Ubuntu Open Week - Kubuntu - Jonathan Riddell - Thu, Apr 26, 2007

see also Tuesday Session.

TZ UTC-4

(05:07:09 PM) Riddell: mm, hope he's ok
(05:07:14 PM) Riddell: well I'm happy to take question
(05:07:19 PM) Riddell: questions
(05:08:57 PM) ***ajmitch wonders if he has imbrandon's phone number somewhere
(05:11:04 PM) PriceChild: Ok this session is supposed to be taken by Brandon. However he seems to be afk and Riddell has offered to take his place. Do we have any questions? Could you introduce yourself Riddell?
(05:11:26 PM) Riddell: hi, I'm Jonathan Riddell
(05:11:29 PM) Riddell: I work on Kubuntu
(05:11:43 PM) Riddell: along with an excellent bunch of the coolest people you'll ever know
(05:11:49 PM) Riddell: who all have a 24 hour party on #kubuntu-devel
(05:12:24 PM) Riddell: with gusty open there's loads of merges to be done so if you're looking for an easy way to help out, that's very welcome
(05:13:08 PM) Riddell: any questions?

<Belutz> QUESTION: i haven't tried kubuntu 7.04 is desktop effects also available in kubuntu?

• it's not on the CD and there's no tick box way to turn it on. that's because compiz doesn't integrate with KDE yet, and also because the proper way to do it is to wait for KDE 4. which will have funky desktop effects built in. http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2787. however... beryl does have kde integration with aquamarine. so you can install beryl and aquamarine and beryl-manager and beryl-kubuntu and get it working just lovely. (I believe, I don't have any hardware that works with it myself). with beryl and compiz merging that will make it easyer for us to have a tickbox for turning on desktop effects. so hopefully with gusty it'll be simple to do

<xerosis> QUESTION: do you feel the need for any more paid developers on kubuntu? if so, what is the likelihood of more?

• there's always a need for more developers. that goes for any free software project (and I expect for proprietry software too, although I've never worked with any). one problem is that trolltech keeps hiring all the elite kde developers. the ones that don't work for suse anyway. canonical only hire the best developers, but I'm keeping my eye out for elite KDE people who need a job and will encourage them to send CVs to canonical

< Tm_T> QUESTION: Will next LTS have KDE4 or still hold on "good old" KDE3 ?

• dunno, if next LTS is gusty+1 then I don't think KDE 4 will be read for LTS treatment. if it's gutsy+2 then maybe, we'll have to see at the time

< nevermind_> QUESTION: how about teaching your own developers up from schools or colleges?

• I'm not sure I understand what you mean. feel free to rephrase the question here

< xerosis> QUESTION: I appreciate, there's not even been a UDS yet, but what are your personal goals for inclusion in gutsy?

• well KDE 4 is due to be released shortly after gutsy, so I hope to be in a position to have a KDE 4 Kubuntu CD when 4.0 is out. also.. improvements to adept to make it match synaptic functionality. make kiosktool work with sudo. porting some of the kubuntu apps to KDE 4 like system settings and guidance. getting an onscreen keyboard since that's something we lack. and our summer of code student is working on a port of gdebi. oh and a port of restricted-manager. other suggestions welcome did you mean getting university students into kubuntu development?

  <nevermind_> not only university students. more like... offering courses at the teaching centers at cities and such I'm just one programmer, I'm not a teacher

  <nevermind_> base courses like "usage" maybe some admining or networking, maybe some base programming but canonical is working on a training programme, so you can get trained up in various aspects of ubuntu usage

  <nevermind_> yah, but id guess there are some ppls around who may be actually interrested) might wanna bring it up at some lug meetings even I also think that university students are a much under-used resource for free software. computing science students have to do a dissertation on something which usually ends up written up and forgotten about. I made a programme called Umbrello UML Modeller which has a lot of real world users. recently a university in france had a course where their students worked on Umbrello and KPlato. we got good features and they got real world experience of code

  <nevermind_> ive just read some paper of a japanese student who did cpu virtualisation... theres alot of good papers and ideas out there one could continue to work with so if you're trying to learn about programming, there's no better way than to code free software. it's a guaranteed A for a uni dissertation. in my experience anyway

< Belutz> QUESTION: all the websites i visited always highlights the new features of ubuntu 7.04 and give screenshots of that feature. Is there a website that highlights new features in kubuntu with screenshots?

• well, kubuntu.org would. except it's died in the data centre crash that happened earlier today, but I'm sure it'll be up soon. https://wiki.kubuntu.org/FeistyFawn/Beta/Kubuntu is a good guide and the previous Herd ones it links to. thanks to nixternal, he does a great job on them

< Armagon> QUESTION: What is the best way to go from loving to use KDE, and knowing how to program, but knowing next-to-nothing about programming with KDE or Linux, to becoming a competent kubuntu developer?

• find a bug a fix it! there's lots of bugs in lots of programmes. if one annoys you, fix it and soon you'll find yourself fixing too many things

  <nevermind_> for a real starter, id suggest good books on c and c++ we also like python for kubuntu or ubuntu stuff, python is great

  <nevermind_> yea, but python to start with... try joinging the bugs team and you'll find plenty of small fixes you can help with and hang around on developers channels (#kubuntu-devel) for help

< auge> Question: When will the postgresql driver in kexi be enabled again?

