KTips is a new group on identi.ca for KDE users to share tips and tricks. If you join the group, you’ll see tips from the KDE community in your timeline. You can also share your own tips by adding !ktips to your messages.

KTips – A new place to share tips about KDE Software

Now some of you might wonder, why another group instead of posting to the existing KDE group? The reason is simple: !kde has all kind of KDE-related topics, and some find it too noisy. If you only want those nifty tips, !ktips is for you. Members of both groups can always crosspost if they want.

Backstory

The idea originates from the “Tip of the day” dialogs – you know, the ones that pop up the first time you start some applications. Although they can contain a lot of useful information, most users close the dialogs down without a second thought. [citation needed]

Uncheck “Show tips on startup” → Close

Personally I never read these dialogs for a simple reason – if I launch Kate, I want to start using Kate right away. Get out of my way.

When I got my new Nokia phone, I could choose if I wanted to receive tips or not. I decided to give it a try and found their approach interesting – occasionally there would be an SMS from Nokia, each time containing a short tip. This way it doesn’t disturb me when I want to use the phone while still keeping me interested.

Today I dented a tip to the KDE group when it hit me – why not make something similar for KDE?

The 140 characters limit on identi.ca ensures that each tip is short and to the point, so the reader won’t be bored. You can read them in your web browser, on your desktop, in your microblog client – basically they won’t get in the way of your work. If you don’t like microblogs but still want to read the tips, you can add the RSS/Atom feed to your feed reader.

Furthermore, you can contribute to it. And it’s extremely easy to do. This should also be a good place to look for content to add to Userbase.

So what are you waiting for? Join today and receive lots of KDE tips – for FREE!

Be free.

However, this post isn’t about Userbase – I hope I’ll find some time to summarize the plans for the wiki here in a few days. Today I want to share another tip that I’ve found and need to remember to add to Userbase: Borderless Maximized Windows.

This option is very useful for devices with small screens, such as netbooks, to give slightly more space to your applications. If enabled, the window border will hide automatically when you maximize a window (and vice versa when unmaximized).

If I remember correctly, this feature was introduced in KDE Software Compilation 4.5 for the Plasma Netbook workspace, where it’s enabled by default. Here’s a short screencast demonstration (what, not an animated GIF!?):

Note that I used double click to maximize the windows. This is configurable in System Settings → Window Behavior → Window Behavior → Titlebar Actions.

Previously I used some window-specific settings to get a similar setup, but it only did it according to some pre-defined rules -  the borders weren’t automatically hidden/shown when a window was maximized/restored.

So how do I enable this in Plasma Desktop?

1. Use you favorite text editor to edit the file
   

   ~/.kde4/share/config/kwinrc

   In some distributions the .kde4 directory is called .kde (or something else like .kdemod4)

2. Add the line
   

   BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true

   under the section [Windows]
   It should look something like this:

   [Windows]
ActiveMouseScreen=true
AltTabStyle=KDE
AutoRaise=false
AutoRaiseInterval=750
BorderSnapZone=10
BorderlessMaximizedWindows=true
CenterSnapZone=0

3. Launch KRunner (Alt+F2) and run the command
   

   kwin --replace

   to restart KWin

4. Go crazy and maximize every window in sight! Remember that you can unmaximize them from the window menu (Alt+F3) or from the task manager in your panel. If quick tiling is enabled (System Settings → Desktop → Screen Edges → Window Management), you can also use Alt+Left mouse button to unmaximize windows by dragging them

Credits this time go to Christian who wrote about this feature in a comment in this blog post. The post also links to a neat widget that’s useful for a setup with borderless windows.

A new course is now open for participation over at the KDE Community Forums. This time the students will use a KDE utility called Krazy Code Checker to improve the code quality of a KDE application of choice, mentored by our own administrator (and System Settings maintainer) bcooksley.

The course requires basic C++ knowledge and a KDE development platform (kdelibs) >= 4.4 (self-compiled or distribution packages). If you want to get a feel of how it’s like, you can take a look at the previous krazy course.

Interested? Head over to the forums and read the course description. If you want to participate, post a reply with the subject you want to work on. Have fun!

Klassroom – Krazy fixes 2 »

Remaining time in the Battery Monitor

1. Right click on the battery and choose “Battery Monitor Settings”
2. Enable “Show charge information” and click on “OK”
3. Quit plasma-desktop with the command
   

   kquitapp plasma-desktop

4. Open ~/.kde4/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc in your favorite text editor (some distributions use other paths, for example ~/.kde/...)
5. Search for the term
   

   showBatteryString=true

   and add the following line directly below it:

   showRemainingTime=true

6. Start plasma-desktop again
   

   plasma-desktop

You may disable “Show charge information” now if you want.

Credits to Sebastian Kügler for posting the instructions on the plasma-devel mailing list. I’ll try to also add them to Userbase when I have some more free time.

Note that I do not want a flame war here about if this should be the default setting/configurable in the GUI – it’s been discussed before, and complaining here won’t make any difference.

