Da qualche giorno è disponibile per il download (è possibile scegliere tra le diverse tipologie la più adatta al proprio sistema ed alle proprie esigenze, io ho scaricato il Live CD KDE4) la nuova release di OpenSUSE, la 11.2. Potete leggere l’annuncio ufficiale di rilascio, le caratteristiche salienti di questa nuova release. E’ disponibile un set di screenshot che vi accompagnerà alla scoperta ed ai primi approcci con questa bella distribuzione linux.

OpenSUSE forse è stata la prima distribuzione GNU Linux veramente “amichevole”, in grado di configurare tutto a “colpi” di click e, soprattutto, la migliore quanto a riconoscimento hardware. Rimane tuttora tra le più adatte a chi si avvicina a GNU Linux per la prima volta.

L’ambiente desktop è KDE 4.3.1 ed il kernel è 2.6.31.5-0.1-default.

OpenSUSE non include driver proprietari e nemmeno i principali codecs audio e video che dovranno perciò essere installati in seguito.

Avviando da CD, vengono riconosciute e montate le eventuali partizioni windows presenti (queste ed altre informazioni sul sistema in uso sono accessibili semplicemente cliccando su My Computer) sulle quali è possibile scrivere.

Il filmato che vi propongo non è indicativo del reale tempo di avvio, perché testato su macchina virtuale e poi editato per tagliare i “tempi morti”, è però utile per dare una breve rassegna dei software inclusi con un occhio di riguardo a quelli di uso più comune:

• navigazione web: Konqueror e Firefox 3.5 (plugin flash non incluso ma scaricabile dopo l’installazione)
• posta elettronica: KMail
• chat: Kopete, Konversation
• torrent: KTorrent
• ufficio: OpenOffice.org
• grafica: Gwenview (viewer), Gimp (editor), digiKam, showFoto
• audio: Amarok
• video: Kaffeine
• navigazione file: Dolphin

Interessante la scelta di proporre Marble.

Da quanto vi ho appena descritto, è chiaro che un intervento, seppur minimo, dell’utente è richiesto perché il sistema si adatti alle nostre esigenze.

this fucking and fucking webcam didn’t work with kopete instead it worked with cheese.

now i have tried to install this bastard library

sudo apt-get install libmimic0

and :S

now kopete works fine. thank you god!

E’ da qualche giorno disponibile la nuova release di Mandriva, una tra le distribuzioni GNU/Linux più user-friendly. Potete visitare i siti dell’annuncio ufficiale di rilascio e di un breve tour che illustra le caratteristiche salienti di questa versione. Il sito per il download è questo, la versione di riferimento è la One.

Preferisco questa versione in quanto in un solo CD è contenuto tutto il necessario (eventuali altri software possono essere scaricati in un secondo momento dopo l’installazione) e si ha la possibilità di testare il sistema operativo. Punto di forza della One sono i driver inclusi nella distribuzione, infatti già in versione live viene riconosciuta la scheda grafica e data la possibilità all’utente di abilitare gli effetti desktop, quali ad esempio il cubo 3D, le finestre “gommose” ed altri effetti speciali. Le partizioni windows vengono riconosciute e montate in automatico, anche se ciò potrebbe essere potenzialmente pericoloso per un utente inesperto.

L’ambiente desktop è KDE 4.3.2 ed il kernel è 2.6.31.5-desktop586-1mnb.

Il filmato che vi propongo (la durata non è quella effettiva testata su macchina virtuale che ha richiesto tempi biblici!!!) mostra una panoramica delle applicazioni che potete trovare

delle quali cito quelle di uso più comune:

navigazione web: Firefox e Konqueror (già inclusi svariati plugins)
posta elettronica: KMail
voip: Ekiga
chat: Kopete, Quassel IRC
ufficio: OpenOffice.org, Okular (visore di svariati tipi di documenti)
grafica: Gwenview (viewer), Gimp (editor)
audio: Amarok
video: Dragon Player
navigazione file: Dolphin

Con Mandriva 2010.0 possiamo fin da subito ascoltare la nostra musica e vedere i nostri filmati in quanto i codecs sono già inclusi (oltre ai su citati driver per la scheda grafica), insomma  si è “produttivi” da subito (caratteristica che l’ha resa sempre tra le più apprezzate soprattutto dai newbie),  anche se a costo di una certa pesantezza che si fa sentire non solo nel test su macchina virtuale, il che rende questa distribuzione certamente non tra le più veloci.

Ubuntu nelle sue diverse varianti (Kubuntu e Xubuntu le più note) è senza dubbio la distribuzione GNU/Linux che ha fatto più proseliti, soprattutto tra i newbie, per la sua estrema semplicità d’uso e per il suo “parco” software vastissimo.

Per Kubuntu potete visitare il sito dove è postato l’annuncio ufficiale di rilascio ed un (breve tour) che illustra le caratteristiche salienti di questa versione. Il sito per il download è questo.

In modo simile anche per Xubuntu potete leggere l’annuncio, visualizzare un breve tour grafico e quindi passare al download.

Su Kubuntu in versione live vengono riconosciute e montate le eventuali partizioni windows presenti, così fin da subito si ha la possibilità di aprire i propri file per testare le applicazioni presenti in questa distribuzione, non invece su Xubuntu.

La scelta di Kubuntu è adatta all’utente che sa quello che fa, quella di Xubuntu è invece adatta all’utente che preferisce non correre il rischio di rovinare il file system preesistente sul pc.

