There’s less than one month left until the beginning of this year’s Akademy conference in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium. Just a few moments ago I’ve finally arranged everything for the trip. The room at youth hostel Domein Roosendael is paid for and the plane ticket is registered. One more time I have to thank Linux Users Group of Slovenia (Lugos), who are paying for the flight. This will be my second time to Akademy and this time I’m staying for the whole week. The only thing left now is to decide which talks from the two parallel tracks I will be attending. Looking forward to meet cool KDE contributors!

Tags: kde, desktop, akademy, akademy 2008, free software, open source, belgium, linux, lugos

I’ve been to Maribor last Thursday where the 1st Day of Open Source event was organised at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. This was my first time visiting Maribor and my first impression was that it is a very nice, clean and lively city.

At the event itself you could attend various interesting talks about Linux and Open Source Software in general. I even had the honor to be the very first speaker. I presented FLOSS, it’s history, licensing and after that talked a bit about Lugos, the Linux User Group of Slovenia. Too bad I missed the talks at the end of the day but I had to catch the last train back to Ljubljana.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by the number of attendance. A quick count showed that there were constantly at least 150 people in the room. By comparison, the day before this event Microsoft organised a similar event, where there were only 30-50 people. Despite Microsoft having better promotion and they even tried to bribe students by some expensive prizes.

Anyways, hats off to Oto Brglez jr. and the Students Group. They did an excellent job organizing the event and I sure look forward to the 2nd Day of Open Source.

Tags: open source, free software, floss, linux, lugos, maribor, slovenia

The meeting was in Paris during the past weekend. I’m glad I made it there and back safely, and without any complications. Well I did manage to make a long detour while going from Gare du Nord to La Chapelle métro station. Two streets had a very similar name and I somehow ended up on the wrong one which confused me a bit. Me and my roomies, Aleix Pol and Albert Astals Cid, were the last to arrive at the hotel.

After a nice breakfast the next day we went straight to the Mandriva office where the meeting was actually taking place. First Anne-Marie Mahfouf, who we all have to thank for the organisation, had a short welcome talk and then everyone introduced themselves. We have then set up an Icecream network for speeding up the compilation. My laptop with Gentoo for some reason decided not to cooperate. Maybe because I had the tools compiled with CPU specific optimisations or maybe because I was the only one running in 64-bit mode.

During the first day we had two presentations. Patrick Spendrin told us how and why he is porting KDE applications to Windows. There are so many great free and open-source educational applications in KDE that it would be a shame if people on Windows couldn’t use them. Well with KDE 4 this will finally be possible. Later Vladimir Kuznetsov prepared a demonstration of Step, an amazing interactive physical simulator, a virtual physical laboratory for your computer. He started working on it during Google Summer of Code 2007 and it has come very far. Step has many cool features, even more than some similar expensive commercial applications. Every physics teacher should definitely check out Step.

On the second day we started working later because the security card didn’t work and so we couldn’t enter the office. Lucky those who decided to sleep an hour longer that morning :). We continued our work and then had a presentation about the future of KDE Education project. Later Patrick managed to get Step running on Windows. At 5pm I was sad as I had to leave the meeting and travel back home.

During those two days I was checking out how translations work in educational applications. For that I also needed to update some of the Slovenian translations. While testing I noticed a bug in Kickoff menu which didn’t show search results of entries without GenericName specified in their desktop files. Albert quickly fixed this and while we were debugging I found out about DDD frontend to GDB and learned how to teach GDB so it is able to print Qt data (look into kdesdk/scripts/kde-devel-gdb), for example QString data. Another “important” thing I learned was how to add Plasmoids to the container that replaces kicker. When you have the Add Widget dialog open you have to drag the Plasmoid directly to the panel. Thanks to Benoît Jacob for this, and for the trip around Paris.

I had a really great time in Paris and it was nice to meet all the people and get to know all the faces and voices that are behind IRC nicknames. With face to face meetings like this our community only gets stronger. Can’t wait to meet them all again next year at aKademy 2008 in Belgium.

Tags: kde, community, meeting, education, physics, free software, open source, linux, windows, paris, france

On 1st and 2nd December this year the KDE Education project is preparing its first meeting. I’ve already been to a similar event during aKademy 2007, where one day was dedicated to free and open source software in education and schools. I enjoyed it a lot and was very happy that Anne-Marie invited me to the meeting which will be happening in a little more than a month in Paris. I’ve already booked my flight and I can see that there are currently 10 more people registered at the travel page. Can’t wait to meet them all. Thanks to Anne-Marie for hard organisational work, thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring the meeting and thanks to Mandriva for allowing us to use their offices.

As a preparation for the meeting I have started to check out how to use Valgrind which helps you find memory leaks in the code. I used it on KStars and it revealed a problem in constellation boundary highlighting code which leaked about 13 MiB of memory on my short test run. As I had some more free time today, I also updated the Slovenian keyboard layout for KTouch and converted it into the new XML format. Blinken didn’t escape me as well.

These were my little contributions to KDE today. Now I have to prepare for a lot of work that awaits to have as much KDE 4 translated into Slovenian language as possible when it gets released.

Tags: kde, community, meeting, education, free software, open source, paris, france

I got a new laptop a few hours ago, for free again, thanks to LUGOS. It’s a HP Compaq nx6325 and it is a very similar model to my current nx6125. It has some more hard disk space (80 GiB instead of 60 GiB) and instead of single core AMD Turion 64 it has a dual core AMD Turion 64 X2, still 1800 MHz. Being similar to nx6125 laptop also means that it has the crappy Broadcom wireless network adapter which doesn’t even have any open source drivers from Broadcom. So I’ll still have to use NDISwrapper with Windows drivers or the reverse engineered bcm43xx drivers which are open source but don’t work as good. The laptop also has the integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 graphics card, which has some problems with closed source drivers and no good open source drivers when it comes to 3D support. At least ATI/AMD have started to provide specifications for their graphic chips so there is hope. In addition, their latest closed source drivers, starting from version 8.41.7 are much improved. No such hope for Broadcom yet. Another thing I hope is that HP did their job right this time and that nx6325 doesn’t have as broken ACPI as nx6125 has. Anyways, double processor power will sure come in handy for compiling Gentoo Linux and KDE 4. Temporally the new laptop is running the new Mandriva Linux 2008. When I get back home I’ll install Gentoo Linux on it and give the nx6125 to my cousin Matej.

Tags: hardware, computers, laptops, notebooks, hp, nx6325, broadcom, ati, lugos

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

Well almost. There was a concert performed last night by an Italian Pink Floyd tribute band called Seamus. Although it was raining heavily the day before the event, the sky was luckily clear during the concert. If the weather wasn’t good with us, the performance would be in a large tent here in Bohinjska Bistrica, which sucks badly when it comes to acoustics. So the concert itself was at a place we call »Pod Skalco« (could be translated as Under the Rock) right next to Lake Bohinj. Seamus band played for about two hours and a half and everyone from our team of five agrees that they were very very good. And if old Pink Floyd gurus like my father and his friend Toni say this you can safely believe it to be true. It was a lot of fun and great music for only 5€ of entrance fee. In fact I was quite surprised that there were not more people at the concert. Ah well, those not being there, including my sister, can be very sorry. They missed a lot of great music for little money.

Tags: pink floyd, seamus, rock, concert, concerts, bohinj, slovenia, slovenija

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