Ioannis Aslanidis

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.