Enjoy!

In the Arch community, it’s common praxis to check the wiki before asking a question. Many users also contribute to the ArchWiki by adding content, translating pages and whatnot.

The number of Userbase contributors are growing, but getting on the top list is still very easy – a few edits will do. The wiki is still unknown to a large part of the user base; it doesn’t feel like the natural place to seek and add information about KDE.

Now I’m not going to just sit here and complain. It’s time to do something about this, and I’ve decided to put some time and effort into Userbase once I’ve dealt with a couple of Real Life stuff. First I want to gather feedback from you, the community, and that’s why I’ve written this post. All you need to do is answer this simple question:

Why don’t you use Userbase?

I want to hear the answer from both users seeking information and potential wiki contributors. If you belong to both groups, that’s great.

What would make you use Userbase more, what kind of improvements do you want to see? What’s the most important thing that needs to be done, in your opinion?

I hope you can spare a few minutes to answer the question(s), it’ll be immensely useful. Note that I want to know what can be done on the Userbase side – answers such as “because I’m too lazy” aren’t very helpful.

Thanks for your time.

I’ve gathered some tips for new users to get a more familiar desktop, based on frequently asked questions I’ve seen in various places. This is in no way a “10 things you should do” list – it’s up to you to decide which way you like better.

The post is mainly aimed at those who are new to Plasma Desktop, but even experienced users might learn something new.

KDE Plasma Desktop

Just a short note before we begin: the images with a play button are linked to short screencasts – just click to watch them. The screencasts are encoded in GIF and can therefore be played in most web browsers without any additional plugins. The downside is that the quality is quite poor, hope you can bear with it.

Without further ado, here are 10 things you might want to do in KDE SC 4.4:

1. Change the application launcher

The default application launcher in most distributions

Some like it, others don’t – it’s about the default application launcher “Kickoff”. Fortunately, it’s very easy to switch to a more traditional application launcher, similar to the one featured in the KDE 3 series:

Switch to Classic Menu Style

1. Unlock widgets if they’re locked
2. Right click on the application launcher icon and choose “Switch to Classic Menu Style”

There is also a more advanced application launcher called Lancelot. This widget, among others, is usually found in a package called kdeplasma-addons. To find out how to add Lancelot to your panel, see section 6. Tweak your panel.

Classic Menu (left) and Lancelot (right)

2. Switch to a traditional desktop with icons

The “traditional desktop” I’m talking about is the type of desktop where you basically have a fullscreen file manager with a nice wallpaper. You can put icons on it, create new folders and files etc.

Traditional Desktop

The default desktop type in Plasma Desktop behaves in a different way. Instead of icons, you put widgets on it – for example icon widgets, or a widget to show the content of a folder (called Folder View). To switch to a traditional desktop, all you need to do is change desktop type:

Switch to traditional desktop

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Click on “Activity”
3. Change “Type” to “Folder View”
4. Click on “Apply” or “OK”

Options for the Folder View desktop type will appear in the Desktop Activity Settings dialog. Note that you can still put widgets on the desktop if you want.

For more information about desktop icons, see this blog post. Although it’s written for KDE SC 4.2, most of the things are the same in 4.4.

3. Choose your wallpaper

While this is similar to how it works in other workspaces, Plasma Desktop offers some extra functionality that are worth mentioning. If you only want to change the wallpaper image:

Change Wallpaper

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Make sure “Type” is set to “Image”
3. Either select a wallpaper in the list, or click on “Open…” to select an image file
4. Click on “OK”

As you probably have guessed, there are other wallpaper types as well. Below is a short description of those shipped with KDE SC 4.4 (some found in kdeplasma-addons):

Color

Paints a solid color or a gradient between two colors on the desktop.

Virus

Viruses that mutate, spread and slowly eat your wallpaper. The better a virus adapts to your wallpaper, the higher is the chance that it’ll survive and pass on its DNA to future generations.

Virus wallpaper

Mandelbrot

Shows a Mandelbrot set fractal on your desktop. You can move the fractal by holding down your left mouse button and drag the Mandelbrot around. Even better, zoom in/out with your mouse wheel or by holding down the middle button (scroll wheel) and move the mouse cursor up or down.

Mandelbrot wallpaper

Note: If your right click menu disappears after changing to this wallpaper type, you can open the Wallpaper dialog by clicking on the toolbox (located in the top-right corner by default) and press “Desktop Activity Settings”. When you’re happy with your Mandelbrot set it’s possible to lock the view (from the wallpaper dialog) to get the mouse actions – such as the right click menu – back.

Weather

Displays different wallpapers depending on the current weather. You can decide which pictures to show for certain weather conditions from the Advanced dialog.

Pattern

Repeated pattern painted on the desktop.

Image

Probably the most commonly used wallpaper type. Pick an image to show as your wallpaper.

Slideshow

Can’t decide which picture you want on your desktop? No problem, with slideshow you can have them all. The images will automatically switch after a set amount of time.

