George Wright's Blog: Category KDE

Akademy 2008

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:51:00 +0100

I’ve finally got round to booking my trip to Belgium this year to attend Akademy. I did seriously consider not going, but I’ve been all the other four so I figured it would be a tragedy not to go this year (and abuse sebas, obviously). I’ll only really be there for the main conference, so I’m leaving the UK on the 1835 Eurostar out of St Pancras, and returning on the 1759 Eurostar out of Bruxelles Midi.

Unfortunately I missed the deadline for hostel booking and so I’m having to shell out bags of money to stay in a hotel, so I’ll be in the NH Mechelen with the likes of Antonio Larossa and Pino Toscano.

Do let me know if you’re going to be on the same Eurostar or in the same hotel!

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo 2008

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:50:00 +0100

Looks like there might actually be one this year. I’ve now applied for KDE to have a booth, so is anyone up for joining me on the booth this year?

It’ll be the usual story.. sit on the booth for two days getting bored, laughing^Wsmiling at the neighbouring GNOMEs and demonstrating how unbelievably awesome our desktop environment is. Obviously in between lots of lunch breaks.

Maybe we should do what we did a couple of years ago and apply for a combined Freedesktop.org booth with the GNOME people to increase our booth area?

Onwards to the summer!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:05:00 +0100

My exams finally finished about 2 weeks ago, and since then I’ve been vegetating (mainly in bed, on my bike or shooting) so I’ve not really been doing much in the way of work.

My roadmap for the summer is fairly packed; on Monday I move to Sweden to work for Cendio on their ThinLinc stuff then after three weeks out there I’m moving back to London to work from there for the rest of the summer.

Interspersed with ThinLinc work I’ll be doing lots of work on NX hopefully and working on my nxcl 2.x branch with my Summer of Code student, who is starting to make progress with his stuff now that his academic commitments are finally over!

I think this summer will be the best summer for open source NX work there has been; we now have a fairly mature server in the form of FreeNX, and my client is taking shape in the form of nxcl/qtnx, and the work on nxcl 2.x will be a much needed restructuring of the client code.

It would be great if anyone interested in NX at all could take a look at my nxcl 2.x roadmap and give me any feedback as to what they’d also like to see or see changed. I’ll also be working with Seb James on his GTK+ based frontend as well (nxlaunch) and hopefully we’ll see a fairly decent KDE and GNOME client come out of all this work.

NX in the Summer of Code

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:33:00 +0100

Congratulations to Gross David for successfully being selected to take part in the Summer of Code this year to work on NX support in krdc. Hopefully this will lead to some interesting changes ahead!

Working on NX again

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:39:00 +0000

Today I start working for DeFuturo Ltd on creating a cross platform NX client (GPL, of course) in Qt for their Desktop on Demand service. I must say I’m really happy to be working again on C++/Qt as GTK was starting to get to my head a bit!

The ultimate goal of this project is to create a cross-platform client which can execute directly after downloading without the need to install it anywhere. However, at the moment I’m simply working on getting an open source client working for Linux, OS X and Windows.

Yesterday I committed a version of QtNX that I’ve been hacking for the past couple of days which has now had its backend code updated to use Seb James’ nxcl client library instead of my ageing nxclientlib. I have confirmed that this works with nxproxy 3.1.0 and nxssh 3.1.0 for connecting to a NX 1.5.0 server, and I assume it works with NX 2.x and 3.x servers as well, but I don’t have access to any for testing at the moment. I will be working over the coming weeks on getting this to work with OS X and cygwin on Windows, as well as hopefully doing some code cleanups at the same time.

All in all, I’m very pleased with this work and this should lead to some very nice and exciting changes in the NX client world!

Hogmanay party!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:27:00 +0000

Tickets arrived today for Edinburgh for the KDE GB AGM at Jonathan’s flat over the New Year! Woo!

