ervin's piece of web

This week has also been interesting on the Solid front. The API is slowly improving (because of my limited spare time). And the day when we’ll have all the necessary classes and methods to port kio_media on Solid will surely come soon.

I’m currently implementing capabilities support, my primary targets are of course the ones necessary to manage media. Hence why storage and volume capabilities are half done. Even mount, unmount and eject support are there.

As expected, I’m focusing on the HAL backend, which had an interesting side-effect. This backend make an extensive use of our upcoming DBUS binding and then strengthen it by providing uses cases. For sure, it’s for the better and Thiago is really helpful in this area, I’m glad he maintains those bindings.

And before I forget, I’d like to point something new under the Solid umbrella : solidshell. This new tool will allow to the most important features of the framework from the command line. It already allows to list devices and to display their properties. Mount, unmount and eject are also provided.

During the following days/weeks I’ll focus on polishing what is currently there. After this (hopefully short) phase I’ll introduce more features again.

Past week I’ve done some KDE promotion. It was interesting because I did this using two radically different methods.

On monday and tuesday, I gave two talks in my university about Qt and KDE as a development platform. I gave Kubuntu CDs to the students and since they are in computer engineering they’ll hopefully install it. It seems that they enjoyed the topic. They started to wonder why they had to suffer with other non-free toolkits when I showcased Qt and QtDesigner. Then they were impressed about the niceties provided by kdecore, kdeui, and DCOP. After that, I explained them how to use the KParts and their jaw dropped when I showcased the small browser George Staikos wrote for OSDW. And finally having network transparency in their applications using KIO finished to convince them. I also took some time to present what will hopefully be in KDE4

The result? Several amazed students, that will surely want to experiment with Qt and KDE in the future. It even looks like some of them are really hooked and I had the opportunity to discuss more with them on friday answering some late questions.

On saturday, I participated in an event organized by Toulibre. I showcased a laptop running Kubuntu, there was also some boxes running Ubuntu. A talk took place, but I didn’t attend since I was involved in the booth with the rest of the team. People were really interested in the topic and we even had a journalist from the local press that came and asked questions for a paper. I think we were all impressed by the age diversity of the attendees (the youngest was under 10 and the oldest surely over 70). I find nice to be able to propose KDE to people that could be your grandparents for their daily use.

Really a nice week, I’d love to have more occasions to do this kind of things… I’ll surely try to invest more of my spare time for promotion.