• hmm, I thought it was

  <auge> no, it is not in feisty :( I'm not sure what library is needs, it may not be in main, but if it is there's no reason why not. I'll look out for it when I merge koffice and poke me if it doesn't get fixed in the next month in gutsy

< emet> QUESTION: Why don't Ubuntu developers make their software a bit easier to port (Eg: not dependent on GNOME libraries)?

• port to what? most of the programmes are well designed so it's often easy to port to KDE, but if it's a UI app, you have to use some UI library

< samgee> QUESTION: I have recently heard comments that Python is making the desktop sluggish. What are you're comments on that?

• hard to tell, performance is such a subjective thing. kubuntu has power manager written in python by default now and I've had a couple of complaints that it's too slow compared to the c++ competition but a couple out of our millions of users isn't many. ubiquity seems to struggle in 256MB now, but I don't know if that's because of python, I suspect not. no easy answer to that, although I suspect if we start using lots of different environments things start to get short of memory (openoffice, firefox, mono, python.. ouch). fortunatly kubuntu only has two of those

< Belutz> QUESTION: still on the website question, do you know any community/user website that highligths kubuntu features like this one http://philbull.livejournal.com/25596.html (this one is for ubuntu)

• that page doesn't load. I don't know of any although blogs usually cover stuff, but if you think a special blog/website is needed for that it would be great to have someone set one up

< emet> QUESTION: Wouldn't the easiest thing be to just include GTK+ with Kubuntu then? Or is that not an option?

• kindae defeats the purpose of it being a KDE operating system :). I don't see any advantage in that, KDE has everything we need for a basic operating system (which is all you can fit on 1 CD). if there's stuff missing, it usually gets added soon enough

< Belutz> QUESTION: how do you feel as a kubuntu developer, that the release code name is always refer to ubuntu not kubuntu, so any media that use that code name to highliths new features in a release could mislead the kubuntu users (like i just know now that kubuntu doesn't have desktop effects and restricted manager)

• we can feel a bit in the shadow of the gnome side, which isn't what anyone wants. it's one of the reasons why Kubuntu is a Gold sponsor of Akademy, to show our support to KDE. I'd really like to make the branding a bit more fair, I doubt the ubuntu CD will get renamed to gubuntu to give everyone equally silly names, but it would be nice to have an Ubuntu Family brand rather than have the umbrella brand and the gnome CD share the same branding

< apokryphos> QUESTION: Will there be any chance of kickoff in gutsy?

• kickoff is tricky to package because it's a fork of kdebase rather than a patch. but from talking to the authors they don't see any reason why we can't package it. they say the diff is small enough to be maintainable. the mono dependency for beagle is my other concern, but I'm told that's a plugin. so it's something we should look at again for gutsy. volunteers welcome

< Belutz> COMMENT: I think canonical should think about promoting two products, ubuntu, kubuntu and/or edubuntu to media not just a code name (version) in general

• of course I always think canonical should promote kubuntu more :). especially given some of the commercial successes we've had. I believe there's a deal to ship 100,000 kubuntu desktops in a latin american company happened and the french parliament and educational rollouts.

  <jenda> They're on Kubuntu? (french) the french parliament is yes, although the initial publicity never mentioned it

  <Slayer_X> my small office runs Kubuntu in 20 desktops Slayer_X: excellent!

< auge> QUESTION: Do you expect KDE4 will rock the house and bring a lot of new users to KDE, especially to kubuntu?

• short term, quite possibly not. long term, absolutely. we have 6 kubuntus in all the laptops (ibook and thinkpads ). I suspect 4.0 won't be a revolution compared to KDE 3, just a slicker version in places, but the platform stuff that's going in is lovely

  <auge> Riddell: why? because most of the changes so far as under the desktop. plasma may change that, but there's nothing to see yet porting of the apps in non-trivial

  <auge> Riddell: ok. And is the porting of the Apps difficult?= not difficult, but it takes time and care, but KDE 4.0 will lay the ground for the next 5 years very very well and that will rock the house for the next 5+ years

< Belutz> QUESTION: have kubuntu team ever suggest that default desktop for edubuntu should be KDE?

• lets not mention that to ogra :). it's so cool to have meduxa rolling out Kubuntu on tens of thousands of desktops in the canary islands schools. for gutsy I have a session registered for making sure all the edubuntu stuff works on kde too. which most of it probably does, I just havn't checked it ever and I'd like an edubuntu-kde meta package ready to install (but I don't see a need for a CD)

< emonkey-f> QUESTION: Is there some reference for all this big rollouts like in french parlament?

• no, canonical has a press release but it needs approved by the client and that hasn't happened yet. you can ask tonio (anthony mercatante), he recently got employed by the company doing it. so, Kubuntu rules, it's taking over the world one country at a time. we have a great community, who I love dearly. plenty of help needed. free CDs on shipit of course, hand them out to your friends

< Belutz> QUESTION: is it possible that ubuntu and kubuntu could have a different release date?

• it's possible but would cause problems and I don't see any advantage in it

(05:56:04 PM) Riddell: oh and come to Akademy
(05:56:07 PM) Riddell: it's going to rock
(05:56:10 PM) Riddell: registration now open
(05:56:27 PM) Riddell: or, come to debconf
(05:56:42 PM) Riddell: but I don't have any spare beds left
(05:57:26 PM) ***Riddell dances a jig
(05:57:32 PM) ***Belutz hugs Riddell for answering all of my questions
(05:58:17 PM) jenda: I'm afraid that's all the questions we'll have tonight  :)
(05:58:28 PM) xerosis: thanks Riddell :)
(05:58:32 PM) Riddell: groovy, thanks aa, guid nicht