Globe

A globe for your desktop. There are many different map themes to choose among, and you can set the movement to Interactive, Follow the sun, Rotate and Do not move.

Globe wallpaper

4. Set different wallpaper on each virtual desktop

One feature many ask for is the ability to have different wallpapers on different virtual desktops. This is not directly possible in Plasma Desktop – however, you can have different “desktops”, formally known as activities, on each virtual desktop.

You may think of an activity as what you usually call “desktop”. Other than a name, an activity also has a wallpaper, some features (e.g. display icons) and can contain other widgets – namely the ones you put on the desktop.

The name “virtual desktop” is quite confusing, since it’s actually a group of windows. By default you have the same activity – and therefore also the same wallpaper – on all virtual desktops. To enable different activity on each virtual desktop:

Different activity on each desktop

1. Open the application “System Settings”
2. Browse to “Desktop”, “Multiple Desktops”
3. Check the checkbox “Different activity on each desktop”
4. Click on “Apply” and close System Settings

Now you can have not only different wallpapers, but also different widgets on each virtual desktop.

5. Tweak your panel

The panel, often confused with the taskbar (which is a widget that shows your running applications), can be tweaked in many ways. The first two steps are always the same:

1. Unlock widgets if they’re locked
2. Click on the panel toolbox to the far right, or right click somewhere in the panel and choose “Panel Options”, “Panel Settings”. Note that the latter won’t work everywhere, for example not in the taskbar or system tray

Now you see the panel options. Here are some stuff you can play around with:

Change the height (screencast)

1. Click on the “Height” button and hold down the left mouse button while moving the mouse cursor up or down

Change the width (screencast)

Panel sliders to change the panel width

1. Depending on the panel alignment, you’ll see two or four sliders with arrows. Drag those with the mouse to change the panel width. The arrows pointing out from the panel define the maximum width and the ones pointing inwards the minimum width

Move the panel (screencast)

1. Hold down the left mouse button over “Screen Edge” and drag the panel to the desired screen edge
2. Adjustments can be made with the panel slider pointing at the panel. It’s also possible to change the panel alignment

Add widgets to panel (screencast)

1. Click on “Add widgets…”
2. Drag the desired widgets to the panel or double click to add them

Move widgets (screencast)

1. If you’ve opened the panel toolbox, you can move widgets in the panel with simple drag and drop operations

For more ways to configure your panel, see Plasma HowTo.

In Plasma Desktop, you aren’t limited to one panel – you can add as many panels as you want. However, it’s not possible to change the background and transparency for individual panels – these properties are determined by the workspace theme. If you want to change the appearance for all panels, either change workspace theme or create a custom one. For more information, see the next section 6. Customize the appearance.

6. Customize the appearance

You can change the appearance of many things in Plasma Workspace – everything from icon theme to the look of the window decoration.

Let’s start by launching System Settings and click on “Appearance”. To the left you see a list of modules to configure various parts of the workspace.

Appearance section in System Settings

The names are pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll let you play around with the settings yourself. Just a few notes:

• Most modules have a button to download new content, but there are a few exceptions: application styles, window decorations and fonts. The reason the first two don’t have this button is because native styles/window decorations has to be compiled – they’re best installed through your package manager
  • With that said, the Aurorae Theme Engine allows you to download and install SVG-based window decoration themes. Under “Windows”, select “Aurorae Decoration Theme Engine”, click on “Get New Themes…” and download to your heart’s content
• If you want to use the window grouping feature, only some window decorations support it at the moment – for example the default decoration “Oxygen” and “Tabstrip”
• The workspace theme (panels, widget backgrounds etc.) can be change from “Style”, “Workspace”
  • If you want greater control and change the theme for individual workspace components, click on “Overview” in the toolbar and browse to “Advanced” tab, “Desktop Theme Details”

7. Activate/deactivate screen edge actions

Don’t like how windows maximize or tile when you drag them to a screen edge? Or maybe the desktop effect when you hit the top-left corner with your mouse irritates you? No problem – in either case you just need to change an option in System Settings.

Configure active screen edges

1. Launch System Settings
2. Navigate to “Desktop”, “Screen Edges”
3. Click on the different squares in the monitor to set/unset screen edge actions for that location
4. Use the checkboxes under “Window Management” to enable/disable quick tiling of windows
5. The setting at the bottom enables you to switch virtual desktop by moving the mouse cursor to a screen edge
6. When you’re happy with the settings, hit “Apply”

8. Configure mouse actions on the desktop

Two groups of people will be especially happy for this new feature in 4.4:

• Laptop users who sometimes accidentally scroll through virtual desktop when moving the mouse cursor over the desktop
• Persons who want to set a custom menu to pop up when clicking on the desktop

Even if you don’t belong to either group, you might find this option useful.

