Ioannis Aslanidis

You can now find on ~arch media-gfx/digikam-0.9.3-beta1, which now requires of media-libs/libkdcraw-0.1.2 (just bumped) and has a new dependency: media-libs/jasper.

This will probably be the last release before KDE4 and it includes the following features:

• The camera interface is now used to import new images into collections.
• There are new options to download pictures and delete them from the camera at the same time.
• Support of Drag & Drop to download files from camera window to album window.
• A progress bar has been added to indicate the available space in the Album Library Path.

Have fun!

It's been a while since I was last around. I finally got back some free time after completing my Master in Security Engineering and back from holidays as well: three awesome weeks in Greece.

You might be guessing correctly, my system is badly outdated. I'm at this precise moment completing the latest updates and after that I'll have to update my CVS local repository.

In the meanwhile, I took the chance to get back on the rails and I have fixed some broken posts in the Gentoo Forums on the Greek category, which got unreadable after the UTF-8 conversion.

Soon enough I'll be back to KDE maintenance and Bugday, unless anything unexpected happens again.

See you in the battlefields fellow developers and users!

After a few days in Mountain View, CA, I am back to Spain. The town is very nice... and very extensive. I never imagined that the fact that there were no blocks of appartments would imply that a city of so few inhabitants could occupy such a large extension.

The purpose of the trip will remain secret, at least for now, even though some people might already presume the reasons...

Apart from that, I can state for the few days I was there, that the city itself is safe and that their inhabitants are very kind and are always eager to give some directions to lost visitors...

It has been a great experience and I hope that I will be able to repeat it in a near future. We'll see about that.

I also got a nice driving experience from that... I am used to manual transmission cars and it was the first time that I had to drive an automatic one. I am not used to such an amount of horsepower either, however it was pretty quick for me to master the car itself. What was harder was to not get lost among so many roads and streets and highways. Maybe the signals on the road, as they are different from Europe, made my life a bit more tricky. Anyhow, it's just to get used to it; the last day I was already comfortable with it and surprisingly I didn't get lost even once!

Back to Spain now, back to work, back to Gentoo. Yes, I know that I missed April's bugday, but I assure you it was worth it!

See ya everyone on IRC and on the forums.

I had a few custom ebuilds that I don't want them to hit the main tree. Until today I had two packages inside Flameeyes's overlay, as I didn't expect to create any more. However, I've seen that it's just a matter of time until I create new ebuilds that should not hit the tree, either because they are unstable or because they are live ebuilds.

In any case, Markus Ullmann (jokey) was very kind to set up an overlay for private use. You can find my newly created overlay (it's still missing some configuration, but it's functional) if you follow the link below:

Deathwing00's Dev Overlay

Remember as well that I advise you to use app-portage/layman in order to fetch the contents of the overlay.

My fellow users,

lately, some of us have been discussing about the needs of a common Gentoo branding on some applications (i.e. KDE, Gnome, OpenOffice,...). Currently, every application has either no branding at all or its own branding theme.

In an initial step towards a unified Gentoo branding for applications, we need to solve some technical details, with the help of our fellow users, with your help.

The first issue, my fellow users, is to decide whether you want such branding on your applications and if you would like it to be installed by default or not. Please, be so kind to review the following forums thread, give your opinion and post your feedback: Forums Thread #529836.

Additionally, if you are a KDE user, be so kind to review bug #157519, test it, give your opinion, provide your own content, etc.

Thanks for your time. By the way, the previous bug counts towards Gentoo Bugday.

Today I got desperate at the moment I noticed that I could not submit media-gfx/digikam-0.9.0_rc2. The reason was that the dependency on media-gfx/exiv2-0.12 is now enforced on this version. Luckily, Stefan Briesenick (sbriesen) quickly responded to my petition in bug #157515 and bumped media-gfx/exiv2 to the required version in a most swift and efficient way. Now everyone can enjoy the latest media-gfx/digikam and media-plugins/digikamimageplugins.

Thank you Stefan!

Dear users,

today I have bumped media-gfx/digikam, media-plugins/digikamimageplugins, net-p2p/ktorrent and app-cdr/k3b. I expect that you will delight these version bumps. Remarkable changes go below:

media-gfx/digikam-0.9.0_rc1
For this release of digikam, upstream makes it clear that it is strongly advised to use media-gfx/exiv2-0.12 which is not released yet. In the portage tree, the latest version is 0.11. To make it clearer, they use an unreleased SVN version of exiv2. Fortunately, digikam seems to work fine with version 0.11 and you will not need to make use of any live ebuilds. Other dependencies have been updated, list follows:

• >=media-libs/libpng-1.2
• >=media-libs/libgphoto2-2.2
• >=media-libs/tiff-3.8.2
• >=media-libs/lcms-1.14

As advised, the minimum KDE required version is now 3.5.x. The main reason of this release is the large quantity of fixed bugs.

media-plugins/digikamimageplugins-0.9.0_rc1
With every digikam release, we get a digikamimageplugins release. The most remarkable of this release is again a large quantity of fixed bugs. This version of digikamimageplugins requires digikam of at least the same version.

net-p2p/ktorrent-2.1_beta1
As a downstream maintainer, I have removed the znow patch for this version (which remains for version 2.0.3), because of the fact that upstream decided to stay put and leave alone CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS. Some interesting new features of this release:

• Switched the GUI to an IDEAl style GUI (like KDevelop)
• WebGUI plugin
• RSS plugin
• Improvements in down and upload performance
• Grouping feature to put torrents into groups
• Improved search plugin, which now allows multiple searches

app-cdr/k3b-1.0_beta1
I have added a new optional runtime dependency to this release of k3b. The dependency is known as media-video/emovix and will allow to burn eMoviX images with k3b.