I’m taking the new National Express service, as they took over the East Coast Main Line from GNER this month; in the little propaganda brochure they sent with the tickets it states that they have now extended the free wireless internet for standard class passengers as well - kudos to National Express for this!

Will be arriving at Edinburgh Haymarket around 1800 on the 31st; if anyone is arriving around the same time, do let me know.

WebKit & KDE

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 00:32:00 +0000

Now that I have a KDE 4 environment that I’m willing to use, I thought I’d take a look at Trolltech’s WebKitKDE KPart for embedding WebKitQt into Konqueror (or any other application which supports KParts).

Unfortunately, it seems that the project has been stagnant for a while and had bitrotted to the extent that it no longer compiled. I have now committed a fairly trivial fix that lets it compile and load, but it’s still in a fairly broken position. Hopefully I’ll be able to find some time to look into it more closely and potentially sort a few things out.

Now for the gratuitous screenshot:

WebKit in Konqueror with Firefox in the background

zsh, KDE4

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 21:17:00 +0000

As I’ve heard so many great things about zsh I decided to give it a spin and I must say that I’m quite impressed on the whole. I especially like the less intrusive way it displays possible tab completion values, as well as the vi keybindings that come with it (although I’ve had to bind a few keys which I keep hitting out of habit, such as end/home and delete). The configuration system it brings up on first load is really spiffy as well, and I like the fact that there’s an option to append command history to the log file instead of replacing it - extremely useful given that I tend to have ~10 terminals open at any one time.

I also finally got round to building a more up to date copy of KDE 4 and I’m really impressed with the progress they’re making; it really is astounding how quickly it’s all coming together. I’m currently in the process of installing an SVN build on my X40 so that I can run it full time on there - I think it’s finally hit the stage where I can run it full time.

nxcl: yet another client library!

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 14:44:00 +0100

In my previous blog I mentioned that Seb James had taken my nxclientlib code and improved it substantially, and that it would be committed soon.

Well, the code’s been cleaned up since I first saw it and it’s now available from the FreeNX SVN repository. Personally I’m very glad this has happened - it’s brought nxclientlib to the sort of level of functionality I always wanted it to have.

New features include NX server version 3 support, NX “shadowing” support (for VNC-like connections), D-Bus API to communicate with the library and many overall improvements across the library. For developers; the code is a lot cleaner now, there’s an autotools-based buildsystem, the Qt dependency has been removed and I’m told it now links to a 110kb library with no major dynamic dependencies - how’s that for compactness?

Hopefully soon we can have a first class NX client which can be packaged and distributed without much trouble!

New office, WebKit, Mission Control

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 01:20:00 +0100

On Wednesday Collabora moved out of the old office which we had outgrown and into our new amazing 4-room office opposite King’s College, Cambridge and above the Fudge Kitchen on King’s Parade. The old office is a shoebox in comparison! We now have a large front office, a large back office, a smaller back office (which I think we’re letting out to Ept Computing) and a large conference room. This ought to improve productivity, and as an added bonus it’s situated right next to my college supreme convenience!

To respond to some of the comments I’ve seen about Alp’s and my WebKit work; yes, I will be trying to get it to work on the Nokia 770 as I personally own a 770 and not an N800 and we may well be making a public release when it’s more stable. Currently I’m investigating the upstream source code and hoping to start working on adding the features we need to WebKit itself and submitting patches which implement them. Alp already has commit access to WebKit and will be working upstream anyway.

Last week, Tobias Hunger blogged about my involvement with standardising Mission Control, which is the abstraction layer which sits between Telepathy’s Connection Managers and the client. To anyone who’s interested in the work, the preliminary specification is online. So far, we still need to work out a sensible API for the Channel Handlers and iron out a few problems with the current specification, but we’re getting pretty close to coming to an agreement about it all. I personally would be very happy at the idea of having a standard API for this which can be shared between KDE (Decibel) and GNOME (Nokia Mission Control).