Dopo una rapida “esplorazione” ci si renderà conto che non è possibile visualizzare correttamente siti con contenuto flash, come ad esempio YouTube, e nemmeno potersi godere i propri file musicali ed i propri filmati.

Karmic Koala infatti non include i principali codecs audio e video (nemmeno flash) e nemmeno driver proprietari, quali ad esempio quelli della scheda video.

Ciò potrebbe far scoraggiare l’utente che sia avvicina per la prima volta al mondo GNU/Linux, ma occorre sottolineare che bastano pochi interventi perché Karmic Koala diventi perfettamente “usabile”.

I filmati che vi propongo servono soltanto a mostrare l’impatto visivo di queste due distribuzioni e fare una carrellata dei principali software che mettono fin da subito a disposizione.

Le durate dei filmati non corrispondono a quelle reali, infatti prima di postarli ho preferito cancellare i “tempi morti” di durata eccessiva, anche perché per la registrazione mi sono servito di macchine virtuali che non emulano a dovere le caratteristiche hardware dei pc in circolazione.

Kubuntu

L’ambiente desktop è KDE 4.3.2 ed il kernel 2.6.31.14.generic.

Ecco una breve rassegna dei software inclusi (cito solo quelli di uso più comune):

• navigazione web: Konqueror
• posta elettronica: KMail
• chat: Kopete, Quassel IRC
• torrent: KTorrent
• ufficio: OpenOffice.org, Okular (visore di svariati tipi di documenti)
• grafica: Gwenview (viewer)
• audio: Amarok
• video: Dragon Player
• CD burning: K3b
• navigazione file: Dolphin

Xubuntu

L’ambiente desktop è Xfce 4.6.1 ed il kernel è 2.6.31-14-generic

Ecco una breve rassegna dei software inclusi (cito solo quelli di uso più comune):

• navigazione web: Firefox
• posta elettronica: Thunderbird
• chat: Pidgin, XChat IRC
• torrent: Transmission
• ufficio: Abiword, Gnumeric
• grafica: Ristretto (viewer), Gimp (editor)
• audio: Exaile
• video: Totem
• CD burning: Brasero
• navigazione file: Thunar

Gli altri programmi possono essere scaricati ad installazione ultimata.

Kubuntu e Xubuntu sono senza dubbio delle ottime distribuzioni (adatte soprattutto a chi proviene da windows) e le consiglio caldamente. Da quanto vi ho appena descritto, è chiaro che un intervento, seppur minimo, dell’utente è richiesto perché il sistema si adatti alle nostre esigenze.

Hi guys,
I m a great fan of pidgin once.It works great provides many features.Just replaced my google talk.But in recent days pidgin didn’t connect to net.At most it works for a month after a fresh
installation.So i m frustrated and searched for a good alternative.I hate kopete as it is an KDE app and doesn’t look cool in gnome. Then i came to know about yuuguu and just gave a try.Its a desktop sharing application with a built-in chat manager.I loved it.It is developed using Java.It lacks in user interface.Works very slowly sometimes.And it is not made for chatting.
At last i came to know that empathy is cool enough for chat ( Source : Ravi jaya’s post in ilugc mailing list ).I installed it using my yum.No tweaks,just the yum install empathy command did the work for me.Then i configured my google account.Bingo!!! it is so cool.Let me update how it works after a month .( Hope it wont go mad like pidgin ).
EMPATHY SITE : http://live.gnome.org/Empathy

cheers,
Balachandar.K.M. – LOVE WITH LINUX -

Tenía muchas ganas de hacer esta entrada pero estaba más enfocado en mi otro blog que en este .

La razón por la que hago esta entrada es porque, lamentablemente, en mi país (Chile) se ocupa demasiado el protocolo de mensajería instantánea MSN (que Richard me perdone por nombrar esa palabra en este blog) . Siendo consiente de esto, quiero contribuir, con mi muy pequeño granito de arena, para que los usuarios de la internet seamos cada vez más libres en ese sentido. Es por ello que en esta entrada les hablaré acerca de Jabber.

Si ya tienes una cuenta jabber, te recomiendo leer el final de esta entrada, por el contrario, si no tienes idea de lo que es esto o si no tienes una cuenta, te invito a seguir leyendo el próximo párrafo

Jabber es un protocolo libre para mensajería instantánea, basado en el estándar XML y gestionado por XMPP Standards Foundation.^[1]

La red de Jabber está formada por miles de grandes y pequeños servidores en todo el mundo, interconectados por Internet. Habitualmente la red es utilizada por alrededor de un millón de personas.^[1]

Es el proyecto más aceptado como la alternativa libre al sistema MSN Messenger del diablo de Microsoft , al AOL o al Yahoo Messenger. Aunque es un protocolo bastante minoritario, está creciendo más cada día, gracias a los usuarios y a Google, que ha creado un cliente de mensajería instantánea que utiliza Jabber, Google Talk.^[1]

Características:^[1]

• Protocolo abierto: Con todas las ventajas del software libre, se puede programar un servidor o un cliente o ver el código, entre otras cosas.
• Descentralizado: Se puede crear un servidor para Jabber, y se puede interoperar o unirse al resto de la red Jabber.
• Extensible: Se puede ampliar con mejoras sobre el protocolo original. Las extensiones comunes son manejadas por la XMPP Standards Foundation.
• Seguro: Cualquier servidor Jabber está aislado del exterior. El servidor de referencia permite SSL para comunicaciones cliente-servidor y algunos clientes aceptan GPG como cifrado de las comunicaciones usando cifrado asimétrico. En desarrollo uso de claves de sesión y SASL.
• Multiredes: Un transporte o pasarela permite comunicarse con otros protocolos usados por clientes como MSN Messenger, ICQ, AOL o Yahoo!.
• Salas de conversación: Conocido como Multi-User Chat. Es una de las extensiones que han sido añadidas a la mensajería Jabber, la cual le permite la creación de grupos de debate como en las redes IRC, con la posibilidad de poseer usuarios con distintos privilegios (moderadores, participantes e invitados), iniciar conversaciones privadas y transferir archivos.

