Hello planet! This is Bhushan Shah. I am 18 years old, will be 19 years on this 13th sept. I am from India. I am using Linux and KDE from last two/three years. I started KDE development by porting KGet widget to QML, well not yet merged to master due to some bugs. After that I started to explore some other parts of the KDE like kde-workspace.

Recently I made into SoK, Season Of KDE. My project is to port plasmoids and DataEngines to KDE Framework 5. In this project Sebastian Kügler (sebas) will mentor me. Initially I have ported some DataEngines to use KDE Framework 5. I will post more updates to this blog and it will get syndicated to Planet KDE.

As a part of SoK project, I am currently porting device notifier applet to Plasma2. Device notifier applet was already ported to QML by Viranch Mehta so it was somewhat easy task for me. In a Plasma2 port first task is to change versions of imports and some other modifications. Result was awesome, I got Device Notifier applet in working stage.

After that I ported config.ui file to config.qml because in Plasma 2 config.ui files are no longer used. To port config.ui files you can have a look at the code given in plasma-framework/examples/applets/conditionalloader. As a sidenote all example DataEngines in the plasma-framework/examples/dataengines are now ported to use KF5.

Here is a configuration dialog which is ported to QML.

But currently other options like Device actions, Removable devices are still missing.

Hello planet! Just a quick note that CFP form for KDE India conference 2014 is going to end in 2 days (3rd December 2013). So if you are interested in giving lightning talks, tutorials, tech demos please fill the form early.

As Shaan7 (Shantanu Tushar Jha) says,

• KDE contributors wanting to share knowledge/experience
• People who have participated in GSoC, SoK, OPW or similar, to talk about how their project experience was
• People who have submitted a couple of patches

should give talks at KDE India conference to motivate students attending event.

KDE India conference 2014 is going to run from 21st to 23rd February at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

So please keep awesome talks coming.

Hello planet! Happy New Year 2014! With the year 2013 Season of KDE has come to an end. This was great experience for me. Under guidance of Sebastian Kügler (sebas), I ported some of the DataEngines to KDE Frameworks 5 and libplasma2, Some applets to Plasma2 and QML2 and also killed some bugs.

List of things that I ported to Plasma2 includes Icon (Generic Icon), Device notifier, ksgrd module from libksysguard, Activity bar and much more. I got to know many things about opensource world.

Patience

Okay that’s first rule of life, Keep patience. When you ask a question or ping someone on IRC, just stick to IRC, don’t disappear or panic! If you don’t get reply in expected time that doesn’t mean that you are being ignored. You will get reply for sure. Just wait!

Double check whatever you do

When you work on some opensource project and you have commit access to that project, it doesn’t mean you can commit anything. If you are going to commit something without someone reviewing, please make sure that commit will not break build on CI system. Keep eye on Jenkins. During my SoK once I commited some changes that were not ready to commit and result was broken build of kde-workspace on Jenkins, I fixed it after 30 minutes and 5 commits. :(

Stick to the plan

That’s what movies tell us! (Right?) Sometimes in opensource world it is not recommanded to do work which is out of plan. I started to port some of applets in kdeplasma-addons during the end of SoK but then I realized porting stuffs from kdeplasma-addons was out of scope to meet the requirements of Plasma 2 release schedule. It’s not that you are forbidden to do stuffs out of plan but its better if you stick to the plan.

That’s what I learnt during SoK. I plan to make my contributions to KDE this year also in spair time. Sebastian Kügler and everyone else from Plasma team, thanks again for mentoring me through this season.

Hello planet! KDE India team is going to organize a KDE India conference 2014 in DAIICT, Gandhinagar. In KDE India conference there are many awesome talks. In fact every talk is interesting but I find this talks more interesting.

• Baloo - Metadata and Search by Vishesh Handa
• C++11: A Language Renaissance by K�vin Ottens
• KDE unlike a coconut by Smit Shah, Let me find out what’s wrong with coconuts? I like them, they are sweet! :(
• Mer project - powering Jolla Sailfish and Plasma Active by Siteshwar Vashisht and Shantanu Tushar.
• Where KDE is and where it is going by Jos Poortvliet

And of course my own talk, Introduction to Plasma Next by KDE

In this talk I will give introduction to Plasma Next, changes in Plasma Next and if there is enough time I will demostrate installation of KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma Next.

I am already excited about KDE India conference 2014, because it is the first KDE event that I am going to attend and first talk at any KDE event (Well, no stage fear).

Hello planet! Okay, that’s not even a word, GSOCer..! but I am selected in Google Summer of Code 2014 with KDE. My project is Integrating Plasma mediacenter with Plasma Next and porting it to KF5 and Qt5. My mentors are Sinny Kumari and Shantanu Tushar Jha.

