KDE @ SCaLE 19X

I am happy to share that this year we were able to host the KDE booth at the 19^th annual Southern California Linux Expo-SCaLE 19X  that took place on July 28-31, 2022 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport in LA, California.

SCaLE covers visitors from all over the United States and around the world. It is the largest, community-run, open-source, and free software conference in North America.

We collaborated with OpenSUSE, LOPSA and NextCloud with the vision to promote cross community growth and to provide outreach and knowledge regarding our communities. 

Our booth was appreciated for a lot of things but the main attraction was the banner, attendees loved finding the logos of their favorite KDE tools. Our setup consisted of one big screen showcasing a promotional video of KDE, interactive laptops, Plasma Mobile, and lots of Katie and Konqui stickers.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the excitement attendees had seeing us participate; they were willing to know more about our products, and what was going on with the KDE community. People love experimenting on Plasma Desktop and had fun trying out our applications. Plasma Mobile was also a hot topic of discussion and attendees were very eager to know the updates regarding it. Amongst our attendees, we had a lot of college students interested in joining our community and contributing to open source projects in general. 

Attendees of all ages showed a keen interest towards our GCompris Application, with lots of kids enjoying playing educational games. One of the attendees was part of the education administration of a local school district and even expressed some interest in integrating the application as a beta at a few schools.

This was the first time we offered swag at our booth and the Katie and Konqui Stickers were a big hit in attracting attendees to our booth. 

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We went into this conference with a specific goal of outreach and spreading the word about KDE and I believe we succeeded quite a bit as we got a chance to work at a grass-roots level and find the next generation of open source contributors who are excited about the future of KDE.

This entire conference would not have been possible without Drew Adams and the entire OpenSuse community who played a huge role in helping us get a foothold at this conference. On behalf of all of KDE we want to thank them and acknowledge all the hard work that was involved to make this event happen.

Hope to see you all at SCaLE 20X next year in March. 

Till then Happy coding.

Akademy 2019 in Beautiful Milan

Akademy 2019 was hosted in University of Milano-Bicocca, Milan from 7th to 13th September. It was great to meet all the fellow KDE contributors again 🙂

Akademy gives a chance to bring together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers and other contributors to meet in person and discuss about achievements of the past year and plan out the goals for the next year.

Group Photo

First two days contributors presented talks on their respective projects. You can go through the talks as now the videos for the same are available.
All talks were so great and full of knowledge, but out of all there were few topics that fascinated me, and I would like to share those topics with you.

• Everything to hide: helping protect the privacy of our users by Ivan Čukić.
• All on board ! Are we there yet? by Neofytos Kolokotronis.
• Plasma for Embedded Devices by Marco Martin and Bhushan Shah.
• Taking KDE to the Skies:Making the drone ground control kirogi by Ekie Hein
• And my favorite talk was the KDE Goals – Panel Discussion hosted by Lydia Pintscher.

Last year in Akademy, KDE Goals were announced, which were:

1. Usability and Productivity for Basic Software.
2. Privacy Software.
3. Streamlined Onboarding of New Contributors.

So in this Interactive Session, Lydia discussed with the goal keepers how far they have reached and how was their experience while working on these goals, and then finally this year’s Goals were announced,

• Wayland
• Consistency
• All about the apps

This year unfortunately I didn’t give any talk but instead tried my hands in volunteering. I volunteered to be a Session-Chair, basically my job was to introduce speaker and manage talk room. It was such a learning and amazing experience to be a volunteer.

Having a word with the Keynote speaker Leonardo Favario.
{Photo credit Paul Brown}

Rest of the week was BoFs (Bird of Feather), Workshops, Meetings, Daytrip and Training.

There were many BoF sessions scheduled for a week and I attended the following sessions:

KDE PROMO :

We discussed on some marketing strategies, and did some brainstorming on few topics. Learnt how far we have reached on spreading KDE to new users and determined few tasks we would work on for this year.

OpenQA :

I work and contribute in OpenQA Project, in this session Harald Sitter and Jonathan Riddle gave a brief introduction on OpenQA and then we discussed the workflow for writing new tests cases, and I personally got a chance to learn alot of new things from Jonathan Riddle.

