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Making DesktopBSD ready for KDE 4

ph — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:11:07 +0000

KDE 4 has been around for some time now and, while many still feel it has not matured enough, it will undoubtedly be the future of the K Desktop Environment. Therefore, it is important to adapt DesktopBSD, which currently uses KDE 3 as its desktop environment, to this new major release. This is rather difficult because of some of the technological changes in KDE 4, in particular that KDE 4 now uses the Qt 4 development framework instead of its predecessor Qt 3 used in KDE 3 and the DesktopBSD Tools. Since Qt 4 is not backwards-comptabile, the DesktopBSD Tools would have to be ported to Qt 4 first in order to be able to utilize KDE 4 functionality, a process involving a lot of effort and very few gains.

As an alternative, the decision was made to stick with Qt 3 as framework for now and replace all of the KDE functionality in DesktopBSD code so it still works fine under KDE 4 without requiring users to have KDE 3 installed, in particular:

System tray icons: KSystemTray
Passive popups (”balloon notifications”): KPassivePopup
Icon loading: KIconLoader
Embedded terminal control: Konsole KPart, TerminalInterface
Inter-process communication: DCOP
Integration in the control center: KCModule

I have already found a replacement for KSystemTray in the Psi messenger’s code base, writing own code for passive popups and the icon loading shouldn’t be too hard and I’ll likely use DBUS as a replacement for DCOP. As for the control center integration, providing glue code for both KDE 3 and KDE 4 shouldn’t be too hard, I’m thinking about having to choose (or even auto-detecting) which to build when installing from the ports collection.

However, I haven’t been able to find a replacement for the Konsole KPart and I really do not want to port or even code a terminal emulator myself. Any suggestions for a Qt 3 terminal widget? Otherwise, I guess I’ll have a look at the Konsole code…

Forums software upgraded to phpBB 3.0.2

ph — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 23:52:52 +0000

After deleting lots of spam posts in the forums yesterday, I decided to spend a little time to prevent this from happening again in the future.

As a first step, I upgraded the board software from the now rather outdated phpBB 2 to phpBB 3.0.2, which was released only a few weeks ago. phpBB 3 has more anti-spam features than its predecessor and the registration captcha also seems to be much more sophisticated.

I was rather surprised how smooth the upgrade went – after creating a database and entering some initial settings, the conversion wizard was able to import all information from the old database and also handled additional data like avatar images nicely. As far as I can tell, external links to forum topics and posts also still work.

Still, phpBB 2 themes don’t work with phpBB 3, so I had to find a new theme that uses BSD-like red colors and shouldn’t be too different from the old theme. The Milky Way Red theme from Icy Phoenix seemed like a very good choice. In fact, I only changed the logo in the top-left corner

For now, I hope this stops those annoying spammers, otherwise I’ll have to look for some additional modifications to get the problem under control.

Oh, and of course, if you have found a problem with the new board software or configuration, please write me a mail or contact me via PM.

Crossover Games for FreeBSD

Oliver Herold — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 11:47:28 +0000

I am happy to announce that we are now making available ‘cutting edge’ builds of CrossOver. To start, we are providing experimental builds of CrossOver Games for Linux, Mac OS X, and now BSD systems.

codeweavers

So you can test the experimental build of Crossover Games on every FreeBSD 6 or 7 — including of course PC-BSD and DesktopBSD. But you have to patch FreeBSD 6 to use this application, if you’re using FreeBSD 7 then there is nothing to patch. But remember it’s an experimental build!

news from the KDE4 front

Oliver Herold — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:14:12 +0000

Right now I have some free time to update KDE4. Today i’ve committed the 5 Basic Ports (kdelibs4/base4/pimlib/runtime/workspace) with the implementation of bsd.kde4.mk. This allows further use of USE_KDE4 (actually, kdelibs, kdebase and pimlibs) for KDE4-related builds. Now I have to work on the implementation of all other related ports.

/usr/home/miwi

As you can see work on KDE4 is going on, so it should be more than ready with the stable release of KDE 4.1 in summer. Thanks to miwi and all of the other ports-commiters

DesktopBSD artwork

Oliver Herold — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:45:41 +0000

Vermaden created some nice and stylish artwork for DesktopBSD, purely KISS.

vermadens’ resources

FreeBSD: Google Summer of Code 2008

Oliver Herold — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:10:36 +0000

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to participate as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code 2008. This program funds students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break. We have had over 50 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program in 2005, 2006, and 2007.

FreeBSD Google SoC

If you are a student and feel competent to participate, well then you should consider an application for Google Summer of Code 2008. Please submit your idea before March 31st (details on FreeBSD Google SoC page).

Update:

The deadline for student applications to participate in the Google Summer of Code has been extended by one week. The new deadline is Monday, April 7, 2008. If you haven’t already, please visit our FreeBSD Summer of Code page and look at the example project ideas we’ve listed there, or propose your own. There are many new ideas listed since the first announcements went out.

FreeBSD news

Sound in FreeBSD 6.x

Oliver Herold — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:03:58 +0000

Since FreeBSD 6.2 there are some new sound drivers in FreeBSD, but one important driver is missing: emu10kx (Audigy2-4 non-pro). Don’t use the version from ports anymore, it’s really dated. But don’t worry you can get the missing driver in no time. Just follow the instructions there in the README file, it’s rather easy. But maybe this isn’t enough? If you’re the owner of a Creative Labs X-FI card or maybe of a Asus Xonar (Chipset: CMI8788) then there is just one possiblity to get some ‘noise’, you have to install 4fronts OSS drivers from ports. It’s rather easy too, after installation just enter soundon as root et voila. But beware 4fronts OSS driver isn’t 100% compatible, there are some minor quirks with some games/applications and there were some incompatibilities with nVidia binary drivers in the past. But usually they are fine.

DesktopBSD 1.7 snapshot

Oliver Herold — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:36:21 +0000

First remember it’s an early snapshot, so there will be certainly some problems! But apart from that it’s DesktopBSD based on FreeBSD 7.0R. I did a first test, there are some minor quirks with the mounting tool and the scheduler is SCHED_4BSD, so it has got a performance drop especially on uniprocessor systems. The first preview version will follow soon with SCHED_ULE activated and some other useful addons. So if you’re eager to test, you’re welcome But remember it’s an early test!

You can download the snapshots there (scroll to the bottom) at the usual servers (mirror too). We have prebuild packages for FreeBSD7 on the server.

DesktopBSD Tools 1.6 in ports

Oliver Herold — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:58:03 +0000

It’s done, the update to the DesktopBSD Tools is ready and now you can use it with portupgrade 2.4.x again. There are other improvements too, read it there.

more KDE4 status

Oliver Herold — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:15:06 +0000

KDE4 makes good progress. Version 4.0.2 is in the test repo now and works according the port-commiter Martin Willke quiet well and even better as the previous version. So it should be no problem to see KDE4 in the portstree with the advent of KDE4.1 in summer.

via Martin Wilke