This project involves various task,

• Porting plasma mediacenter library, plugins, and backends to Qt5/KF5
• Porting user interface elements to QtQuick2 and Plasma Next components or rewriting if needed.
• Creating Plasma shell package which wraps user interface elements.
• Writing more unit tests for plasma-mediacenter library.
• Porting away from deprecated API in KDELibs4Support.

I discussed this project with Shantanu Tushar at the conf.kde.in 2014. Given I already worked on plasmoids porting to Qt5/KF5 in Plasma Next during Season of KDE I found this project perfect for me. Some more things about this project.

• In a free time I already ported plasma mediacenter library and unit tests to KF5 and Qt5. Code lives in frameworks-scratch branch of plasma-mediacenter repo,
• Also I have ported browsing backends and plugins to KF5 and Qt5.
• This will allow me to focus on user interface and shell implementation in coding period.
• During community bonding period I will cordinate with KDE Visual design group and KDE Usability group for new design

Overall, this is going to be a great experience for me like Season of KDE. I will get involved with KDE Community more and more during GSoC and hopefully our users will benifit from it. That’s my wish.

Again Thank you my mentors, Plasma team and KDE for giving me chance to do things this GSoC. Also I thank Google for organizing such a nice program.

Hello planet! This is first report for my GSoC project porting plasma mediacenter to Qt5/KF5 and Implementing shell package.

So far I have,

• With help from sebas ported away plugin loading code from deprecated methods and macros
• Ported Plasma mediacenter welcome screen and media browser to QtQuick 2.0 and Plasna Next components.
• Cleaned source code of autotests and ported away from deprecated methods

Now enough words,

Lets checkout some screenshots..

Somehow thumbnails are not working properly for online backends.. This is best screenshot I was able to get.. :D

So that’s it for today.. Next week I have my exams so I will skip next report. Thanks for reading..

As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June.

Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories

So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR.

to install use your AUR helper,

packer plasma-mediacenter-git

If you get any bugs please report on bugs.kde.org

PS: This is first package I am going to maintain on Arch Linux User Repos..

Hello KDE community,

This is second update to my GSoC 2014 project. Previously I ported homescreen and mediabrowser part of the plasma-mediacenter. My next task is to port mediacontroller and mediaplayer components of the plasma-mediacenter. To port mediacontroller and mediaplayer I also wrote runtimeData class which acts as a bridge between libs and qmlcomponents.

So here is screenshot of the current state

At the moment duration slider is broken.. But plasma-mediacenter on KF5 is progressing towards functional mode.

My next plan is to,

• Fix slider (Infact runtimeData)
• Port playlist components
• Add option to toggle plasmashell dashboard
• Use units provided by PlasmaCore instead of hardcoded values.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more updates.

Akademy 2014 was my first ever akademy that I attended and I must say that was nice experience for me. I got to meet many people whom I only know with their IRC nicks or just identity usernames. Our pre-registration event took part in the Redhat office, Brno. I reached there at evening and there I meet plasma developers as well as KDE-India people whom I alredy meet once at conf.kde.in, they gave very warm welcome to me.

On next day event took part in the Brno University of Technology, where on first two days there was many exciting talks. Some of them were lightning talks and others were full length technical talk, I also gave 10 minute talk in which I tried to explain “How I met our konqi - in single episode”. This talk included my experience with KDE community so far, How I started to contribute to KDE, Season of KDE, Google summer of Code etc..

After the 2 days of talks there was BoF sessions and workshops, where I attended the Plasma BoF, Plasma mediacenter BoF, KDE Windows BoF, KDE Edu use in India and KDE India BoF. This was really exciting to become a part of the awesome discussions going in this BoFs. Most exciting BoF for me was plasma mediacenter and plasma BoF because I normally work on this parts.

On the last day there was my birthday which I spent in the flight… :P but again that was best birthday gift I got from KDE e.V., Thank you for sponsering my travel and accomodation in Brno, Czech Republic.

As a part of SoK project, I am currently porting device notifier applet to Plasma2. Device notifier applet was already ported to QML by Viranch Mehta so it was somewhat easy task for me. In a Plasma2 port first task is to change versions of imports and some other modifications. Result was awesome, I got Device Notifier applet in working stage.

After that I ported config.ui file to config.qml because in Plasma 2 config.ui files are no longer used. To port config.ui files you can have a look at the code given in plasma-framework/examples/applets/conditionalloader. As a sidenote all example DataEngines in the plasma-framework/examples/dataengines are now ported to use KF5.

Here is a configuration dialog which is ported to QML.

But currently other options like Device actions, Removable devices are still missing.