Existen miles de servidores Jabber en Internet y se estima que al menos un millón de personas usa el servicio regularmente (datos de la XMPP Standards Foundation en 2004). Sin embargo, no es tan conocido como otros sistemas propietarios más extendidos.^[1]

Pero ya dejemos la cháchara de lado y vamos a la acción.

Para crear una cuenta jabber lo primero que debemos hacer es escoger un servidor, puedes ver una lista con servidores aquí o aquí. Tu cuenta llevará el nombre del servidor, en que la registraste, después de la @, por ejemplo, si te registraste en jabberes.org, tu cuenta será del tipo: cuenta@jabberes.org. Además necesitas un cliente, el cual puede ser una web o un programa. Si prefieres una web tienes las opciones: Afflux, JWChat, Jabbear, SamePlace (extensión para Firefox, Flock y/o Thunderbird) y SparkWeb. Si te inclinas por un programa, en la siguiente lista tienes varias opciones para GNU/Linux:

• Ayttm: Multiprotocolo. Soporta ICQ, AOL, IRC, XMPP/Jabber, SMTP, MSN y Yahoo! Messenger
• BitlBee: Multiprotocolo. Soporta XMPP/Jabber (incluyendo Google Talk), MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM e ICQ.
• Empathy: Multiprotocolo. Soporta Jabber, GTalk, MSN, IRC y Salut. Diseñado para GNOME
• Gajim: Sólo soporta Jabber. Diseñado para GNOME.
• Galaxium: Multiprotocolo. Soporta Jabber, MSN e IRC. Diseñado para GNOME.
• Gossip: Sólo soporta Jabber. Diseñado para GNOME.
• Jabber.el: Cliente Jabber para Emacs.
• Kopete: Multiprotocolo. Soporta AIM, ICQ, MSN Yahoo, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, Novell GroupWise Messenger, y más. Diseñado para KDE
• Sim-IM: Soporta Jabber, Google Talk, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger y MSN. Basado en las librerías Qt y puede ser compilado con la opción soporte para KDE.
• Synapse: Al parecer soporta Jabber, Gtalk, Twitter, Facebook y parecidos. Que alguien aclare esta duda por favor.

En esta lista de programas nombré clientes Jabber exclusivamente para GNU/Linux, si deseas ocupar uno multi plataforma, un cliente en modo texto o usas otro sistema operativo visita la página oficial de XMPP/Jabber. En la sección Clients encontrarás lo que buscas.

Ahora que has escogido el servidor y programa o web para registrar tu jabber, procederé a mostrar lo que sigue que es registrar la cuenta. En este ejemplo usaremos el servidor jabberes.org y el programa kopete.

Lanza kopete y ve a Preferencias>Configurar…

Haz clic en Añadir cuenta…, en el menú que apareció selecciona Jabber y haz clic en Siguiente:

Ahora, en la pestaña Configuración básica, haz clic en Registrar nueva cuenta:

En Servidor de Jabber ingresa el que has escogido (en este ejemplo jabberes.org) o presiona Elegir… y selecciona uno. En ID de Jabber deseada escribe la identificaión de jabber que quieres (nick o nombre, por ejemplo) seguido por  una @ y el nombre del servidor, por ejemplo: zuargo@jabberes.org. Ingresa tu contraseña, ocupa el puerto por defecto o el que aparece ahí y, si lo deseas, tilda la opción Utilizar cifrado de protocolo (SSL) para que tu conexión al servidor sea más segura. Presiona Registrar:

En este momento estarás de vuelta en la ventana anterior. Puedes cambiar las opciones que están en otras pestañas o simplemente presionar Siguiente:

Ahora aparecerá una ventana avisándote que la cuenta ha sido configurada con éxito, presiona Finalizar:

Volverás a la ventana de configuración de kopete, presiona Aceptar.

Bien, para comenzar a utilizar nuestra cuenta, primero debes seleccionarla (las cuentas configuradas  en kopete se muestran en la parte inferior de la ventana principal del mismo). Luego debes hacer clic con el botón derecho del ratón sobre esa y seleccionar, entonces, uno de los estados (por defecto son Disponible, Ausente, Ocupado, Invisible), en este ejemplo, seleccioné Disponible:

Una de las gracias que tiene Jabber es que puedes agregar contactos (al igual que MSN, por ejemplo) o puedes conocer personas en salas de conversación (al igual que IRC).