As for the upstream release itself, it includes many improvements, fixes, and even GUI changes over preview 1. Looks like the day for the final release is closer!

That's all for today, have a nice bump-day

Again, I was forced to regenerate a patch for a newly released version. This time it was kde-base/kdm-3.5.5. Many KDE users that use kde-base/kdm together with sys-boot/grub need to use the functionality of the `grub-set-default' command. The problems of the integration of the bootloader (grub) with the display manager (kdm) have been notable. Although the solution is provided in bug #63800 of KDE, it was not applied in SVN yet, and that brought me to a report in bug #153566. I regenerated the patch and committed a new revision bump to the tree. I expect upstream to handle this issue soon. If you are really interested in this patch to be applied upstream, I advise you to get into that KDE bug and ask for it. Maybe next time I won't be here to regenerate that patch

I have commited a recent pre-release version of net-im/kmess and I added LINGUAS support to it. The peculiarity of this ebuild is that it provides three different character sets for Chinese input (two additional: zh_CN.GB18030 and zh_CN.GB2312). For users that need Chinese support, simply adding zh_CN to their LINGUAS will make all three character sets get installed. Another peculiarity is that the Estonian locale is called 'ee' instead of 'et', however users that need Estonian support do not have to worry about it, as I added a check so that when 'et' is present in LINGUAS, the 'ee.po' file is used.

This new version of KMess not only contains many fixes for various bugs (some of them annoying to the user), but it also provides the new protocols MSNP12 and MSNC5 together with new interface improvements. Let's mention that among the many new additions, users can now receive winks, send and receive nudges and use direct connection support, which results in faster file transfers.

If you want to try this pre-release version of KMess, you will find it keyworded for ~x86 ~amd64 ~ppc and ~sparc.

Incredible, but true. A few hours after committing the ebuilds for the latest KDEBluetooth release, we received a 0-day bump request. Seriously, we appreciate a lot that you notify us if we forget to bump a package, but please, please, don't fill 0-day bump requests. Give us two or three days after the release date before filling a bump request. Most of the times we are aware of the releases and receiving bump requests delay us: it's counterproductive. The worse is when you do not even give us a single blessed day to bump the ebuild, and it's even worse if you request a 0-day bump without even updating your tree. And please, think of kittens!

RockMan (Marco Gulino) released today KDEBluetooth beta 2 (net-wireless/kdebluetooth). I have been using a live ebuild to keep track of all the great work that he has been doing. The most notable improvements are some compilation and stability fixes. A nice addition is the compatibility with the latest bluez and openobex versions. Let's remark that RockMan also develops KMobileTools (app-mobilephone/kmobiletools) which now is able to use KDEBluetooth as a library, which greatly improves its functionality.

Together with the version bump, I added localization support to the ebuild (-r1), so that it does not install unnecessary language locales. This way I follow with the tendency to remove unneded localization files.

If you want to try out KDEBluetooth, you might want to have a look at one of my small contributions to the Gentoo Documentation (with the help and collaboration of several people, see the authors list to the right for details): Gentoo Linux Bluetooth Guide

Some usefull references:

• KDEBluetooth new homepage
• KMobileTools homepage

After several reviews on the initial contributed ebuild, I ended up adding language and documentation support on my own. No unneeded translation files; if it's not in your LINGUAS, it won't get installed.

About the documentation, I managed to modify the ebuild so that it does not install any documentation at all if you have '-doc', even though the default behavior is to install it all. On the other hand, if you turn on the 'doc' USE flag, you will be forced to have the english documentation installed, however you will not be forced to install the german or french documentation unless you really need it, of course.

This application will not work correctly with versions of kde-base/kdelibs lower than 3.5.5 that were compiled with the 'debug' USE flag. Although there is a patch out there that fixes the problems with lower versions of kde-base/kdelibs, I did not add it and thus I set need kde-3.5.5. The main reason is that the ebuild just hit the tree (it's not stable) and the latest unstable version of kde is 3.5.5.

KBackup is a program that allows you to back up any directories or files and you can find it under app-backup/kbackup with the initial version 0.5.1.

Thinking of it as my first post to the blog, I have to thank Steve Dibb 'beandog' for setting it up for me so quickly. Thanks beandog!

Now the good news. As some people might have noticed, I was offline since Wednesday, October 11, 2006. My internet connection went down unexpectedly. After digging into the logs of the cable modem, I discovered that although it was able to acquire the upstream and downstream channels, it failed to contact my ISPs DHCP server. In fact, the cable modem was complaining that it received no DHCP offers.

I was forced to call my ISP and report the issue. They replied me that they changed some of their systems and that all Motorola cable modems would be unusable for a determined period of time. In fact, they told me that the issue would be solved at 3:30 pm on Thursday, however that did not happen and I was forced to call again. This time they replied that it would be solved at 11:30 pm of the same day. I wish it was true. The next day on the morning (today, Friday), I was still with no internet connection. Seeing the poor results of my ISP's efforts, I decided to call them once again and request them to change the cable modem immediately as I needed my internet connection at all costs before the evening. After some minutes standing by, they said that they could not do such thing until the issue with the Motorola cable modems was solved. Now that was awful! I asked them to replace my cable modem because the one I had didn't work and they replied me that they couldn't do that until it did work.

Anyhow, I went to the univeristy in order to take care of what I had to do. I had my SSH keys on me (passphrase protected, of course) so I logged in really quickly into woodpecker, set up my .devaway and notified a few people on freenode about the situation.

Lucky me, at about 8:00 pm the internet connection was restored and I had over 700 email messages pending for reading, spam excluded.