Hello planet! Just a quick note that CFP form for KDE India conference 2014 is going to end in 2 days (3rd December 2013). So if you are interested in giving lightning talks, tutorials, tech demos please fill the form early.

As Shaan7 (Shantanu Tushar Jha) says,

• KDE contributors wanting to share knowledge/experience
• People who have participated in GSoC, SoK, OPW or similar, to talk about how their project experience was
• People who have submitted a couple of patches

should give talks at KDE India conference to motivate students attending event.

KDE India conference 2014 is going to run from 21st to 23rd February at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar, Gujarat.

So please keep awesome talks coming.

Hello planet! Happy New Year 2014! With the year 2013 Season of KDE has come to an end. This was great experience for me. Under guidance of Sebastian Kügler (sebas), I ported some of the DataEngines to KDE Frameworks 5 and libplasma2, Some applets to Plasma2 and QML2 and also killed some bugs.

List of things that I ported to Plasma2 includes Icon (Generic Icon), Device notifier, ksgrd module from libksysguard, Activity bar and much more. I got to know many things about opensource world.

Patience

Okay that’s first rule of life, Keep patience. When you ask a question or ping someone on IRC, just stick to IRC, don’t disappear or panic! If you don’t get reply in expected time that doesn’t mean that you are being ignored. You will get reply for sure. Just wait!

Double check whatever you do

When you work on some opensource project and you have commit access to that project, it doesn’t mean you can commit anything. If you are going to commit something without someone reviewing, please make sure that commit will not break build on CI system. Keep eye on Jenkins. During my SoK once I commited some changes that were not ready to commit and result was broken build of kde-workspace on Jenkins, I fixed it after 30 minutes and 5 commits. :(

Stick to the plan

That’s what movies tell us! (Right?) Sometimes in opensource world it is not recommanded to do work which is out of plan. I started to port some of applets in kdeplasma-addons during the end of SoK but then I realized porting stuffs from kdeplasma-addons was out of scope to meet the requirements of Plasma 2 release schedule. It’s not that you are forbidden to do stuffs out of plan but its better if you stick to the plan.

That’s what I learnt during SoK. I plan to make my contributions to KDE this year also in spair time. Sebastian Kügler and everyone else from Plasma team, thanks again for mentoring me through this season.

Hello planet! KDE India team is going to organize a KDE India conference 2014 in DAIICT, Gandhinagar. In KDE India conference there are many awesome talks. In fact every talk is interesting but I find this talks more interesting.

• Baloo - Metadata and Search by Vishesh Handa
• C++11: A Language Renaissance by K�vin Ottens
• KDE unlike a coconut by Smit Shah, Let me find out what’s wrong with coconuts? I like them, they are sweet! :(
• Mer project - powering Jolla Sailfish and Plasma Active by Siteshwar Vashisht and Shantanu Tushar.
• Where KDE is and where it is going by Jos Poortvliet

And of course my own talk, Introduction to Plasma Next by KDE

In this talk I will give introduction to Plasma Next, changes in Plasma Next and if there is enough time I will demostrate installation of KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma Next.

I am already excited about KDE India conference 2014, because it is the first KDE event that I am going to attend and first talk at any KDE event (Well, no stage fear).

Hello planet! Okay, that’s not even a word, GSOCer..! but I am selected in Google Summer of Code 2014 with KDE. My project is Integrating Plasma mediacenter with Plasma Next and porting it to KF5 and Qt5. My mentors are Sinny Kumari and Shantanu Tushar Jha.

This project involves various task,

• Porting plasma mediacenter library, plugins, and backends to Qt5/KF5
• Porting user interface elements to QtQuick2 and Plasma Next components or rewriting if needed.
• Creating Plasma shell package which wraps user interface elements.
• Writing more unit tests for plasma-mediacenter library.
• Porting away from deprecated API in KDELibs4Support.

I discussed this project with Shantanu Tushar at the conf.kde.in 2014. Given I already worked on plasmoids porting to Qt5/KF5 in Plasma Next during Season of KDE I found this project perfect for me. Some more things about this project.

• In a free time I already ported plasma mediacenter library and unit tests to KF5 and Qt5. Code lives in frameworks-scratch branch of plasma-mediacenter repo,
• Also I have ported browsing backends and plugins to KF5 and Qt5.
• This will allow me to focus on user interface and shell implementation in coding period.
• During community bonding period I will cordinate with KDE Visual design group and KDE Usability group for new design

Overall, this is going to be a great experience for me like Season of KDE. I will get involved with KDE Community more and more during GSoC and hopefully our users will benifit from it. That’s my wish.

Again Thank you my mentors, Plasma team and KDE for giving me chance to do things this GSoC. Also I thank Google for organizing such a nice program.

Hello planet! This is first report for my GSoC project porting plasma mediacenter to Qt5/KF5 and Implementing shell package.