Customize mouse actions on the desktop

1. Click on the toolbox (or right click on desktop) and choose “Desktop Activity Settings”
2. Choose “Mouse Plugins”

Each action consist of a row with 4-5 items (from left to right):

1. Trigger - Mouse button/wheel to trigger the action. To change the trigger, click on the button. It’ll remain pressed and say “Input here…”. Now, click with a mouse button or scroll in a direction over the button. Note that you can combine this with modifier keys (such as Ctrl)
2. Action list – Choose the desired action from the dropdown list
3. Configure button (not always shown) – Lets you configure the selected action
4. Information button – Shows an About dialog for the action
5. Remove button – Removes the mouse action

To remove an action, simply press the remove key on the same row. At the bottom there’s a button to add new mouse actions.

If you don’t set “Standard Menu” to any mouse trigger, you can still access the Mouse Actions dialog from the toolbox (by default in the top-right corner).

Similar to other settings in this window, the mouse actions are activity-specific. If you have more than one activity, you have to change the mouse actions for all of them – or you could have different mouse actions on different activities (see section 4. Set different wallpaper on each virtual desktop for more information about activities).

9. Configure other settings

You’ll find more KDE software options in – surprise, surprise – System Settings. Here are some favorite modules of mine:

• Look & Feel: Desktop, Desktop Effects – If your hardware supports compositing and you’ve installed the required drivers, it’s possible get various useful (and less useful) desktop effects. In this module you can Suspend/Resume Compositing (Alt-Shift-F12 is faster if you do it regularly), play around with effects and find other relevant options
• Look & Feel: Desktop, Launch Feedback – I don’t like the bouncy icon that appears when you launch applications, so that’s one of the first things I disable in this module
• Look & Feel: Window Behavior, Window Behavior – A lot of options to control how your windows should behave
• Computer Administration: Keyboard & Mouse, Global Keyboard Shortcuts – Configure global keybindings. Change the components with the “KDE component” dropdown list
• Computer Administration: Input Action – More advanced module to set different input actions, such as keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures and window actions
• Advanced User Settings (Advanced tab): Autostart – Manage autostart programs and scripts
• Advanced User Settings (Advanced tab): Session Manager – If you find that applications not listed in Autostart still start up with Plasma Desktop, it’s probably because you restore the previous session (“A session contains of a collection of applications as well as application-specific information that reflects the state of the applications at the time the session was saved” — Techbase). This module lets you change this behavior under “On Login”. Personally I like the option “Restore Manually saved session”. When this option is selected, the session can be saved from Kickoff (the default application launcher) or the classic menu

If you find it troublesome to navigate back and forth in System Settings, you might prefer the classic tree view style:

Tree View in System Settings

1. Launch System Settings
2. Click on “Configure” in the toolbar (if you’re inside a module, you can’t see this button)
3. Select “Classic Tree View” under “View Style” and click on “OK”

10. Check out online resources

To round off, here are some recommended KDE websites where you can find more interesting things:

• kde.org – The official KDE site where you’ll find announcements,  useful information about various parts of KDE and links to other relevant sites
• userbase.kde.org – Wiki for KDE software users. The screencasts in this post were taken from http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/HowTo/4.4
• forum.kde.org – KDE Community Forums. Here you can get help from other users (including contributors such as KDE developers), post ideas in Brainstorm, have discussions with KDE enthusiasts and much more
• kde-look.org – Get new themes, wallpapers, icons, widgets and other stuff. Or why not share your own creations?
• kde-apps.org – Same as kde-look.org but for KDE applications

I hope you found some of the tips useful; if you think I missed something, just drop a comment below. Feedback in general is also much appreciated!

Plasma HowTo - Move Widget

The screencasts are small and can be played in almost any graphical web browser, at the expense of reduced image quality. Given that the screencasts are meant as HowTos and not for showing off Plasma Desktop, I think the lacking quality is acceptable (for now) considering the advantages. In the future, with HTML5 and whatnot, the format will probably be Ogg Theora.

If you want to create your own animated GIF screencasts, I have written a small guide here (updated yesterday).

Tip for translators

The Plasma HowTo is quite easy to translate since it doesn’t consist of much text. Nevertheless, I much appreciate the work of those who’ve translated the page already – thank you. Here’s a tip on how to update the translation for 4.4:

If the translation is up-to-date with the 4.3 version of Plasma HowTo, this will be simple. Most of the content is the same, so you can copy the old translation to the new version. However, you need to update the links to the new screencasts. This is easily done in a text editor by replacing all “.gif” with “-44.gif” (without “”).

To see the other changes, go to “History” for the English version and compare the latest version with the second version (with the comment %s/\.gif/-44.gif/g). Fix those changes, and you’re done.

On Thursday 4th February 2010, the KDE Community Forums is holding a new event called Answer Day. The event will start 00:00 UTC (ends 23:59 UTC), and everyone can participate! We’ll focus on doing the following two things:

• Answer unanswered questions

  In the forums, KDE users can ask questions and help other users. Usually you’ll get an answer pretty fast, but some questions might have been overlooked or nobody knows the answer.