Para agregar un contacto, a tu cuenta Jabber usando kopete, debes ir a Archivo>Añadir contacto y cliquear sobre la cuenta. Aparecerá una ventana donde puedes añadir la ID Jabber de una persona:

Para unirte a una sala de conversación debes saber primero en qué “lugar” (no se me ocurre otra forma de decirlo ) del servidor se encuentran dichas salas. Haz clic derecho sobre tu cuenta jabber y luego seleccionar la opción Servicios… Aparecerá, entonces, una ventana donde podrás ingresar un servidor jabber (por ejemplo jabberes.org, jabber-hispano,org o jabber.org) en el campo Servidor. Ingresa uno y luego presiona el botón Consultar al servidor. Aparecerán entonces una serie de “filas” con los transportes (no hablaré acerca de los transportes de jabber en esta entrada, pero deberías averiguar acerca de estos) del servidor y además una “especie” de “subservidor” contenido dentro del mismo servidor que lleva por lo general un nombre relacionado con la palabra conference, por ejemplo: conference.jabber.org, conf.jabberes.org, etc. Es en este “subservidor” donde se encuentran las salas de charla o conversación:

Ahora que sabemos en qué lugar del servidor se encuentran las salas de charla, cerramos la ventana anterior, y nuevamente hacemos clic derecho sobre nuestra cuenta de jabber, pero esta vez, seleccionamos la opción Unirse a grupo de charla… En el campo servidor, de la ventana que apareció, escribe la ubicación de las salas dentro de un servidor determinado, por ejemplo, conf.jabberes.org y presiona Consultar:

Haz doble clic sobre una sala y la misma se agregará como un contacto a tu lista de contactos de kopete, desde donde la puedes clicar para comenzar a charlar con las personas que están en dicha sala.

Pueden dejar sus dudas en un comentario y con gusto las responderé, pero les aclaro desde un comienzo, que no soy algún tipo de experto en jabber y que no he usado mucho este protocolo (leer siguiente párrafo ).

Ahora que ya te haz hecho una cuenta jabber, o si ya tenías una, te invito a dejarla en un comentario de esta entrada para yo agregarte como contacto y comenzar a tener amigos en este protocolo (yo tengo cuenta pero no conozco a alguien que tenga otra ). También recuerda añadir a las personas de los comentarios anteriores y así formar una gran red (sueeeña xD) de amigos que usan jabber ^__^

Saludos

Enlaces de interés:

http://www.jabber.org/

http://www.jabberes.org/

http://xmpp.org/

^[1]Wikipedia: Jabber

Empathy 2.28: Easy Desktop Sharing – Le Weblog à Cassidy
ということで、Empathy＋Vinoで、お手軽にデスクトップ共有ができるようになるかもーということらしいです。

どうやらGnome3.0に向けた機能実装ということのようですが、今後GnomeではPidginではなくEmpathyを標準IMクライアントとするようですから、Pidginには実装されない可能性もあるわけで・・・。私はPidginの方が気に入っているので、できたらPidginにも実装してくれるとうれしい限り。というかlibpurpleでお願いします。

この記事ではKopeteでも似たようなことができるようになるだろうとか書いてるんだけど実際どうなんだろ？ 最近はKopeteは全く触ってなかったし、ちょっくら起動してみるかな・・・？

It’s quite a few weeks since I promised I’d write a guide to trying out the Kopete Telepathy plugin, but better late than never…

The current state of the code is as follows:

• 1-1 text chat using telepathy-gabble (jabber/xmpp/google talk) is the only form of communication implemented.
• This is still very much playground-quality software, so expect it to be full of bugs and crashes. However, it is now mature enough that I’d really appreciate reports for any bugs you find (Please report them to bugs.kde.org product ‘Telepathy’ and component ‘kopete-protocol-telepathy’). Only yesterday did a bug where messages were sent to the wrong people come to light, so be careful what you say until it’s more stable!

Prerequisites (compile in this order, or use distro packages where available):

• Telepathy Mission Control 5 (at least version 5.2.2, preferably version 5.3.1+) source code here
• Telepathy Gabble (at least version 0.7.27, preferably version 0.8.3+, avoid 0.9.x releases for now) source code here
• Telepathy Qt4 (version 0.1.9 required) source code here
• Telepathy accounts kcm (from svn, svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/network/telepathy-accounts-kcm )
• Telepathy accounts kcm plugins (from svn, svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/network/telepathy-accounts-kcm-plugins)
• Trunk version of Kopete (will not build against KDE 4.3)

Getting the Kopete plugin:

• Source code at svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/playground/network/kopete
• Compile using the usual KDE methods.
• If the share-my-desktop plugin fails to build, ignore this, or comment it out in the CMakeLists.txt file.
• run “kbuildsycoca4″ in a konsole so that Kopete picks up the new plugin.

Trying out the Kopete plugin:

• Launch Telepathy Mission Control (still needs to be done by hand unfortunately): Run in a konsole: “/usr/local/libexec/mission-control-5″ (or wherever you installed mission-control-5 to)
• Launch Kopete.
• Create a new account in Kopete,  select the “Telepathy” protocol, and follow the instructions.
• Try it out
• Report any bugs you find to help us make it better, or ask for help in #kde-telepathy on freenode if you have any problems.

