devices, programming, linux, 4x, games

Looks like some Mozilla developers, like Gervase Markham, have noticed that Slovenia may soon become the first country in the world where Firefox will pass the 50% point when it comes to internet browser market share. When this happens Firefox will definitely be the most used web browser in our beautiful country.

The latest report from Xiti Monitor (in French) cites Firefox share in Slovenia to be at 47,9%. Gervase even thinks that Firefox is already the most widely used browser in Slovenia. Well in my opinion this hasn’t happened quite yet. If you check out my previous blog article Slovenia loves Mozilla Firefox web browser, you can see that a Slovenian internet advertisement company Iprom measured lower share of Firefox. By about 11% lower than Xiti. As long as the difference is still the same today, then Iprom would spit out a 37% share.

In any case the share of Firefox is very high in Slovenia and we are on a very good way to truly be the first country in the world to pass the magical 50% share. And I think there is still a couple months of time left to organise the World Slovenia Day that Gervase proposes.

To all Slovenians: Let’s not let Finland beat us to it. They are only 2,5% behind us. Ditch your old, closed source and insecure browser and switch to Firefox! Let’s make the whole world proud of Slovenia!

Tags: slovenia, mozilla, firefox, browsers, web, internet, ie, internet explorer

I’m now safe at home for about a day and here is my look back at aKadmy 2007.

I’m glad that flights and other travelling went so smoothly. Yeah, it was a bit long and there was a lot of waiting, especially the first day, but that’s about it. Found the bus between Prestwick airport and Glasgow just fine. And the walk in the middle of the night from the bus to Euro Hostel was also fine. We felt lost just for a short moment, but then found the hostel immediately.

The room in the hostel was OK, nice to have your own shower and you got fresh towels every day. There could be more variety when it comes to breakfast and it would be nice if each room had a free wireless internet. Well at least they had internet at the lobby of the hostel.

The aKademy conference itself was great. I expected that there would be around 200 people, but I’ve heard that there were actually about 300 people. The talks and BoFs were interesting. I especially liked the ones about KDE and FLOSS in education. What I did miss is a talk about translation and localisation, which is a very important part of KDE and free software. It was also unfortunate that the wireless internet connection only started to work at the end of the second day. I also expected that they would be selling more KDE merchandise. like plush Konqi, more t-shirts, pins and stuff like that. Other than that it was really nice to meet all the people and I sure hope I will be able to go to aKademy 2008 next year.

About Glasgow. The English accent they use there makes people hard to understand sometimes. The traffic lights work in a strange way, feels almost randomly. With sister we also tried Kebab there and it was put together in a different way than here in Slovenia, didn’t taste very good and it was very expensive (like everything in Glasgow). The weather was depressing a bit. Almost always cloudy and it was raining very often. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to go sightseeing. The aKademy programme filled almost entire day and at the end of the day I was just so tired that I went back to the hostel and fell asleep.

All in all it was a great week and I recommend to every KDE user to definitely try to visit aKademy at least once. In the end I must thank Linux User Group of Slovenia, who paid for my trip and made this great experience possible. Thank you LUGOS!

Read more:
Ready for aKademy 2007
All packed and ready for aKademy 2007
aKademy 2007, day 0
aKademy 2007, day 0, part 2
aKademy 2007, day 1
aKademy 2007, day 2
aKademy 2007, School and Education day
aKademy 2007, BoFs Day

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

My plan today was to go to Kopete plugin development BoF first. But I couldn’t find the room and the Geo Services BoF I stumbled upon looked very interesting, so I just stayed. There were a lot of interesting ideas where geo-location information could be used. For example tagging photos in DigiKam and other documents with location. This could then be integrated with Strigi desktop search so you could quickly search for photos taken at or around some place. There were also some concerns raised about publishing your location, so a user should be aware of privacy when it comes to it.

The second BoF today was about KDE Games. Developers talked about the best way to handle resizing game windows. You see, it takes a certain amount of time to re-render the SVG image after you resize. There were also discussions about the welcome screen, which enables players to quickly start games, and how to make game instructions easier to get to.

