Be Active - KDE SIG FAD at DevConf Brno

The last week and the whole weekend was really demanding but also one of the best of all while being Active in Fedora community. The Developer Conference is for developers and it was held by developers - the Red Hat, Fedora and community ones. A great opportunity to meet very nice (looking) people. You could meet one third of current Fedora Board, one (now former) FPL, the base OS guys who serves you a lot of Fedora updates, the core system developers and of course - nearly the whole Fedora KDE SIG (me, Rex Dieter, Lukas Tinkl, Kevin Kofler, Radek Novacek) with special guests (Christopher Wickert, Martin Klapetek, Dan Vratil and Lukas Karas). It was nearly impossible to talk to everyone, to attend every hackfest/sprint, to listen to all talks. And over six hundred people arrived the first day! It was Active.

Well, this is my quick summary - mostly from our Fedora KDE SIG lands and the Activity Day. We set quite high standard and level of achievements for the FAD (see the plans on FAD wiki) and I'm really glad we met them (at least partially).

• Christoph was working on LightDM packaging for Fedora, he started at FUDCon EMEA Milan and after the real fight he was able to get the beast log him in, even with Qt greeter and I'm really looking forward to try the KDE greeter with all the neat QML stuff there!



• Me and Radek Novacek were finishing the Plasma Active stuff - so that's all the Be Active stuff in this blog. We hit several build issues and we were trying to figure out how to integrate PA2 to Fedora. Finally we decided that we will aim on a Fedora Active spin, containing only touch enabled applications (the core PA stuff, Bangarang with touch support etc.) as on tablets the desktop stuff is not very usable and on the other hand - we don't have enough space on Plasma Workspaces spin to include the touch bits in. Also we will skip the Fedora 17 as a target for spin, we will try to prepare unofficial images during the development, waiting for Plasma Active 3 that should be consumable by end users (as it targets the Spark tablet release). Imagine Fedora on Raspberry Pi with touch screen and Active on top of it (yeah, I know, it's ARM so more work will be needed, for now we aim on Atom based tablets like WeTab/ExoPC and check the photo of Lenovo IdeaPad running it) :)





• Rex was working with Martin, the KDE Telepathy upstream guy, on the packaging with the aim to replace Kopete and make Telepathy bits default in Fedora 17. We will see but the progress is nice, Kopete is not anymore maintained... Rex also committed the package splits to comps.





• Martin finished the sprint with the Firemuk, check his blog post to see nice Nepomuk coolness.





• Kevin was working on his colorized system tray icons, yep, I should get them soon! and updated of git-cola in Fedora to latest upstream.



• Lukas was finishing his uDisks 2 support in Solid and the first batch of patches is already upstreamed! Great achievement! Hero Trophy earned.

I also gave a talk about Qt 5 - the Qt Project, now under open governance, what's new in the fifth version, with a quick QML and Qt Quick tutorial and the response from KDE community. And it wouldn't be me without some wow effect - so the whole talk was written in Qt Quick using QML Presentation System on top Qt 5 using OpenGL Scene Graph. With all examples embedded in slides. Even Kevin thinks it's abuse of QML I still like it - there's no easier way how to create interactive presentations, one minus is export. I'd try to capture it and publish it somewhere. Also check my branch - I'll commit the changes needed to get it running on current Qt 5. And as winter already came, and alpha is coming from the north and behind the wall - we were talking about how to provide the packages for Fedora. Stay tuned!

And spending the Sunday's afternoon with Red, Jared and Dennis was ... priceless...



So I'd like to thanks to all people, all developers who were working really hard to get this event ready, thank you!