  The forum has a feature to list the 1000 latest unanswered topics. Not all are questions, but you’ll find a large portion of posts waiting for answers here. So during the Answer Day, we encourage everyone to actively seek unanswered questions to answer.

  

  What to do: Click on “View unanswered posts” in the panel, browse through the list and answer as many questions as you can/want to.

• Mark topics as solved

  Before posting a question, it’s recommended that you search the forums first to see if the topic has been covered before. To make it easier to find answers, the forums have a plugin to mark topics as solved (it’s also possible to only search for solved topics).

  A solved topic will show up with a next to the title in forum view (where you see a list of topics). Clicking on the green checkmark will take you directly to the answer. In topic view (inside a topic), is shown in the title of the post with the best answer.

  Choosing the best answer is something the topic starter has to do by clicking on under the post with the solution (can be undone with). Sometimes, however, this isn’t done – maybe the topic starter didn’t know about this feature, or he/she forgot to click on the button.

• What to do: If you find a solved topic while browsing around in the forums, report the post with the answer by clicking on underneath it. Choose “The reported post does not fit into any other category, please use the further information field.” in the dropdown menu and optionally enter a comment in the text box below. Someone in the forum team will take a look at the reported post and mark the topic accordingly.

  It has to be clear that the question has been answered, for example if the topic creator has replied “Thanks for the answer, that worked perfectly”, of if you know that the answer given is 100 % correct and the only possible answer.

We hope that Answer Day will be successful and eventually become a forum tradition. What do you think about this event, and forum activities in general? Suggestions and feedback are always appreciated.

First I want to remind you that this isn’t a comprehensive guide to build KDE SC from SVN – you can find those on Techbase. I followed much of the Getting Started/Build/KDE4 guide to get started.

Introduction

I’ve found it easiest to build KDE trunk using a tool called kdesvn-build. From its Techbase page:

kdesvn-build is a tool to allow users and developers to easily download and build the latest versions of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC) from the KDE source code repositories. It automates the following tasks and more:

• Performing the initial checkout.
• Handling updates for modules that are already checked out.
• Setting up the build system for the module.
• Performing the build and install.
• Specifying your CMake options or configure flags (so you don’t have to remember them every time).

It’s basically a script that does the hard work for you. And it’s pretty, too.

kdesvn-build in action

Since I want to keep my stable KDE SC version, I have a special user called kde-devel to run trunk. Everything will be install in this user’s home directory – no root access is needed, and if something breaks, the risk is minimal that it’ll affect my whole system.

You can do the same with your usual user and some scripts, see Increased Productivity in KDE4 with Scripts for more information.

1. Create and setup user

First this kde-devel user has to be created:

useradd -m -G [groups] -s /bin/bash kde-devel

[groups] depends on how much rights you want to give this user, for example the right to access sound or use sudo. For my kde-devel I used

useradd -m -G users,audio,optical,storage,video -s /bin/bash kde-devel

Now, add a password:

passwd kde-devel

To use applications from trunk instead of the stable version installed, you have to set the correct environmental variables. I added the code from this example .bashrc to /home/kde-devel/.bashrc and changed the line

export QTDIR=$HOME/qt-kde

to

export QTDIR=$HOME/qt4

since that’s where qt-copy will be installed.

2. Install required packages

I’m an Arch Linux user and used the command here to install the required packages. You can find similar information for your distribution on this page.

Regarding Qt,  .kdesvn-buildrc (more about this configuration file later) states:

# KDE /trunk requires a very recent Qt so qt-copy is the best route if you're
# building /trunk.  If you are building an older branch you may use your
# system installed Qt by setting qtdir to point to it (what qmake -v
# reports with the /lib removed).

So, I chose to let kdesvn-build compile qt-copy as well.

3. Get and setup kdesvn-build

At the time of writing, the latest version of kdesvn-build is 1.11. If you want to use the commands below, substitute <version> with your version number, e.g. 1.11.

I downloaded kdesvn-build as kde-devel and extracted the tar to ~/kdesvn/kdesvn-build (you may choose a different location if you want):

su - kde-devel
<write password for kde-devel>
mkdir -p ~/kdesvn/kdesvn-build
wget http://kdesvn-build.kde.org/releases/kdesvn-build-<version>.tar.bz2
tar xjvf kdesvn-build-<version>.tar.bz2 -C ~/kdesvn/kdesvn-build/

Before using kdesvn-build it needs to be configured. There’s a sample configuration file in the extracted directory – all we have to do is to copy it to ~/.kdesvn-buildrc and edit it to fit our needs.

cp ~/kdesvn/kdesvn-build/kdesvn-build-<version>/kdesvn-buildrc-sample ~/.kdesvn-buildrc
<your favorite editor> ~/.kdesvn-buildrc

The file is quite long, but don’t worry, most of the text consists of comments. I found the default configuration to be good for my purposes, the only thing I did was to comment out some modules that I didn’t want, for example

#module kdetoys
#end module

By default KDE trunk and Qt will be installed at ~/kde and ~/qt4, respectively.