KDE India :

We discussed on next KDE Conference India, listed few places were we can host the conference, and I am happy to announce that conf.kde.in is coming back in 2020 🙂 It will be held in Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology from 17th to 19th January. If you love open source and wish to learn more about our community come join us in this conference 🙂

Privacy :

In Privacy BoF we discussed on various aspects, determined goals for this year, talked a bit on funds for next sprint and did brainstorming on few topics.

KDE Students Program :

Here we discussed about the students program, took feedback on what we need to improve, what should be the work pattern for this year and our main focus was on Season of KDE Program, It is an upcoming project so we were discussing on its timeline and structure which soon you will come to know 🙂

Daytrip

It is a tradition of Akademy that Wednesday afternoon we all attendees go out and explore a particular area. This time the trip went to the North to Varenna near Lake Como, Ahhh! it was indeed the most magnificent place, a day where I enjoyed the nature’s beauty accompanied with my incredible friends.

Enjoying Daytrip

Training

Communication Training:

KDE e.V. had organized Communication Training session for community members, and I am so glad I could attend this training. Our trainer Tilman Krakau gave some basic but very essential lessons on communication, how to coordinate with your team-workers and always try to understand the receivers’ point of perception.

Conclusion

Akademy was really productive, it was great socializing and meeting old friends and making new ones. Learnt alot of new stuffs and it was an amazing experience. I am really thankful to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my trip.

And to those who aren’t part of KDE yet and wish to be, I have something interesting to share with you, Season of KDE is coming soon. It is a great way to join our community, learn new things and get comfortable with coding, and there is one thing I would like to tell about this program, it is just not for students it is open for everyone 🙂

See you all next Akademy, till then Happy Coding! 🙂

 

 

Akademy 2018 in Vienna

Akademy 2018 was hosted in TU WEIN university, Vienna from 11th to 17th August, 2018.Being part of this Akadmey gave me a chance and opportunity to meet all the fellow KDE contributors in person and socialize with them.

First two days some contributors gave presentations on their respective projects.
Rest of the week was BoF (Bird of Feather) sessions, BoF sessions are great way to discuss things with other community members and gather feedback. There were also workshop sessions organized by KDE e.V. for community members.

On second day I got a chance to give a presentation at Akademy this year, I had a lightning talk on my Season of KDE 2018 project ‘OpenQA Plasma Mobile’.
Abstract of my talk was:
– To explain the work-flow of the project and what goals achieved.
– After Project completion what did i work on
– Future plans

There were many BoF sessions scheduled for a week and I attended the following sessions:

KDE Promo:

It was my first BoF and it went off very well, KDE Promo team works on how to make KDE Community be known by almost everyone. It was amazing meeting team and now being part of it. Our major discussion was on how to spread KDE to new users, for that which medium should be used and what updations are required.

Documentation:

This was the most fun BoF, got chance to meet amazing people and give ideas about how to make documentation more user friendly, happy to share part of this team as well, and will work on documentation for new users with Valorie, looking forward on this project 🙂

OpenQA:

This is the area where I contribute in KDE, in the session Harald Sitter started with the introductry part and then we discussed about the workflow for writing new tests, evaluation of the OpenQA web user interface for KDE Neon, and adding more testcases.

Mycroft AI:

This BoF was about how does the Mycroft AI works on plasma, started up with the demo followed by a discussion of the the architecture.

KDE India:

Here we discussed on various aspects regarding the KDE Conference KDE India, 2019. Shortlisted few places for hosting the conference, suggestions for restructuring the presentation time and keeping all talks not less than 15 minutes was been appreciated by the team, personal query session for 15 minutes with the speaker would also be provided, and many workshops would be conducted.

Four workshops were conducted by KDE for the contributors, out of which i was present at these two:

Public Speaking Training by Marta Rybczynska:

The workshop was to help us in becoming a better speaker, Marta taught us some very important lessons and gave us personal sessions where she made us know what things would need attention and improvement and what things we are doing pretty well. This was the most amazing training I have ever been.

Documentation workshop by Stefan Knorr:

This workshop was really helpful as writing down your piece of work in a way that your reader is able to connect with it, is really very hard, Stefan Knorr gave us some very nice techniques that would be very helpful while doing documentation and the best part of all gave us a practical which we had to do on that time itself using the techniques we learnt. It was a very fun and worth learning experience.