I’ve also stayed at the SQO/Research BoF where people where gathering ideas for tests that could be used to measure quality of open source software. Something similar to English Breakfast Network and Ohloh. I didn’t have any ideas at the time, but later at home I got an idea that one of the tests could check out how well code is prepared for internationalisation and translation.

The next BoF was about Plasma, the new desktop that is coming in KDE 4 and is heavily based on desktop widgets/desklets/gadgets which are called Plasmoids. I didn’t hear or see much new about Plasma, but during the talk Zack Rusin managed to get an OpenGL plasmoid working. Way cool! Oh yeah I almost forgot. Aaron Seigo told us that there are some companies interested into Plasma, which would like to use plasmoids and all to build a multimedia centre interface.

The last BoF I went to was about KDE Education project. One thing we all agreed on was that Edutainment should be renamed to Education. There was also a debate whether some applications (like KhangMan) should be in KDE Games package or remain in KDE Education. Other topics included the need for more artwork, the need for KEduca replacement and educational plasmoids. You can read more in KDE Edu BoF Report.

This was it for the day and the last thing for this year’s aKademy. I returned back to hostel earlier to pack the baggage and get some sleep before waking up at 3:40 in the morning getting on a long trip back home. Too bad time flies so quickly during aKademy.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland, bof

Skipped the breakfast today, since I forgot to set up the alarm clock and was already running late. Went directly to the university, because I wanted to be there about half an hour earlier to connect to the internet. The connection was not working and it was strange that there were no people. Luckily Mario Fux came by (he forgot his power adapter) and told me that the talks are in the Livingston Tower across the street.

We had three talks in which we were told about three actual deployments of Linux in schools over Europe (Norway, Switzerland, Spain). It was shown how much money a school can save by using free and open source software, in what way the money is saved and how the deployments are made. It is sad that at first school administration is often very afraid of Linux in their school, because they don’t know anything about it. After they actually see how well it works and how many benefits it brings they eventually want more Linux. It was also very interesting to see what and how many customizations are made during deployments. Either to make a better fit for school’s special needs or to work around deficiencies in existing Windows servers, which often don’t work nicely with the rest of the world.

There was a chance to see One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and Intel Classmate PC side by side and we also got them into our hands. I was quite surprised that Classmate PC actually feels lighter. What I also like about Classmate PC is that it appears to be a more capable machine for which it is easier to develop applications. The model at the presentation actually had a slimmed down version of Mandriva Linux installed, with KDE desktop and OpenOffice.org. And everyone knows how heavy OpenOffice.org is when it comes to system resources.

The guy with OLPC also showed us around GCompris, a suit of educational applications. I’ve heard about it before, but never checked it out. It has over 100 educational activities and is definitely something to check out in more detail and see how well it is translated into Slovenian language. Later Marble was presented. It is a widget for showing geographical data that is ready to be used in Qt or KDE applications (for example in KStars to set location you are observing from). In addition, it is a full application, which is similar to Google Earth. During the presentation Summer of Code student managed to get GPS support working. Another application presented was KAlgebra, which can be used as a bit more advanced calculator and is also capable of drawing 2D and simple 3D graphs. It is also very nice to see that KAlgebra is based on MathML standard.

At the end we had a discussion where we collected a few topics, on which it would be nice to work in the future. For example more task oriented and simplified desktop and applications. Another idea was to set up a web portal and mailing list where people interested in free and open source software in education could work together. Maybe SchoolForge could be revived and used for this.

Another very interesting day indeed. And if you would like to know all details about what was happening be sure to check out KDE Edutainment pages some time later. You will be able to find all the presentations and some notes there.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland, education, olpc, one laptop per child, classmate pc

During the breakfast I’ve heard the news that there could have been a terrorist attack at the Glasgow airport. Someone crashed into terminals or something like that. As far as I know nobody got hurt and there were only flights canceled for the day.

