FreeSoftNews

Interviewers: Scott Swigart and Sean Campbell

Interviewee: Helio Chissini de Castro

In this interview we talk with Helio Chissini de Castro. In specific, we talk about:

* The open source environment in Brazil
* The strengths of Mandriva Linux
* Organization and maintenance of Mandriva
* The future of open source software in Latin America

Sean Campbell: Can you tell us a little bit about your background, both with open source and outside of that?

Helio Chissini de Castro: Sure. I started in open source 10 years ago, when I finished university in a computer science major. I joined a company that works on desktop development called Choose, which works with ILOG tools. They work on Windows and UNIX C++ software, and they really have nothing to do with Linux and open source at all.

Read more at How Software is Built

I am proud to announce the release of Soprano 2.1, the RDF
storage/parsing/serialization framework based on Qt 4. Soprano 2.1 comes with
a set of improvements and new features as compared to 2.0 and will accompany
the upcoming KDE 4.1 release.

The following list is not complete but names the most important changes and
improvements.

* SignalCacheModel to restrict the number of emitted statementsAdded and
statementsRemoved signals in a certain timeframe.
* Raptor serializer now supports all raptor serializer factory names which are
mapped to Soprano user serialization types.
* Changed mimetype of N-Triples to “application/n-triples”

• Read more: Soprano 2.1 released

Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings and Kross meeting here at the KDAB Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people representing Ruby, Python, C#, Lua and PHP. The projects do not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and review the details of how the implementations worked.

Python and Ruby are in a very good shape and stable for being used in application development using Qt and KDE facilities, while Qyoto, the C# binding is well on its way to providing the same level of completeness and stability. PHP will try to fill the gap between Desktop and Web Applications using the powerful technologies in the Qt toolkit, such as QtWebKit for instance. An interesting new star on the bindings horizon is Lua, which is widely used for scripting some well known computer games and other applications.

Read more at KDE.news

The SQO-OSS project aims at developing a software quality assessment platform to Free Software developers. SQO-OSS is a project funded through the European Commission’s Framework Programme 6 and consists of a number of European organisations with knowledge relevant to build such a platform, among which KDE e.V.. After more than one and a half years of research, design and development the SQO-OSS developer now have made available a first demo showing some capabilities of the Alitheia system. Alitheia stands for the ultimate and business-like truth. Read on for more details.

Read more at KDE.news

Hi,

KDiff3 is back and ready for KDE4. Although the status is still beta I think
it is very usable already.

My thanks go especially to Valentin Rusu who volunteered to do the porting of
the build system to cmake and made the program compile again.
More thanks go to Albert Astals Cid and David Faure who helped with the
kdiff3-plugin.

• Read more: KDiff3 is back in extragear

The KOffice team announces the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.

Read more at KDE.news

The reasons for the user revolt against KDE 4, which we reported on yesterday, are still being sorted out. They appear to be a complex mixture that includes the assumptions that KDE used in its planning, the rush by distributions to include a release that was not ready for general use, and sensationalism in free software blogs and journalism. One reason that has yet to be discussed is one of the potentially most significant — the apparent shift in the FOSS user base. Judging from the quickness and thoroughness with which KDE 4 was rejected, the audience for free software seems to have shifted from a small group of knowledgeable users that treasures innovation to a larger one that values convention and familiarity and is actively suspicious of change.

Read more at Linux.com

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page.
KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.

The development in trunk/ in Subversion has already been opened for feature development, which is going into KDE 4.2 (to be released in January), but developers are strongly encouraged to concentrate on bugfixing in the 4.1 branch for now. Do give RC1 a spin, file bugreports and fix things, there is only a week left until 4.1 is being tagged. Do have your changes in the 4.1 branch reviewed by your peers, though. Note that some users might still be suffering from performance problems with NVidia graphics chips. There is a page on Techbase that gives some more information about it. Make sure you report bugs via KDE’s Bugzilla so they can be addressed and do not get lost.

Read more at KDE.news

When KDE 4.0 was released in January, it was supposed to be the foundation for a new era of desktop development. But as 4.x versions began finding their way into distributions, negative reactions began to obscure other ones. With the upcoming 4.1 release due at the end of this month, it’s hard to avoid wondering: what happened?

Read more at Linux.com

I’m very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa.

Read more at KDE

Rest in peace Uwe!
FreeSoftNews team

The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. announced that they will hold their
yearly conferences, GUADEC and Akademy in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The
conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the
same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of
Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade.

• Read more: GNOME and KDE to Co-locate Flagship Conferences on Gran Canaria in 2009

There has been a bit of a dustup about KDE 4.0. A lot of opinions have been expressed, but I thought you might like to hear from KDE. So I wrote to them and asked if they’d be willing to explain their choices and answer the main complaints. They graciously agreed.

I was a bit puzzled at some of the complaints, because I use KDE, and when I didn’t like something, I would just change it. For example, if I didn’t like the new menu, I could right click on the menu icon and it gave me an immediate choice to go back to the old one. How hard is that? Could it be that at least some of what we are seeing is our old friend Stick in the Mud?

I asked that because a friend of mine just switched to Linux, and she chose Mandriva 2008, so I explained to her how to change back and forth and asked her to try both and tell me what she preferred. She reports she greatly prefers the new menu. I asked why, and she said she didn’t know. It seemed to her easier to find things, less confusing. For what it’s worth.

Read more at Groklaw

The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade.

Read more at KDE.news

Aloha!

Today is an epic day. The Amarok team just released Amarok 2.0.0 Alpha
1 “Malina”. It marks the beginning of a whole release series which
ends with the final version of the first KDE 4 based Amarok release -
2.0.0
Read the release announcement and digg it please
http://digg.com/software/First_alpha_release_of_Amarok_2_0_Malina

• Read more: First alpha release of Amarok 2.0 - Malina

On Sunday 6th July, the Bugsquad will be holding a Kopete bug triage day. The aim: to dramatically reduce the number of Kopete bug reports from the current level of approximately 530. As usual, this bug day will be coordinated in the channel #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net. There will also be a followup bug day two weeks later, on Sunday 20th July, to triage any remaining bugs.

Read more at KDE.news

Akademy 2008 has published the programme of talks. Track themes include research, applications and community. There are keynotes from Frank Karlitschek of the Open Desktop sites, Sebastian Nyström of Nokia, Cliff Schmidt of KDE users Literacy Bridge. Lightning talk sessions include a Plasma Frenzy and an Akonadi Rumble with KDAB’s Till Adam. It is a packed programme to start off the week, the rest of which will be filled with BoFs, Tutorials and an Embedded and Mobile Day.

Read more at KDE.news

KDE Project Ships Second Beta of KDE 4.1

KDE Community Announces Second Beta Release of KDE 4.1
June 24, 2008 (The INTERNET). The KDE Community is proud to announce the
second beta release of KDE 4.1. Beta 2 is aimed at testers, community members
and enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 4.1 can
fully replace KDE 3 for end users. KDE 4.1 beta 2 is available as binary
packages for a wide range of platforms, and as source packages. KDE 4.1 is due
for final release in late July 2008.

KDE 4.1 Beta 2 Highlights

After one month has passed since the feature freeze on the KDE 4.1 branch, the
KDE hackers have been working on polishing the new features, desktop
integration, and documenting and translating the packages. Several bugfixing
sessions have been held and squashed bugs in the beta software. While there
are still bugs left that need to be fixed until the release, KDE 4.1 Beta2
shapes up nicely. Testing and feedback on this release is appreciated and
needed to make KDE 4.1 a splash.

Read more: http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.1-beta2.php