4. Build

When everything has been set up we can let kdesvn-build perform its magic. As kde-devel:

~/kdesvn/kdesvn-build/kdesvn-build-<version>/kdesvn-build

Be patient, this will take a while. I encountered some problems during the build – see the next section for solutions. Remember that you can cancel the build with Ctrl-C.

kdesvn-build also offers some useful options, use --help to list them all.

~/kdesvn/kdesvn-build/kdesvn-build-<version>/kdesvn-build --help

5. Troubleshooting

As said, the process wasn’t flawless for me – actually, I ran into a problem very early. If you use the same version of kdesvn-build, it’s likely you’ll encounter this as well.

Can’t checkout qt-copy

Error updating qt-copy, removing from list of packages to build.
> Can't checkout qt-copy: No such file or directory at /home/kde-devel/.bin/kdesvn-build line 1981.

The problem is known, but I’m not sure if I can say the same about the cause. If you look in the logs you’ll see

less ~/kdesvn/log/latest/qt-copy/error.log

# kdesvn-build running: 'git' 'clone' '--' 'git://gitorious.org/+kde-developers/qt/kde-qt.git' '/home/kde-devel/kdesvn/qt-copy'
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/kde-devel/kdesvn/qt-copy/.git/
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: early EOF
fatal: index-pack failed

To solve it I cloned the git repository manually by copy-pasting the command from the log:

'git' 'clone' '--' 'git://gitorious.org/+kde-developers/qt/kde-qt.git' '/home/kde-devel/kdesvn/qt-copy'

Here kdesvn-build has no problem to update and build qt-copy after this fix.

Phonon-related problems

Apparently kdebase needs Phonon from kdesupport now, which also is the default option in the new kdesvn-buildrc-sample file. My problems with Phonon vanished after upgrading to kdesvn-build 1.11 and making a new .kdesvn-buildrc based on the new sample file.

file INSTALL cannot copy file

CMake Error at workspace/plasma/generic/scriptengines/python/cmake_install.cmake:76 (FILE):
file INSTALL cannot copy file
"/home/kde-devel/kdesvn/kdebase/workspace/plasma/generic/scriptengines/python/plasmascript.py"
to "/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/PyKDE4/plasmascript.py".
Call Stack (most recent call first):
workspace/plasma/generic/scriptengines/cmake_install.cmake:39 (INCLUDE)
workspace/plasma/generic/cmake_install.cmake:42 (INCLUDE)
workspace/plasma/cmake_install.cmake:38 (INCLUDE)
workspace/cmake_install.cmake:90 (INCLUDE)
cmake_install.cmake:39 (INCLUDE)

The first time I ran kdesvn-build, kdebase failed to compile due to this error. A quick search pointed me to this Techbase page, which says

try to set: -DPYTHON_SITE_PACKAGES_DIR=~/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages (check that this path corresponds to something in your system, you might have a different version of python) as a parameter for cmake (or cmakekde)

I had no idea how to do that, so I asked on IRC and was suggested to run cmake . -DPYTHON_SITE_PACKAGES_DIR=[...] in the kdebase build directory:

cd ~/kdesvn/build/kdebase
cmake . -DPYTHON_SITE_PACKAGES_DIR=~/.local/lib/python2.6/site-packages
make
make install

Other problems

I didn’t run into any other problems, but if you do, I recommend that you check out Troubleshooting on Techbase and see if you find a solution. Sometimes some modules simply won’t compile, with a higher risk on Mondays. Visit Dashboard to see the build status.

6. Run

Now finally for the fun part – trying out new features in trunk. You can find more information about this topic on this page.

Launch applications

Sometimes I want to launch the trunk version of individual applications from my stable KDE SC session, for example if I want to see if I can reproduce a bug. To handle things like the DISPLAY variable I use sux, which is available in many distribution repositories. (If you’re an Arch user like me, you can get it from AUR).

For example, to run Dolphin:

sux - kde-devel
<write kde-devel password>
dolphin

As simple as that. The - after sux is very important – it ensures that the environmental variables we set in /home/kde-devel/.bashrc are used.

Start a new session

You can also start a full KDE trunk session, but first you need to tell your login manager how to start it. For KDM this is done by adding a desktop file to `kde4-config --prefix`/share/apps/kdm/sessions/.

We want to add it to our stable version of KDM, so make sure to use another user than kde-devel for the following commands (you’ll need root privileges):

cd `kde4-config --prefix`/share/apps/kdm/sessions/ # use kde-config if you're on KDE SC 3.x
cp kde.desktop kdetrunk.desktop
<your favorite editor> kdetrunk.desktop

Change the lines (yours might differ slightly)

Exec=/usr/bin/startkde
TryExec=/usr/bin/startkde

to where you’ve installed trunk, in my case

Exec=/home/kde-devel/kde/bin/startkde
TryExec=/home/kde-devel/kde/bin/startkde

and Name=KDE to something else, for example Name=KDE trunk.