Today the most interesting talks started with Tudor Groza, who presented concept of semantic desktop and how it is coming into KDE. We found out that the next version of Mandriva Linux should already integrate some parts of it. Later on Olaf and Gunnar Schmidt had a very interesting talk about accessibility, something that is too often overlooked when developing software. Accessibility is also one of the hot topics in governments, so it is very important that KDE provides the best experience for people with disabilities. The next talk on the programme was from Jim Zemlin of Linux Foundation, who told us what the organisation does and into which direction Linux is going. During his talk we got the good news that the internet id finally working. In the following talk Sander Koning provided us with some tips on writing documentation so that it is useful to the users. It’s harder than it looks at first. Towards the end of the day Claire Lotion revealed to us that there is a lot of money available from European Union which can be used for research in informatics and computer related fields. KDE already has some projects which would be good candidates to apply for this money, but currently there is no framework in place at KDE to better utilise the available resources. Claire has started the work to improve the situation.

At the end of the contributors conference there was the 3rd aKademy Award Ceremony. Award for the best application went into the hands of Sebastian Trueg for K3b. Danny Allen received award for his great work on weekly KDE Commit Digest. Congrats to both!

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

At around 5:30 I was woken by a sea gull (or something like that) which was banging on our window. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I waited until breakfast, waited some more and then headed to the conference, which started at 9 o’clock.

I’ve been in the Room 1 for the entire day, listening to 2 keynotes and 10 other talks. Let me mention just some of them, the ones which were the most interesting to me. At the Threadweaver talk I found out what this library actually is, where and how it is useful and that it shouldn’t be that hard to use. Definitely something to take a closer look at when I get home. After lunch (where I met Mike from Edinburgh and Matt from Philadelphia) Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical (Ubuntu) presented 13 suggestions to make Linux even better and more widely used. People agreed on most of the stuff, like the importance of the first impression. However, some were not convinced that 6-months release cycle would be beneficial to KDE. It was also nice to see that he recognizes the valuable work translators do. Later in the day Zack Rusin presented a talk about computer graphics and introduced a tool/framework called Quasar, which should make graphical effects easier to create. Another thing to check out later. Aaron Seigo also talked about how important beautiful graphics are for enjoyable experience when using a computer. But the effects must be natural and subtle. At the end, we listened to a talk by Patrick Harvie, who is a member of the Scottish parliament. It was very refreshing to see that there are politicians who actually understand the true meaning of the word free in Free Software and know about the many benefits of Free Software for society.

All in all it was a great first day at aKademy. The only thing we missed a lot was the working wireless internet connection.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

I just came back from aKademy 2007 early registration at Livingston Tower, University of Strathclyde, which is about 20 minutes of walking away from Euro Hostel. It was a bit hard to find the registration place at first. I was looking for a big KDE banner, but it turned out that there was only an A4-size piece of paper with handwriting attached to the front door, so I completely missed it. Luckily my sister has a keen eye and she noticed it and we found the room just fine.

At the registration I got a name tag and a bag of cool stuff. Mandriva, which is one of the sponsors, provided most of it. They put together 5 items: a Mandriva Linux One 2007 CD, a 2 GiB USB memory stick with bootable Mandriva Linux on it, a Mandriva branded pen, a sheet with Mandriva stickers, and a Mandriva branded plastic bag. From other sponsors there were: July 2007 edition of Linux Magazine, Google Code branded notebook, and a Kubuntu 7.04 CD. Organizers also provided a Glasgow Tourist Map and a Greater Glasgow & Clyde Walley Essential Guide, which will both come in handy. From AMD we got a promotion leaflet for their developer tools. Oh, I almost forgot, there was also the KDE branded mug among the cool stuff.

