Author: kmi

Very rough plans for K3b 2.1

Michał (the lead K3b developer) is busy preparing K3b 2.0 for release. However we have some rough plans how to proceed after that release. I’d like to share them with you.

Keep in mind that Michał is currently pretty much the only developer (I’m just a translator who occasionally lends a hand on janitorial work if within my capabilities), so in the end it depends on the amount of time and work he can put into K3b whether it even happens like this.

  • Support of KDE Plasma’s global progress bar and removal of K3b’s own progress OSD.
    This is not a crucial feature for 2.0 and according to Michał actually requires a higher amount of work one might think.
  • Support for writing Flash Drive images.
    With CD drive-less netbooks on the rise and the announcement of KDE’s Plasma Netbook Reference Platform, K3b 2.1 may support USB Flash Drives as target medium. So instead of cryptic dd if=Plasma-Netbook-Reference.i686-0.1.0-*.raw of=/dev/sdX commands, hopefully 2.1 will do the same with two mouse clicks. 🙂
  • Spanning data projects over more than one disk.
    Let’s say you’d like to record 7GB of data. Then you’ll be prompted to insert either a Dual Layer DVD or two regular DVDs.
  • DVD subtitle grabbing.
    Title basically says it all. 🙂
  • Somewhat fixed release cycle.
    Three of the most used Linux distributions (Fedora, Kubuntu, and Mandriva) have a fixed 6-months release cycle with releases every spring and fall. To reduce the amount of incoming bug reports for “old” K3b versions, we hope to release new versions in time before those distributions’ feature freeze. Maybe (only maybe) releases will happen more often than that, but don’t expect a brand new K3b version three weeks after a Fedora/Kubuntu/Mandriva release.
    And maybe (again: only maybe) K3b 2.1 will be released along with KDE SC 4.5, because of the already mentioned Netbook Reference Platform that should have its first stable release with SC 4.5.

That’s it for now from K3b. And now I’d like to advertise one of my favorite bands: Van Canto 🙂

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Oh dear! Qt incompatibility on the horizon

I’ve read through a lengthy thread in the official Meamo forum (it’s so long, I even forgot how I even got there *g*).

Basically it says: The Symbian Foundation and Nokia with Maemo (now MeeGo) are building two widget sets on top of QGraphicsView – while both are called Direct UI, they are entirely different (I’ll refer to them as SDUI and MDUI from now on).

Symbian Foundation employee Mark Wilcox is the one who seems to see the seriousness the most that it’s totally braindead to have incompatibe widget sets. Ironically MDUI seems to be the portable one. Hopefully the Foundation understands the problem now and throws away SDUI and adopts the MDUI library for Symbian.

Too bad neither project adopted the already shipping QGraphicsView widget set KDE Plasma, but since Plasma was never written with Symbian compatibility in mind, it may be not ideal anyway. If I didn’t miss anything, MDUI already runs natively on desktop Linux (because it’s mostly developed on it) and uses the DE’s theme. If true that’s good news. Even if not source compatible with the Plasma API, MDUI apps could work nicely under the KDE’s workspaces (notably Plasma Mobile).

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Call for German speaking K3b testers

(English / Deutsch)

Hi there. My name is Markus and I’m currently the maintainer of the German K3b translation (I’m also one of the Kdenlive translators, btw). As this blog post is a call to test the German translation, it’s likely of no interest to anybody who doesn’t speak German, hence I continue to write in German (don’t worry, other upcoming posts will be in English).

Deutsch:

In der letzten Nacht habe ich – hoffe ich zumindest – die letzten Macken in der deutschen Übersetzung von K3b 1.70 ausgemerzt. Um sicher zu gehen, bitte ich Euch, die neusten Sprachpakete zu installieren und zu testen:

  1. Installiert die neuste K3b-Version 1.70. openSUSE-Anwender finden sie z.B. im PackMan-Repository, das openSUSE-Anwender so oder so aktiviert haben sollten. Wenn Euer Distributor KDE SC 4.4 anbietet, ist K3b 1.70 sicher auch dabei.
  2. Falls gettext bzw. gettext-runtime bei Euch nicht installiert ist (sollte aber eigentlich), auch das installieren.
  3. Ladet die folgenden Dateien runter: k3b.po k3bsetup.po libk3b.po libk3bdevice.po
  4. Wechselt mit Dolphin in den Ordner mit den Dateien und öffnet Extras -> Konsole .
  5. Dort gebt Ihr dann ein:

sudo rm /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/*k3b* sudo msgfmt ./k3b.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/k3b.mo sudo msgfmt ./k3bsetup.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/k3bsetup.mo sudo msgfmt ./libk3b.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/libk3b.mo sudo msgfmt ./libk3bdevice.po -o /usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/libk3bdevice.mo

Und das war’s eigentlich auch schon. Gefundene Fehler meldet bitte unter bugs.kde.org. Bei Fehlern in der Übersetzung “i18n” als Fehlerkomponente eingeben und als Summary “Error in German K3b translation” oder so angeben. Dann landet das auch bei mir. 😉 Wenn Ihr Fehler im K3b-Programm selbst findet, die nichts mit der Übersetzung zu tun haben, wählt “k3b” als Komponente. Um die kümmert sich dann Michał, der aktuelle K3b-Betreuer.