KPowersave Tip of the Day

I've seen at SUSE Labs Conference and now at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), that people have trouble to disable Screensaver and Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) on KDE while a presentation/talk.

Here now the "KPowersave Tip of the Day" for Linus Torvalds (which had some problems to find out how to disable the screensaver at the LPC) and all the other KDE users out there:

KPowersave has a 'Presentation' scheme which do everything for you (disable: screensaver, DPMS, autosuspend, autodimm). Simply activate it before starting your presentation:

• right click at the KPowersave icon
• select 'Set Active Scheme'
• select the 'Presentation' scheme
  

Tech Tags: KPowersave KDE Conference

Akademy 2008 ended

Last Friday (15.08.2008) the Akademy 2008 officially ended. Thursday was the day of the 'Boat Trip on the rivers Dijle, Ruppel and Schelde'. It was a really nice trip with drinks, finger food and a delicious barbecue. The right event/place to discuss KDE and opensource topics with different people.

The conference was really a great event. Many interesting talks, discussions and new information. Thanks to all attendees and the organization team.

What I really missed (again) was a list of all attendees. With some of the information we filled out on registration as e.g. Name, E-mail address, IRC nickname. But also information about: how long (and on which days) a person will be at the conference, what a attendee contributes to KDE or on what he/she is working and maybe also the 'Remaining information' field if there are usefull information. All this would make it much easier to find and contact the correct people. There were so many new attendees this year that it was really hard to find what they do and if it would be important do speak to one of them. There is room for improvement.

Next year the Akademy is planed on the same place as the GUADEC: Gran Canaria. The content of both conferences will be independently, but there will be a number of cross-over sessions for all attendees.

Tech Tags: Akademy KDE

HAL: fixed device locking

Some days ago I had a discussion with Matthias Kretz at the Akademy 2008 about HAL, the handling of audio devices in HAL and the needs/requirements from the perspective of phonon.

One aspect was that phonon needs to find out of some other tool already uses a audio device. The HAL device locking would be a solution to detect this. I took a look at the HAL code for device locking and while playing around with the interfaces I wondered why it didn't work as it should. The lock information (info.locked* keys) where never removed if the lock owner died or exited without unlock the interface again. The handling was also broken if someone requested more than one lock (e.g. two or more different devices).

I really wonder why there was only one bugreport about problems with device locking (if the lock owner dies). Did nobody ever used these interfaces?

I've wrote a quik patch to solve these problems. As first I changed the hashtable which contains the lock info from key={lockowner}/value={device} to key={lockowner}/value={list of devices} so that locking multiple devices is now possible. And the other part of this patch is to remove the lock based on the old_service_name (and not the new_service_name) on NameOwnerChanged events from DBus to solve the 'lock owner died' problem.

Tech Tags: KDE Akademy HAL

Akademy 2008: Literacy Bridge

Yesterday the 'KDE Contributors Conference' of the Akademy 2008 ended. And there where of course again several really interesting talks as e.g. 'Location-aware applications with GeoClue' or 'Gallium3D - Graphics Done Right'. But for me the most interesting and impressive talk was the keynote from Cliff Schmidt: 'Digital Audio to Reduce Illiteracy, Poverty and Disease'.

He spoken about the Literacy Bridge, a nonprofit organization which try to fight against illiteracy, poverty and disease by empowering people in the developing world with affordable tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning. The goal is advancing education, health, economic development, democracy, and human rights.

Currently they are building the 'Talking Book Device', a robust/rugged low cost audio player and recorder. The plan is to produce the device for 5 Dollar, so that the people can buy the device themselves. It would allow local organizations and users to produce the content themselves as e.g. to help people to learn reading. An other example: it would enable a doctor to speak instructions on the device for taking pharmaceutical to prevent misusage.

The really impressing on the project and the organization is that they really understand the audience.They cooperate with local groups e.g. in Africa, they understand the people and their needs. And this is in my opinion why the project will success. Compared to the OLPC project this device fits into the existing infrastructure of wide parts of the developing world, it's no high-tech tool, it's easy and intuitively to use and it's really affordable.

You can find more information on the website and the blog of the organization.

Tech Tags: KDE Akademy literacybridge.org

aKademy 2008 started

I (or we, since there are 8 SUSE developer here) arrived yesterday at Mechelen (Belgium) for the Akademy 2008 (from 9. to 15. August in Sint-Katelijne-Waver). Today the Akademy was opened and there where already some really interesting talks as the keynote ('KDE Community websites: The past, the present and a vision for the future'), 'Future of the KDE Development Model', 'Akonadi Unleashed', 'Deepening KDE and Qt collaboration' or 'Qt on Maemo'.

Thuesday is the 'Embedded and Mobile Day' with interesting talks about QT and KDE on Maemo. I have to ask there the Nokia/maemo people about the handwrite recongnition (HWR) on the N810. I couldn't find yet any usefull information about the backend which do the recognition. Currently there is no good free HWR for Linux TabletPCs available (except maybe Cellwriter, which support grid-entry based input, but no natural writing). It would be really cool if Nokia would share the HWR so that TabletPCs under Linux could get more usable than currently.

Tech Tags: KDE TabletPC

Fixed KDBus

I commited today two fixes to the KDE SVN to make KDBus usable again on DBus method calls:

• fixed show the input widgets for input/output method parameters, show in the 'Output:' section only the output and not again also the input parameter widgets [1]
• fixed handling of boolean method parameters, now you should be able to call e.g.  SetPowerSave(bool) on the org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.SystemPowerManagement interface again without errors [2]

Updated RPM packages are already available for openSUSE 10.2 - openSUSE Factory and SUSE Linux Enterprise (Desktop) 10 as always in my openSUSE Build Service project.

Tech Tags: KDE Patches Packaging

Novell is now Patron of KDE

Great news: Novell became as first Linux distributor an official patron of KDE. I don't understand why this wasn't announced by Novell yet. I could only find Novell now listed on a webpage of KDE e.V.: 'Supporting Members', but I think this is a good step of Novell/SUSE to give some back to the (KDE) community.

Tech Tags: KDE Patron Novell

KDE Tablet PC support

One of problems with Tablet PCs under Linux is lacking support for small, but very essential features as the Windows XP Tablet PC Edition provide. There are already drivers for machines with e.g. Wacom tablets or some Fujitsu Siemens (FSC) devices and also some applications as Xournal, Jarnal or xstroke which provide useful features.

On SUSE there is also support in SAX to configure Wacom and FSC devices and I already wrote a patch for HAL (v0.5.8/git) to detect Tablet PCs and set the needed Ports correct and automatically. There is also a patch for XDM to show xvkbd on login and a patch for KDE to show xvkbd on the unlock dialog from Lubos Lunak.

But until now one feature was missing: The user could rotate the screen via KRandr and also the Wacom driver support already rotation but there was no way to do this together because the Wacom driver did not support the XRandR extension. The user had to call xsetwacom to rotate also the input devices to use rotation. Thanks to Stephan Binner the user can now rotate the screen and the input devices together via KRandr and it work like a charm. You can find the patch here.

Tech Tags: KDE TabletPC