So, aKademy 2007 hasn’t really started yet and it is already great.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

Right now it’s 13:20 and I’m sitting here in the lobby of the Euro Hostel, so this means that I’ve arrived to Glasgow safely. The trip was quite long and tiring. The drive to the Maribor airport (which was a bit hard to find) was 3 hours long, waited 2 hours for the plane to London Stansted, the flight was about 2 hours long, then I had to wait another 6 hours for the flight to Glasgow and the flight itself was about 1 hour and 30 minutes long. After arriving to Glasgow Prestwick airport we waited about half an hour for the bus to Glasgow, 45 minutes of bus ride and 20 minutes of walk I’ve finally checked-in at the hostel. No wonder I dropped dead right after getting into the room. When I woke up I had some nice breakfast and now I’m waiting re-check-in as part of the KDE aKademy 2007 group.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

Together with my sister we’ve just finished packing our luggage for our trip to Glasgow, Scotland. As I’ve already written before, we’re going there for the annual KDE community meeting called aKademy. I think I’m quite well prepared for the conference. Using KOrganizer I’ve made a detailed plan of all the talks and BoFs and other events that I intend to visit. KOrganizer also has a very nice export function which outputs all the events into a nicely formatted HTML file. So thanks to KOrganizer you can see my detailed aKademy 2007 calendar. Our plane lifts off in less than 12 hours and we also need about 3 hours to get to the airport so I should better get some sleep. I’ll report back, here on my blog, when we get to our destination. Can’t wait to meet all the KDE people in person. Oh, and thanks again to Linux User Group of Slovenia for sponsoring my trip.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, community, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland

When I got my first 64-bit processor (AMD Athlon 64 3000+) about 3 years ago I sure wanted to take all advantage of what it had to offer by running a 64-bit operating system and 64-bit applications on it. While there was 64-bit Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, there were almost no 64-bit programs and drivers for it. And even today the situation in the Windows world is quite pathetic when it comes to 64-bit computing. It was a few months after I got Athlon 64 when I started to look seriously at Linux which was much more at home on 64-bit hardware.

Searching the internet I found out that the best 64-bit Linux distribution for AMD64 (now called x86-64) was source-based Gentoo Linux. I knew it was harder to set up than normal binary-based distributions, but I was ready for the next level. I was ready to learn more about Linux, ready for 64-bit world and damn all that processor power had to be used for something, like compiling source code for example This was not my first encounter with Gentoo. I managed to install it before, on a very slow computer at video store where I worked over summer. So after a few days of of compiling, installation and setting up the new computer was ready and everything was 64-bit. There was only one exception, OpenOffice.org.

At that time OpenOffice.org wouldn’t even compile into 64-bit form. So I had to use 32-bit binary package of OpenOffice.org and 32-bit emulation libraries. Over a couple of years OpenOffice.org 64-bit porting team improved the code to the point it would compile, but reports said it was crashing a lot. A few months have passed and a couple of days ago version 2.2.1 of OpenOffice.org came out. I decided I would try to compile this version into 64-bit form. I did this today and it compiled just fine and after a couple of minutes of testing it didn’t crash at all. So my entire system is now pure 64-bit code and I can safely remove the redundant 32-bit emulation packages.

Tags: openoffice.org, openoffice, office, 64-bit, x86-64, amd64, em64t, x64, gentoo, linux

One of my favourite films of all time is Das Boot. It’s a story about a German World War II submarine U-96 and its crew embarking on a dangerous mission. Submarines also fascinate me in general. When younger I’ve often played submarine simulation games like Silent Hunter and Jane’s 688(I) Hunter/Killer. Today I’m happy I can say we have a free and open source submarine simulation game that also runs on Linux.

I’m talking about Danger from the Deep (DftD) which is a World War II German submarine simulaton game. Source code is released under GPL license and artwork under Creative Commons license. Danger from the Deep 0.3.0 has just been released and it features much improved graphics (thanks to upgrade to OpenGL 2.0 and GLSL 1.1), 4 new u-boat types (IIA, IIB, IIC, IID), a new Tribal class destroyer, models can now have moving parts (turrets, guns…), multi-threaded code, new sound system, improved torpedo management, new basic torpedo camera and more. For details see latest news section.

I’ve played DftD for a couple of minutes today and I can say it looks like a very promising open source game project. If you are also a submarine fan be sure to download Danger from the Deep and… Dive! Dive! Dive!

