Just like the fellow gearheads who already published this kind of
blog, I'd like to claim that, yes!
[](http://akademy2010.kde.org)
This year I will be spread on several fronts (like every years in
fact), but you will for sure meet me during the following events:
- My
[talk about KDE Mobile](http://akademy2010.kde.org/node/433 "Kevin Ottens, Akademy 2010 talk, KDE Mobile"),
which will happen on saturday afternoon;
- The
[KDE Mobile BoF](http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Mobile/Meetings/Akademy2010 "Akademy 2010, KDE Mobile BoF")
which I will be moderating, people willing to discuss the future of
the KDE Platform and how to contribute more to the the Maemo /
MeeGo ecosystem;
- The
[Solid BoFs](http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Solid/Meetings/Akademy2010 "Akademy 2010, Solid BoFs")
where I'll meet my fellow metalworkers, strengthening our plans for
4.6; note the plural there, there will be two of such meetings
(because some people will attend remotely, and then because of
timezone constraints).
Apart from those three events, I'll run around as usual, probably
trying to poke a bit the Plasma people as well or furiously hacking
somewhere.
Looking forward to meeting you all!
As part of the KDE/Maemo effort (that should get a more generic
name really...), we've already seen emerging some SDKs to help us
target the relevant platforms, some Plasma mobile shell, etc.
Still, one of the challenges is also to widen the scope of our KDE
Platform. For that, a draft plan was made during Tokamak4, and
since then we've been progressing carefully on the matter. We tried
to get as much feedback as possible on the plan, not rushing things
to make sure we weren't stepping on anyone toes.
Today, I'm happy to announce that the very first corner stone of
this plan got delivered. We added support for "profiles" in our
platform. The CMake scripts for it got committed this morning,
along with some changes to libplasma which effectively becomes our
first library supporting those profiles.
By selecting a profile at build time, you get a default setup for
our libraries which will enable or disable some extra features and
dependencies. For instance, if you choose the "Mobile" profile the
feature set coming from kdelibs will be reduced but on the other
hand there will be much less internal dependencies in kdelibs, this
way an application will only need a reduced subset to be able to
run.
This more modular kdelibs depending on the profile chosen is of
course only a first ongoing projects, but we have other topics to
tackle like the runtime dependencies (namely klauncher and kded) of
our platform. On this area we still lack reliable data as it is
much harder to track. Still reducing dependencies during build time
will be a big leap forward. And I'm truely excited because we're
slowly (but steadily!) getting to a slimer KDE Platform.
There's some movement on the KDE/Maemo front. Lately we've seen
more public announcements coming mainly thanks to the office
viewer. But there's also work under the hood cooking up. Most
notably communication channels to provide feedback for the Qt
4.6/Maemo variant are open, hopefully we'll soon see a few patches
flying in. And also Jos posted some (large) patches to streamline
kdelibs which are on the table for discussion and hopefully going
toward a KDE wide solution.
Today though, I just wanted to let everybody know that I've been
working on a virtual machine to help KDE developers easily get a
Maemo SDK. I added some documentation so now we have a
[Qt/Maemo SDK VM page on techbase](http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Maemo/VM)
(download URL and installation procedure are there).
It should be relatively easy for anyone to have it working:
download, boot, login, run a script, done you can know use Qt 4.6
in a fully setup Maemo SDK. Hopefully that will lower the bar to
contributing for quite some people.
That's it for now, don't hesitate to drop me a mail if you have
issues with it.
With Fremantle and the N900 almost out the door, it is time that we
start a more coordinated effort within the KDE community to support
Maemo as an official target system. In the past we had some
scattered and not coordinated efforts,
[results got linked on techbase](http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Maemo).
I attended the
[Maemo Summit 2009](http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2009) in
Amsterdam. Of course a few other KDE people were there. We sat down
together, talking about how we could get the KDE platform working
well on those devices. And we decided that if we want to see KDE
succeed on such devices, we'd have to get more serious and
coordinated about it.
That's why shortly after coming back from the meeting, I asked for
the creation of the kde-maemo mailing list, where we'll be able to
address Maemo as one of the official KDE target systems (like
FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X are). It is time for us to
make Maemo a first class citizen in our community.
Of course it is not wishful thinking we're talking about here. The
efforts already started, for instance Alexis has been working on a
[Plasma based shell for the N900](http://labs.qt.nokia.com/blogs/2009/10/27/qgraphicsview-is-a-hummer-plasma-is-the-luxury-version/).
It is still rough, and a first experiment, but it at least shows
that our platform is viable on this system. Parallel to that,
there's also efforts on how to make the deployment of a Maemo
toolchain more convenient, or how to modularize our platform for
such embedded systems.
It is just the beginning of the journey, let's see where it leads
us!