Conclusion:

Had great time socializing and meeting new people, learning new and amazing things. Akadmey was really productive , got chance to be a part of many discussions and without any doubt it was worth taking experience.
Thank you KDE for this amazing time and experience you gave us, totally appreciate it.

And those who are not part of KDE yet, if you find this interesting then please join us, and become one of us.

See you everyone in next Akadmey. 🙂

Write-up for SoK Project – OpenQA Plasma Mobile

KDE Goal: Usability and Productivity proposed by Nate Graham, is one of the three goals selected by KDE. This goal will focus on polishing our basic software so everyone will be delighted to use it. One of important aspect of Usability and Productivity is focus on quality assurance.

In this Season of KDE (SoK) 2018, I am working on “OpenQA Plasma Mobile” project. This project indirectly helps to achieve the goal of Usability and Productivity as it would work to get the higher quality version of the mobile by creating integration testing for it. It would make it easier to test the common operations of the mobile.

In these few weeks with the help of my mentor Bhushan Shah I have implemented the following:

•  Test of checking wayland session.

  

• Test of checking initial phone session.

  

• Test of opening dialer application.

  

The work done can be found at : https://github.com/bdhruve/kde-os-autoinst/tree/openqa-plasma-mobile

In the upcoming weeks, I will add the tests for more features of Plasma Mobile shell as well as other applications in Plasma Mobile.

Write-up for GSoC Project- Plasma Mobile Emulator

Hello everyone,

It has been pretty a while, i haven’t posted anything regarding the progress in my project. So my project is “Plasma Mobile Emulator”-  A solution for developing, testing and accessing plasma mobile system without having to install on real phone.

So far i have worked on the following:

As mentioned in previous blog post, earlier I added support for touch events in the KWayland fakeinput_interface, after that this was integrated in kwin_wayland.

kwin_wayland nested in QQuickItem
In Plasma Mobile emulator, KWin would need to be child of the emulator window, to achive this Martin Graesslin suggested to use a declartive plugin which would create the anonymous wayland server which in turn would get the nested kwin_wayland started.
Typical definition for such QML item would look like:

<code>
import QtQuick 2.0
import org.kde.kwin.qml 1.0

Text {
text: “Hello world”
height: 600
width: 800
KWinQml {
id: kwin
anchors.fill: parent
socketName: “kwin-plasma-emulator-0”
focus: true
}
Timer {
interval: 5000
repeat: false
running: true
onTriggered: kwin.start()
}
}
</code>

Rendering the kwin_wayland on QML
After I got kwin_wayland running in headless mode inside QQuickItem, next task was to render its contents, for that I triggered repaint of the QQuickItem when damaged signal of SurfaceInterface was triggered.

Input in QQuickItem
Once rendering was working, next task was to use QQuick input events and pass them to anonymous wayland server using seat_interface.
a. Mouse Hover Events – to set the pointer position.
b. Mouse Press/Release Events – to send the pointer button events.
c. KeyPress events- to send keys.

Changes mentioned above are under review on phabricator. I will further update you on the progress of my project.
Thank you. 🙂

Hello KDE

Hello everyone, myself Bhavisha Dhruve. I am a graduate in Bachelors of Commerce and Computer Application and pursuing A Levels in Computer Application. Currently i am a part of Google Summer of Code (GSOC) 2016, and the project i am working for is “Devising the Plasma Mobile Emulator” with the help of KDE organization.

Plasma Mobile Emulator will be the solution for developing, testing and accessing plasma mobile system without having to install on real phone.
This project takes in the following:

• Docker Container with plasma mobile.
• Different Resolution.
• Translation of click to touch events.
• Screenshots and Screen Recording (Future Development).

With the guidance of my mentor Bhushan Shah in these 4 weeks i have been able to create Docker container with kwin_wayland running inside. Currently working on Extending fakeinput interface in kwayland for touch events and the autotests for these added functionalities is in progress and once done it will allow to translate and emulate click events into touch events, as soon as it is done i will update it.

Working with KDE is a gratified experience and a place where everyday i learn something amazing. Thanks to my mentor Bhushan Shah and the plasma-devel team for always being there and helping me out when in need. And a big thank you to Google for giving us such opportunities and letting me to be a part of this 2016 GSOC.

And as it is very well said :“It’s Never Early, Never Late. It takes a little Patience and Faith but it’s worth to wait.” 🙂

Happy Weekend:)