Tags: navy, submarines, simulations, simulation, subsim, games, game, gaming, free software, open source, danger from the deep, dftd

Just in time for summer people from Trolltech have released a new version of my favourite framework for cross-platform GUI programming. For me the most interesting novelties in Qt 4.3 are much improved OpenGL support (I’ve just started learning basics) and integration of QtScript (based on ECMAScript 3, like JavaScript 1.5). Main Window is also enhanced quite a bit with new styles, more advanced tabs, titlebars and animated toolbars. For more details check out Qt and Qtopia Core 4.3 Release Announcement, What’s New in Qt 4.3 and list of changes in Qt/Qtopia 4.3.0. By the way, this version is also the one which the upcoming KDE 4 desktop will be based on.

Download Qt 4.3 for Linux/X11, Mac and Windows

Tags: programming, development, c++, trolltech, qt, qtopia, gui, qtscript, javascript, ecmascript, opengl, kde

I still remember the excitement when we were getting our very first PC in 1996. One of the things we also had to do was to choose an operating system for it. The two main options were IBM OS/2 Warp 4 and Microsoft Windows 95. After reading a couple of articles in Slovenian computer magazines we decided to go with OS/2 Warp 4 as it appeared to be quite a bit more advanced (about one year later we installed Windows 95 and I could experience for myself how much better OS/2 Warp 4 was). I spent countless hours playing the game Galactic Civilisations 2 on OS/2. My first attempt at programming was also on OS/2, using a programming language REXX. So you see, I liked OS/2 Warp 4 a lot.

Here’s a nice video about OS/2 Warp:
Computer Chronicles: OS/2 Warp

This April I’ve read an article on The Inquirer about OS/2 being 20 years old. My nostalgic memories of OS/2 have woken up and I started digging for more information about OS/2 on the internet. I’ve found out that OS/2 community is still alive and kicking and it looks like free and open source software is bringing fresh new life into the venerable operating system. There is even a company Serenity Systems International which has licensed the OS/2 code from IBM. They are still developing and advancing OS/2 in the form of their eComStation operating system (version 2.0 is about to be released). You can also download a demo version of eComStation which is a nice Live CD. I’ll have to try it out soon.

Two weeks ago I tried to find our OS/2 Warp 4 CDs and the box. But unfortunately it looks like we threw all that into the trash can. So the only option was that I download a copy from the internet. Luckily I found it on ED2K network, together with Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. I’ve also started a little hunt to find and collect various OS/2 items, starting with the operating system itself. Let’s see how much of the OS/2 part of computer history I can build up. The first piece of the puzzle has just found its way into my hands. It’s a brand new box of IBM OS/2 Warp 3, the red edition with bonus pack, still wrapped in plastic foil.

Some more videos of OS/2 Warp:
Opening OS/2 Warp 3 for the 1st time…
Upgrade to Win95? Upgrade to Vista? It hurts again!

What’s next. First I’ll check out the eComStation live CD. Then I’ll try to install OS/2 Warp 4.52 in a virtual machine or maybe even build a special computer for it from old parts. I’ll try to recreate the computer desktop from the days when I was younger and again play some Galactic Civilizations. Oh, if you have (or know someone who has) some OS/2 software or other item and you don’t know what to do with it, leave a comment or send me an e-mail, just don’t throw it into the trash can.

Go Team OS/2!

Tags: os/2, os2, warp, os/2 warp, os2 warp, ibm, operating systems, ecomstation, rexx, computer history

This year will be my first time attending aKademy conference, a meeting of KDE users, developers and contributors. Akademy 2007 will take place in Glasgow, Scotland from 30th June to 7th July 2007.

Air plane tickets for me and my sister have just been booked, thanks to Jure Koren, who helped with his credit card (I don’t have any of my own yet). We’ve already arranged for accommodation in Glasgow Euro Hostel about two weeks ago. So everything is ready for the departure. Well almost, I still need to buy a power socket adapter.

Big thanks also go to LUGOS who will be paying for my plane ticket and the room. Without them this trip wouldn’t be possible, or it would be very hard. Can’t wait to meet you at aKademy 2007!

P.S. If you’re coming don’t forget to add yourself to the list of aKademy 2007 attendees.

Tags: kde, akademy, akademy 2007, conference, meeting, desktop, free software, open source, glasgow, scotland