Como dizem uma imagem vale mais do que 1000 palavras

A kezdőkben felmerülhet a kérdés, hogy milyen IM-et használjanak ahhoz, hogy MSN-ezhessenek a haverokkal? Netántán tegyék fel a WLM-et? Neeeem. Több oka is van, egyik, hogy nem menne, másik, hogy minek, amikor van rá jobb is, mint a WLM?!
Nekem az egyik kedvencem erre az aMSN. Ez egy nagyon jól testre szabható, nagyszerű kliens. Skinek és különböző pluginok tömkelegét lehet leszedni hozzá. File-küldés, webcam támogatás, miegymás kellemes, hasznos dolog. Sajnos ahogy a WLM sem, ez sem embeddeli a belinkelt videókat. Talán egyszer majd lesz olyan is benne.
Aztán használható a GAIM/Pidgin is. A GTK+ kezelőfelületet használja, így skinnelni csak akkor lehet, ha az ember megváltoztatja az asztalának a kinézetét. Videóchat-et is lehet vele intézni. Plusz pont, hogy egyéni hangulatjel témákat tudunk belegyömöszölni egy klikkel, és multiprotokoll-kliens. Támogatja az XMPP-t, Yahoo-t, MSN-t, GTalk-ot, Jabber-t és még sok másikfélét.
Régi nagy kedvencem, még a KDE3-ashoz tartozó Kopete. Nagyszerűen testre szabható, beépített skin- és smile-pack-letöltő van benne. A mostani nekem nem jön be, de sokan szeretik, gondolom, abban is megvannak a szépségek, és a jó dolgok.  Ugyancsak multiprotokoll IM-kliens, kezeli ugyanazokat, amiket leírtam a Pidginnél, és amiket nem.
Hát, ez a 3 kliens lenne talán, amik a legnagyobbak, és a leghíresebbek. Természetesen nagyon sokféle van még, az Ubuntu repójában (Ubuntu csomagkezelőjében) megtaláljátok azokat is, amiket még nem írtam le.

Azoknak, akik nem akarnak a csomagkezelővel szenvedni, vagy csak szeretnék tudni, hogyan kell terminálból letölteni, leírom:
Ha az aMSN kell, akkor terminál megnyit, majd beír: sudo apt-get install amsn
Kopeténél: terminál megnyit, majd beír: sudo apt-get install kopete (ebben az esetben KDE-függőségeket is letölt gnome-felhasználófelület esetén, emiatt hosszadalmasabb, és nagyobb a letöltés mérete.)
Pidgin alapból bent van az ‘Alkalmazások -> Internet menüpont alatt.

GSoC is about to end. The good news is that I was able to finish my project, and the bad news is that I would like to have more time to implement more features than I proposed.
All the patches are committed to kopete svn (and libmsn) and trunk (crazy) users can already test them.

As I did not have time to blog (aka ‘I’m lazy to do so’), I am going to report all the status at once in only one post.

Ink support:
The goal was to add a small box where the user could draw something. The ink support will only be compiled if you have libgif. Some people cannot receive inks because they are using old MSN protocols, so the ink button will only be shown if the user is able to receive it correctly.

Voice Clips Support:
It was added to kopete a new action, so it is possible to play and save received and sent voice clips directly from the chat window.

Proxy Support:
The account properties window received new entries, and now it is possible to use a HTTP or a Socks5 proxy.

Emoticons Support:
Three new options were added to better control the emoticons behavior.
1 – Do not send custom emoticons to other contacts.
2 – Do not show custom emoticons from other contacts.
3 – Block emoticons from a certain contact. (this one is in the last screenshot)

Contact List Improvements:
It is now possible to see contacts that deleted us from their lists. A red ‘x’ will be shown on the contact status icon.
Another improvement is that it is possible to refresh the avatar from any contact manually.

So that’s it. I would like to thank Google for the opportunity and specially my mentor Gustavo Boiko, who helped me a lot on my project. It was really amazing to be part of this program and I hope that my work can be useful to others.

Cheers.

Last week was, yet again, a busy week for Telepathy/KDE. The Kopete Telepathy plugin continues to mature, and is now only about 3 showstopper bugs short of being ready for testing. So, look forward to a blog post later this week detailing how to take it for a spin.

I’m really busy at the moment, and don’t really want to drag myself away from coding for too long, so here’s a quick list of last weeks progress:

• Kopete Telepathy plugin now doesn’t lose any messages you send during the first couple of seconds of a chat (while telepathy code is still setting up).
• Many other small bugs fixed in Kopete Telepathy plugin.
• The Telepathy Account Management KCM now has a nice custom UI (which is a lot friendlier than the autogenerated one) for Gabble/Jabber accounts (which I expect will be the most common ones for testing with, since Gabble is by far the most full-featured Telepathy Connection Manager).
• Lots of refactoring and code reduction and tidyup to start the accounts KCM and Kopete Telepathy plugin down the long road to being ready for kdereview

And, as always, I’m not the only person working on Telepathy/KDE. Some (but by no means all) of the other things going on last week were:

• Matteo Nardi submitted a couple more patches to the Acocunts KCM, this time making the Protocol selection a bit nicer when adding an account by easing user interaction with the widget and making common protocol names localisable.
• Abner has pretty much finished the 0.1 version of the stunning new presence plasmoid (more on that soon).

I’ll probably be back again mid-week with some (finally!) details of how to try out telepathy in KDE (warning, extremely pre-alpha software!!!).

In yet another probably-doomed attempt to write regularly about my KDE work, I’m going to try writing a weekly update every Monday on what I was working on the previous week. Lets see how long this lasts. (My bet is on 2 weeks).

Since this is the first one, and I’ve been back from GCDS for two weeks, I’ll cover the progress of both weeks.

Kopete’s Telepathy Plugin

There is a protocol plugin for Kopete that allows Telepathy accounts to be added to it as if it were just another protocol. It has existed for years, but has never quite been in working order. I’ve been working on this for the last two weeks, and now it is approaching being usable.