That’s it. Now you can start a new session (Leave -> Switch User from the default application launcher), choose “KDE trunk” and login with your kde-devel user. To switch between sessions, you can use Ctrl-Alt-Fx, usually Ctrl-Alt-F7 and Ctrl-Alt-F8.

It’s also possible to run a nested session, see Techbase for more information.

Tips

I hope this has helped some to build KDE SC from SVN, and I look forward to hearing your feedback. Before I go back and play around in trunk, I’ll share some tips with you.

Make it easier to run kdesvn-build

By adding kdesvn-build to your PATH, you can run the script by simply typing kdesvn-build. I do this by making a symlink in ~/.bin and adding that directory to PATH:

su - kde-devel
mkdir -p .bin
ln -s kdesvn/kdesvn-build/kdesvn-build-<version>/kdesvn-build .bin/

and add the line

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.bin

to ~/bash_profile. Next time you login you can use kdesvn-build.

Make it even easier to run kdesvn-build

If you like to update often, you can add kdesvn-build to your regular user’s application launcher.

1. Run kmenuedit
2. Navigate to where you want to put kdesvn-build
3. Click on New Item in the toolbar and name it kdesvn-build
4. Click on the icon to choose a nice icon for the menu item
5. Enter <path to kdesvn-build> in Command, for example /home/kde-devel/kdesvn/kdesvn-build/kdesvn-build-<version>/kdesvn-build
6. Click on Advanced and check Run in terminal and Run as different user
7. Write kde-devel as username and click on Save in the toolbar

If you use Konsole as your terminal you can add --noclose in Terminal options to make it stay open after the build is finished.

Check logs for errors

If a module failed to build, it’s often a good idea to check the logs to see what went wrong. By default kdesvn-build stores them at ~/kdesvn/log. I’ve found it useful to make a symlink to the latest logs in the home direcory of kde-devel:

ln -s ~/kdesvn/log/latest/ ~/log

Pause kdesvn-build

So kdesvn-build is halfway through compiling kdebase when you realize you want to watch a HD movie – what to do? No worries, you can easily pause the script (this won’t work if you use the tip from “Make it even easier to run kdesvn-build”).

To pause the script, press Ctrl-Z. You’ll see something like

[1]+  Stopped                 kdesvn-build

The number within the brackets is the job number, in this example 1. To resume it, run

fg 1

where fg stands for foreground and 1 is the job number.

Are you still with me?

I’ve taken a long break from The Road for some time, but fear not, I haven’t forgotten about my initial goal. But since it’s been so long, maybe you have? Let’s start this step with a short recap:

• Step 0 – At the beginning of the summer 2009, I started my journey to “KDE Devland” to become a KDE developer. By sharing my experiences I hoped that I could motivate others to do the same, and leave behind useful tips for those who wanted to walk the same path. The first step was mostly an introduction.
• Step 1 – Before going on a journey, you should be prepared. In this step I shared useful links for soon-to-be developers and wrote about my plan and which books I would use.
• Step 2 – I started with C++. This post went through pointers, something I found hard to understand in the beginning.
• Step 3 – Talking about my temporary workspace and which applications I use to write the code.
• Step 4 – At this point I finally had some screenshots to show. In this step I showed my achievements after the summer and wrote a little bit about Qt programming.

I feel fairly comfortable with Qt now, and try to learn some specific parts of the toolkit when I find the time and motivation. Right now I’m struggling with the Interview framework – I think I understand the theory behind it, but I need to get a feeling for how to actually use it.

In this step I’ll show you some of my own applications I’ve done to familiarize myself with Qt. If you still remember the last step you’ll recognize some of them, however they’re actually all made from scratch. First one out is the smallest application, but also the one giving me the most trouble.

TextSync

Description

TextSync is an extremely simple text editor. Rather than loading and saving text files, it “syncs” to a user-defined text file (from now on referred to as the original file; synced text is the text shown in the application):

• Original file modified – TextSync reloads the synced text
• Synced text modified – TextSync saves the new text to the original file

TextSync in all its glory

The idea is to make a plasmoid version of TextSync. It would behave pretty much like the Notes widget in the sense that you don’t have to think about saving and loading the text, but with additional benefits:

• You know where the text is saved and can easily make backups, for example
• TextSync can be used to display logs by pointing it to a log file and set it to read-only
• You can easily sync text across computers with services like Dropbox. This combination will let you use TextSync as a synced Notes widget, or you can turn it into a basic chat widget by sharing the synced file with a friend

I want to stress, however, that TextSync is not meant to be used as a collaborative tool.

By the way, TextSync is just a semi-temporary name, like the names of the other applications – I might rename it sometime in the future if I find a better name. Maybe “TextView”, similar to the FolderView widget?

What’s next

There are still some things I need to iron out before porting it to Plasma. For example I currently use QFileSystemWatcher to monitor the source file, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea performance-wise.