So far I have,

• With help from sebas ported away plugin loading code from deprecated methods and macros
• Ported Plasma mediacenter welcome screen and media browser to QtQuick 2.0 and Plasna Next components.
• Cleaned source code of autotests and ported away from deprecated methods

Now enough words,

Lets checkout some screenshots..

Somehow thumbnails are not working properly for online backends.. This is best screenshot I was able to get.. :D

So that’s it for today.. Next week I have my exams so I will skip next report. Thanks for reading..

As you already know, Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta is released on 3rd June.

Many distros like Fedora, openSUSE, KUbuntu have already packaged this beta in their repositories

So to make life of Archers easier, I have uploaded PKGBUILD for Plasma mediacenter 1.3 beta on AUR.

to install use your AUR helper,

packer plasma-mediacenter-git

If you get any bugs please report on bugs.kde.org

PS: This is first package I am going to maintain on Arch Linux User Repos..

Hello KDE community,

This is second update to my GSoC 2014 project. Previously I ported homescreen and mediabrowser part of the plasma-mediacenter. My next task is to port mediacontroller and mediaplayer components of the plasma-mediacenter. To port mediacontroller and mediaplayer I also wrote runtimeData class which acts as a bridge between libs and qmlcomponents.

So here is screenshot of the current state

At the moment duration slider is broken.. But plasma-mediacenter on KF5 is progressing towards functional mode.

My next plan is to,

• Fix slider (Infact runtimeData)
• Port playlist components
• Add option to toggle plasmashell dashboard
• Use units provided by PlasmaCore instead of hardcoded values.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more updates.

Akademy 2014 was my first ever akademy that I attended and I must say that was nice experience for me. I got to meet many people whom I only know with their IRC nicks or just identity usernames. Our pre-registration event took part in the Redhat office, Brno. I reached there at evening and there I meet plasma developers as well as KDE-India people whom I alredy meet once at conf.kde.in, they gave very warm welcome to me.

On next day event took part in the Brno University of Technology, where on first two days there was many exciting talks. Some of them were lightning talks and others were full length technical talk, I also gave 10 minute talk in which I tried to explain “How I met our konqi - in single episode”. This talk included my experience with KDE community so far, How I started to contribute to KDE, Season of KDE, Google summer of Code etc..

After the 2 days of talks there was BoF sessions and workshops, where I attended the Plasma BoF, Plasma mediacenter BoF, KDE Windows BoF, KDE Edu use in India and KDE India BoF. This was really exciting to become a part of the awesome discussions going in this BoFs. Most exciting BoF for me was plasma mediacenter and plasma BoF because I normally work on this parts.

On the last day there was my birthday which I spent in the flight… :P but again that was best birthday gift I got from KDE e.V., Thank you for sponsering my travel and accomodation in Brno, Czech Republic.

SuperX, a relatively new distribution, just released beta for its upcoming 3.0 release. SuperX is a KDE centric distribution, and focuses on giving a polished KDE experience (a marketing statement, SuperX guys use).

It is one of the early and few Linux distributions from India, and arguably the most active in development. It has made a mark in Government domain and universities in India. In the year of 2013, the State Government of Assam (for those who don’t know, Assam is a state in northeastern part of India) distributed 29, 887 laptop computers to meritorious high-school passed students and SuperX was the default OS of choice. This might be one of the large OEM-shipment of KDE desktop ever.

SuperX is currently used in Gauhati University in Guwahati, Assam to train Bachelor of Technology students in Linux. The University moved from Windows to locally developed, SuperX. They are also giving training of application development in PyQt and PyKDE and teaching Qt in general to students, under the developers of SuperX. A good initiative by Gauhati University to promote a locally developed distribution and Qt/KDE technologies. On the other side, it is also used in some commerce colleges in Assam, its an example how KDE and open source in general can be used across use cases, may not be necessarily be related to technology.

Here are some of pictures of SuperX being used in Gauhati University (taken from SuperX’s Facebook page):

The beta release of SuperX 3.0, codenamed ‘Grace’ looks promising. It features a highly customized KDE 4 desktop, a dark plasma theme and some great aesthetic tweaks, Under the hood, it is the same Linux desktop, with all goodness of KDE and Qt. The developers have said that, they are ‘KDE and Qt-Centric but not GTK free’, so you will find some GTK application and tools here and there. They have adopted some of Linux Mint’s tools and integrated them, like integrating superx-sources (a fork of mintsources from Linux Mint) into Muon Suite, not a bad thing IMO.

If you want to test the beta, you can download it from their website. At moment I am also helping in development for this distribution in my free time. Thanks for reading. If you have any questions about SuperX, you can ask me on bshah@superxos.com