• The Contact List works (with some basic management features like add/delete contacts, but not others like approving presence subscription requests).
• Accounts are stored in the central Telepathy Account Manager daemon. However, only accounts added to the Account Manager through Kopete’s Add Account Assistant are accepted by Kopete (not if they are already in the Account Manager from some other source)
• Channels are dispatched and handled through the central Telepathy Channel Dispatcher daemon, allowing you to have text chats with your contacts.
• The Add/Edit Account pages are still horrible, but I’m going to integrate the Add Account Assistant from the KCM which I’ll describe below once it is ready.

Telepathy Account Management KCM

In the flying-car future of deep Telepathy integration with KDE, there should be one central UI which takes care of adding/editing/removing instant messaging accounts. This will exist in the form of a KCM Module (which can be invoked by any application wanting a “Add Account” button in its UI). In order to reduce code duplication, it is being designed so that classes from it can be reused with a minimum of effort in Kopete for the Telepathy protocol plugin’s account management features.

Features that have been implemented so far include:

• Display a list of valid and invalid Telepathy Accounts.
• Checkbox to enable/disable Accounts and show their icons (Thanks to Matteo Nardi for the patch)
• Add Account assistant with a generic UI generated on-the-fly from Telepathy Connection Manager Parameters.

Features to coming this week or soon after include:

• Custom UI plugin support and plugins for common Connection Managers in the Add Account Assistant/Edit Assistant
• Edit Account assitant
• Removing Accounts
• Prettier/more usable UI for the whole KCM.

Thats pretty much everything for the last two weeks. I’ll be back next Monday (if not before) with another update.

[UPDATE] As of now the latest update on jaunty for the kopete package, the problem is fixed in the version 4:4.2.2-0ubuntu2.

It seems Yahoo! is changing their protocols for client connection. Heard somewhere this is done to disallow 3rd party clients like pidgin and trillian access yahoo’s messenger service. On my Ubuntu Jaunty, this has not affected pidgin yet! (looks like it auto adjusted) , but for Kopete I had to override the server connection to cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com and now its working fine.

Got the workaround from here.

Kopete is the only yahoo client on linux, AFAIK that allows video chat. Not sure if anything else has surfaced up yet. Haven’t been able to use Gyache yet with my webcam.

Kopete’nin sevdiğim en güzel özelliği birçok mesajlaşma servisinin hesabına ulaşabilmesiydi. Fakat Pardus 2009 Alfa kurulumunu yaptıktan sonra bu özelliğini kullanamadım. Aslında pekte oralı olmadım nasıl olsa henüz alfa sürümüydü ve bu tip sorunlar olacaktı. Hafta sonu Pardus 2009′un RC1 yükseltmesi de yapıldı. Hala bir düzelme olamayınca yolunda gitmeyen birşeyler vardı. Uzun zamandır kullanmadığım Pardus 2008.2 ile açılış yapıp Kopete’nin ayarlarını inceledim ama hepsi aynı idi Artık google amcayla biraz arama yapmak gerekecekti ki fazla sürmeden sonuç verdi Kayıtlı olan bağlantı tercihlerini ve sunucularını aşağıda görüldüğü gibi değiştirdiğimde bendeki sorun çözüldü.

‘Ayarlar>Yapılandır>Hesabı Düzenle>Bağlantılar’ sekmesini aşağıdaki gibi değiştiriniz.

I’m writing this on the plane back from Freiburg, and the Nepomuk Coding sprint. It’s a beautiful town (except late at night during the weekend, but anyway…) and well worth visiting again (hopefully there’ll be a Nepomuk Sprint 2010).

Now to the important details. As I often seem to at these kind of events, I find myself leaving with less code written than I arrived with. However, when put in context, this is no bad thing. Nepomuk is a new technology, and is not entirely straight forward for a newcomer to understand. I arrived with intentions of integrating Telepathy with Nepomuk, but with little clue how to actually do this. And the results: I know understand enough about how Nepomuk works to make a plan, and start coding on integrating with Telepathy (unfortunately most of the code I wrote in the few days beforehand with this aim turns out to be so wrong it’s best just to throw it away and start again).

There are two ways in which Telepathy will be integrated with Nepomuk. One is the fairly obvious case of storing metadata about your IM buddies. Some examples of this might be: the last time they were seen online or the geolocation at which they were last online using the Location interface of Telepathy). I’d love to hear any more suggestions of metadata that it might be good to store on your instant messaging and VoIP contacts (please use the comments section at the end).

The second integration point is a little different. It concerns the idea of metacontacts. Users of IM clients such as Kopete are probably familiar with the idea that you can group two buddies on different protocols, who are the same person in real-life, together as one metacontact. I intend to implement this for Telepathy applications’ contact lists using Nepomuk to store the relation between the different buddies. The advantage of doing this is that not just your IM client, but any Nepomuk enabled application can see this relationship.

So, that’s my rather superficial hand-wavy summary of the plans that came out of the Nepomuk sprint for Telepathy. I hope to write again soon to provide a mercilessly technical explanation of how all this will/is being implemented.

Finally, I’d just like to say thank you very much to Sebastian Trueg who did such a great job of organising this sprint.

I haven’t written anything for a couple of months now for the same reason that I haven’t committed any code. Exams. Now they’re over it’s back to hacking. But just because I haven’t been working on Telepathy/KDE for a while doesn’t mean that nothing has been done (obviously).