Also, TextSync only saves the text every n second (currently set to 5) when the synced text is modified to avoid excessive write to disc, so I have to decide how to handle the following two situations:

• Synced text modified (unsaved), original file modified – At the moment TextSync simply reloads the source file, discarding any changes you’ve made during the last 5 seconds
• Original file modified (not loaded), synced text modified – This is less likely due to the use of QFileSystemWatcher, but can still happen

I want to avoid using dialogs – the user shouldn’t be aware of the whole loading/saving mechanism. I’ve been thinking about using something like diff to merge the two texts, but I’m not sure about this approach yet; even if I was, I don’t know how to implement it.

The easiest solution would be to do what TextSync currently does – discard any changes made in one of the texts, preferable the synced text.

What I learned

TextSync proved to be good lecture on how to structure your classes. In the beginning I had everything in two classes, TextSync for the main application and SettingsDialog for the settings.

Soon I found that QFileSystemWatcher wasn’t flawless. When I modified the source file with vim, it would stop monitoring the file – the next time the original file was modified, TextSync wouldn’t reload it. To workaround this, I had to readd the path whenever QFileSystemWatcher noticed that the file had been changed. This was not as easy as it may sound, as it didn’t work to simply add it immediately.

This extra code didn’t really belong to the main application, so I moved it to its own class, FileWatcher. Now TextSync can use the new class in a very similar way to QFileSystemWatcher, and it doesn’t have to know that FileWatcher attempts to readd the path.

I’m in the progress of doing a similar thing with the loading/saving functions – move everything to a separate class. Since these functions are tightly connected to the QTextEdit widget (the text box), it makes sense to derive the new class from QTextEdit and add the extra loading/saving functionality to it.

GridView

Description

GridView is a reimplementation of the spreadsheet application I did in the previous step. As I wrote back then, I found the spreadsheet example far from easy – by making a similar application myself, I hoped I would understand some parts I didn’t before.

As the name implies, GridView is meant to view grid files (*.grd). In a previous summer job I worked a lot with these files, so I thought it would be nice to make an application to view and edit grid files.

GridView displaying a small 4x4 grid

The files themselves are very easy to read, the grid above looks like this:

DSAA
4 4
0 4
0 4
1.8 9.9
7.5 6.3 2.0 0.7
9.9 5.8 1.8 3.0
8.2 5.7 8.6 7.4
7.6 4.4 4.2 2.3

What’s next

For now, GridView is mostly an empty shell – most functionalities need to be implemented. The UI was made with Qt Designer in contrast to the spreadsheet application, which was mostly made in a text editor.

This is mostly a test application, something I won’t spend time to improve and polish. Once I’ve added the features I want, I’ll leave it at that. But I’m sure it’ll be useful as reference for future applications.

What I learned

Not much yet. Since the application isn’t really needed, I don’t feel much motivation to work on GridView. When I’m back home again I’ll look at the source code of the spreadsheet application again and add some basic features to GridView.

Quiz!

Description

So I only planned to do two applications for this step. But one day when I was generating random dates “manually” (with a random number generator) I realized, “Hey I can make an application to do the hard work instead”. And thus Quiz! (I couldn’t find a good name – the current one is inspired by Qalculate!) was born.

Quiz? No, Quiz!

Now I don’t have to check if my answers are correct in a calendar either, since Quiz! does it for me. Quite a handy little application.

Quiz! can be used for other questions as well – you just have to derive from AbstractQuestionGenerator and implement the generate() function. I’ve only made two question generators so far, the one shown above and one for a math quiz:

A different question generator

As you can see, I also played around with HTML in QTextBrowser.

What’s next

The application works fine for me now, and since I don’t plan to release it, I don’t think I’ll work on it much more. For now you have to change a line in the source code and recompile to switch question generator. It should be very easy to add a feature to change it at run time, however.

Right now the date quiz only asks for dates in 2009, but I have to change it to 2010 now. When I’ve become better I’ll make it generate a random year in the 21th century.

What I learned

Quiz! was very fun to code. It’s small, yet something I know I would find useful.

When working on this application, I came to appreciate object-oriented programming more and more. One good example is the use of QDate to handle dates. Writing a function to generate a random date isn’t hard, but it’s not a one-liner either – you have to take into account that the lengths of the months are different, and with random years you need to remember leap years as well.

With QDate I generate a random month (1-12) and day (1-31) and use the bool QDate::setDate(int year, int month, int day) function in a do while loop. If the date is invalid it returns false and a new date is generated, otherwise it returns true and exits the loop.

As a bonus, QDate offers a dayOfWeek() function to easily check the weekday for a specific date. Thanks to this class, the source code for my date quiz generator is very short and straightforward.

Next stop: The land of yellow cashews

For now I’ve only worked with C++ and Qt, but hopefully I can write a little bit about working with the KDE Platform in the next step. The plan is to first port TextSync to Plasma. There is another plasmoid I want to do – I’ll write more about it the next time if my first step into Plasma land is successful.