UDS-P

Now that I am back from the absolutely fabulous hot-tub I can do some blogging about Ubuntu Developer Summit which is currently going on in (today at least) sunny Orlando, Florida. What Kubuntu Team has been doing these past three days is laying foundations for the upcoming development cycle which will result in the Precise Pangolin release, the next Kubuntu LTS release. As you may know due to policy change LTS releases will be supported for up to 5 years. With the upcoming KDE 4.8 release I am pretty sure this LTS will be rock solid and you won't be disappointed.
Having missed my plane to Florida from NY I was not able to make it in time for broken CJK support discussion and I hope it will get fixed early this cycle. We have also planned lots of love for our and upstream's documentation and we made some extra plans for the Q development cycle and that should result with us having a very detailed and precise (pun not intended) docs for everyone out there. What I am particulary happy about is that we had a special session dedicated to Kubuntu Active which aims to bring you the latest mobile and touch friendly KDE technology such as Plasma Active, Contour, Calligra Mobile, Kontact Touch, Plasma Media Center and possibly some more. In the session dedicated to filesharing in Kubuntu Aurélien Gâteau and Rodrigo Belem made some very fancy mockups and the filesharing dialog will see many improvements.
At some point in time I found myself heading to two interesting sessions, namely: Ubuntu on Tablets and Ubuntu on Phones. In my opinion both sessions were very good, discussing how community sees this working and what needs to be done in order to achive it. As far as I am concerned there are no work items yet but I expect we will see some progress in pushing Ubuntu onto mobile devices very soon.
There are still few interesting sessions scheduled such as accessibility, a whole session on our new package manager - Muon and a very special packaging training session for our documentation master - David Wonderly.
Should you want to join us in our endeavour to make Kubuntu better you can join in the conversation at IRC and listen to audio streams, see http://uds.ubuntu.com/participate/remote/ for more information on remote participation.
I guess I'm back to enjoying my Dr. Pepper then.

Telepathy KDE PPA

Two days ago, as Martin Klapetek mentioned Telepathy KDE got it's first Technical Preview release. In case you were ever wondering what on Earth is that, there is an awesome post written by George Kiagiadakis, one of the developers behind Telepathy KDE, that explains what it is and what it might become in future.

Telepathy KDE looks like and awesome project and awesome projects deserve as much attention and support as one can give. Having that in mind (and few users asking for it in #kubuntu) I approached the guys behind the project and asked them what do they think about having one, as they liked the idea I have set up:

Telepathy KDE Releases PPA - This PPA will have packages for official releases of Telepathy KDE for natty and oneiric (for now)

Daily Builds PPA - This one, as the name implies, will have daily builds of Telepathy KDE modules and should be used only by adventurous people :)

So, if you are running Kubuntu and would like to give Telepathy KDE a try now, please add ppa:telepathy-kde/ppa to your sources list and install telepathy-kde package which will pull all necessary modules.

Kudos to all people behind Telepathy KDE, those great people are hanging around in #kde-telepathy @ irc.freenode.net. Also big thanks go to George for providing me the packaging so I had less work putting everything together.

Project Neon is back!

So, without further ado: Project Neon is back with much more stuff in stock. Those of you who have been around KDE for a while might remember the old one developed by everyone's favourite (or NOT) apachelogger which offered daily builds of Amarok. Well, that one kind of died but new Project Neon Team managed to revive it with new features. Thanks to ingenious Launchpad Source Builds feature we set up nightly builds of the KDE Software Compilation trunk and we are currently working on getting Amarok there too.

Project Neon is an easy way for new KDE contributors to get started without having to build entire KDE trunk by themselves and without having to maintain it. What's more, the dependencies are automatically handled and updated, so whenever trunk introduces some new feature which requires some new stuff you can be sure we will update our packaging soon afterwards. So, who can use it? Well, I think Project Neon is suitable for wide range of contributors such as developers, translators, usability designers, documenters, promoters, and bug triagers. You can see more details on KDE Techbase and on our Wiki as well.

Should you have any questions or want to help us or you simply want to buy us a beer then feel free to join us on #project-neon @ irc.freenode.net or drop us a line on our mailing list.

Kudos go to:
Philip Muškovac (yofel) for doing stuff I didn't want to and making sure our env works
Rohan Garg (shadeslayer), big thanks for great talk a conf.kde.in (slides here) and general help in packaging
Gaurav Chaturvedi (tazz), though he came relatively late he was a great help in testing and general feedback
Tomasz Dudzik (sheytan) for artwork fitting our crazy artistic sense :)
Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer) and Max Bowsher (maxb), big thanks to them for keeping up with our crazy demands, fast bug fixing in bzr magic and offering us workarounds until stuff got fixed, without their aid we wouldn't get so far!