The underlying TelepathyQt4 library on which all our work is based has progressed a lot, gaining support for requesting channels from the Channel Dispatcher, gaining the Client interfaces and going through what will almost certainly be the last major API redesign before it goes stable. These two advances mean that it is now possible to work on Telepathy client applications in Qt/KDE without having to play an endless game of API catch-up.

There are also two summer of code projects progressing nicely:
- George Kiagiadakis (gkiagia)’s work on KCall is really exciting… I can’t wait to take part in my first video conference using KDE software!
- Kaushik Saurabh (roide) is also making great progress on his Conversation Logging Framework for KDE (while not entirely a Telepathy project, it goes without saying that the two will be integrated).

And now to the future… to Friday. I’ll be at the Nepomuk Sprint in Freiburg working on integrating instant messaging buddies with the address book and the semantic desktop. I’m not yet exactly sure how this will be done, but I’ll be spending the next 2 days up until the sprint getting that nailed down, and then coding madly once I get there. I really hope there can be something photogenic as a result, since libraries provide very limited picture-potential for this blog.

I’ve mentioned a couple of times that, at least in my opinion, KDE is losing out to GNOME because there simply aren’t as many Qt applications as GTK ones. Competition breeds quality, and as a result, I find Qt applications in general to be inferior.

Of course, I can’t just say that and not back it up. In fact, I’m not even sure if I’m right! Because I’m using KDE 4.2 at the moment, I thought this would be an ideal time to really test some Qt and GTK applications extensively. In all cases, I tried to use Qt applications first, and only installed the GTK alternative if it either showed bugs, crashed, or simply irritated me to the point of madness after several days.

This should be the first in a series of articles comparing different kind of applications. In this post I’ll cover chat clients: Kopete, Kmess, and two GTK alternatives, Pidgin and Emesene.

Kopete has been KDE’s default chat client since I started using Linux. At that time GNOME felt alien, but even then I used Pidgin. I simply didn’t like Kopete. Its configuration felt clunky, cluttered and unnatractive…and it still does. That’s because it hasn’t changed since forever, even during the switch from KDE3 to KDE4. It still looks and feels like it did 8 years ago, as you can see from the screenshot on the official homepage…which is till the KDE3 version. The latest News item is dated August 2008, which tells you a lot about the stagnation of the development of this application. It does support video chat, and of course it lets you connect to and chat on all major chat protocols, so I decided that this time I’d try and use it for a week.
Unfortunately, it only lasted a day, because every time I start the program it complains about the MSN password. It’s actually correct, and works when I enter it again…until I shut down Kopete. At that point, I decided that it simply wasn’t good enough, and installed something else.

Kmess seems like a better alternative. It has a beta version for KDE4 and like Emesene, it only supports MSN chat, but it has more features, like showing and saving MSN winks, choosing how to open links, and of course it integrates better in KDE4, especially when it comes to notifications. I like it a lot, but the layout is, ironically, a bit of a mess. I’ve noticed this in other KDE4 applications too, where icons overlap text until you widen the window. In any case, with the windows stretched out everything looks fine. It did manage to crash the KDE4’s notification applet, and not all the winks showed perfectly, but I’d recommend it over Kopete.

Pidgin is GNOME’s default chat client (*), and like Kopete, this is a golden oldie. Unfortunately, and also like Kopete, not much happened with it since quite some time. In fact, it’s safe to say that since the upgrade to version 2, when Gaim changed its name to Pidgin, all the changes have been minor. Pidgin still does not support saving moving icons, it still doesn’t offer voice chat, and like Kopete, its configuration is a bit all over the place. Settings can be changed in Account Settings, in Settings, and in Plugins. It’s a bit chaotic, but it works just fine and it looks a whole lot better than Kopete does. Unlike Emesene, it does open links, and you can configure how it does that too (in which browser, and new window or new tab?).
It has been less than stable for me though, at least outside of GNOME. I’ve suffered one crash in KDE4, but on my Windows laptop from work it crashes at least once a week.

Emesene is what I’ve been using in GNOME and Openbox the last couple of months. Most of the times, I’m only using the MSN protocol anyway, and Emesene takes everything that’s good about MSN (simple layout, easily configured), makes it even better (I just love the slick look of those icons), and wraps it in a fast, lightweight chat client. Even my girlfriend loves it, because it feels so familiar, and you can save and use custom icons It doesn’t support video chat, but since this is an application claiming to be fast and lightweight, I don’t mind.
This is my chat application of choice, and to me it looks better in KDE4 than even KDE applications do.

A clear win for GTK and Emesene here, because of its simplicity, speed and looks. KMess is a close second though, and even in beta looks like a better, easier chat client than the dinosaur Kopete.

Next: Browsers (Konqueror, Firefox, Arora, and probably some stuff about Midori, Epiphany and Opera)

San

(*) Edit: As has been pointed out by mtz in the comments, Pidgin is not the default chat client in Gnome, Empathy is. It’s actually developing fast, and probably will be included as default in GNOME distributions in future releases, but I didn’t include it here because I have no experience with it.
In any case, I was wrong. My apologies.

Hi all,

It has been long time I do not write anything here, so it is a good time for an update.

The news:
well, this year I got accepted to Google Summer of Code and last week I started working on my proposal.
The first feature I suggested is the support to send Ink Draws, and I’m working on it right now.
Just for the record I’m posting here the first screenshot of what I have done so far.

Now the bad news:
MSN supports two kinds of image formats: Gif and Isf (Ink Serialized format, from Microsoft).
My first idea was to store the draw to a QImage (from qt4) and then save it to gif, but unfortunately there is no gif writing support in Qt. The Isf format is now open, and there is a library made by the aMSN people to manage the Isf images, but unfortunately third party clients still does not support Isf.
People from kopete-devel@ ML said that it is ok to link kopete to an external library (like giflib) to manage that, but the right approach was suggested by my mentor, that is to write a QImageIO plugin to deal with this gif stuff.

At the moment I’m busy fixing other bugs and adding some more stuff to the Ink plugin (pen color and size), but as soon as possible I will evaluate what is the best approach (giflib, QImageIO plugin, other? suggestions are welcome) considering my programming skills.

For now I’m using a dirty trick: I save the image in PNG and then.. well.. QProcess::exec(“convert old.png new.gif”);, but do not worry, I will not keep that in the code

E’ da qualche giorno disponibile la nuova release di Mandriva (ex Mandrake), una tra le distribuzioni GNU/Linux più user-friendly. Potete visitare i siti dell’annuncio ufficiale di rilascio e di un breve tour che illustra le caratteristiche salienti di questa versione. Il sito per il download è questo, la versione di riferimento è la One (Spring).

Preferisco questa versione in quanto in un solo CD è contenuto tutto il necessario, eventuali altri software possono essere scaricati in un secondo momento dopo l’installazione. Grazie alla One si ha la possibilità di testare il sistema operativo senza scrivere nulla sull’hard disk, evitando così di fare danni. Punto di forza della One sono i driver inclusi nella distribuzione, infatti già in versione live viene riconosciuta la scheda grafica e data la possibilità all’utente di abilitare gli effetti desktop, quali ad esempio il cubo 3D, le finestre “gommose” ed altri effetti speciali. Le partizioni windows vengono riconosciute e montate in automatico, anche se non è possibile accedervi.

L’ambiente desktop è KDE 4.2.2 ed il kernel è 2.6.29.1-desktop586-4mnb, quindi della serie 2.6.29, il che, tra le altre cose, garantisce un supporto ad un numero sempre maggiore di webcam, tranne la mia che si è ormai trasformata in un problema cronico!!!

Darò una breve rassegna dei software inclusi citando quelli di uso più comune:

navigazione web: Firefox 3.08 e Konqueror (già inclusi svariati plugins)
posta elettronica: KMail
voip: Ekiga
chat: Kopete
ufficio: OpenOffice.org 3.01, Okular (visore di svariati tipi di documenti)
grafica: Gwenview (viewer), Gimp (editor)
audio: Amarok 2.02
video: Dragon Player, Totem
navigazione file: Dolphin

Con Mandriva 2009.1 Spring possiamo fin da subito ascoltare la nostra musica e vedere i nostri filmati in quanto i codecs sono già inclusi. Eventuali altri programmi che dovessero servirci possono essere scaricati dopo l’installazione della distribuzione abilitando i relativi repositories.

Insomma con Mandriva 2009.1 Spring si è “produttivi” da subito, caratteristica che l’ha resa sempre tra le più apprezzate soprattutto dai newbie.

E’ da qualche giorno disponibile la nuova release di Mandriva (ex Mandrake), una tra le distribuzioni GNU/Linux più user-friendly. Potete visitare i siti dell’annuncio ufficiale di rilascio e di un breve tour che illustra le caratteristiche salienti di questa versione. Il sito per il download è questo, la versione di riferimento è la One (Spring).

Preferisco questa versione in quanto in un solo CD è contenuto tutto il necessario, eventuali altri software possono essere scaricati in un secondo momento dopo l’installazione. Grazie alla One si ha la possibilità di testare il sistema operativo senza scrivere nulla sull’hard disk, evitando così di fare danni. Punto di forza della One sono i driver inclusi nella distribuzione, infatti già in versione live viene riconosciuta la scheda grafica e data la possibilità all’utente di abilitare gli effetti desktop, quali ad esempio il cubo 3D, le finestre “gommose” ed altri effetti speciali. Le partizioni windows vengono riconosciute e montate in automatico, anche se non è possibile accedervi.

L’ambiente desktop è KDE 4.2.2 ed il kernel è 2.6.29.1-desktop586-4mnb, quindi della serie 2.6.29, il che, tra le altre cose, garantisce un supporto ad un numero sempre maggiore di webcam, tranne la mia che si è ormai trasformata in un problema cronico!!!

Darò una breve rassegna dei software inclusi citando quelli di uso più comune:

navigazione web: Firefox 3.0.8 e Konqueror (già inclusi svariati plugins)
posta elettronica: KMail
voip: Ekiga
chat: Kopete
ufficio: OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, Okular (visore di svariati tipi di documenti)
grafica: Gwenview (viewer), Gimp (editor)
audio: Amarok 2.0.2
video: Dragon Player, Totem
navigazione file: Dolphin

Con Mandriva 2009.1 Spring possiamo fin da subito ascoltare la nostra musica e vedere i nostri filmati in quanto i codecs sono già inclusi. Eventuali altri programmi che dovessero servirci possono essere scaricati dopo l’installazione della distribuzione abilitando i relativi repositories.

Insomma con Mandriva 2009.1 Spring si è “produttivi” da subito, caratteristica che l’ha resa sempre tra le più apprezzate soprattutto dai newbie.