KDE 4.6.2 news & upgrade guide

Just to give everyone a quick heads up, the stable request for KDE SC 4.6.2 plus KDEPIM 4.4.11.1 is likely going to be filed soon. On the whole, the upgrade should go very smooth. In case there are problems, we now have a Gentoo KDE 4.4 - 4.6 Upgrade Guide, covering the most frequent issues. In addition, it probably never hurts to look at the general Gentoo KDE Guide.
If you want to test before the actual stabilization takes place, just grab the keyword file... Cheers!

KDE 4.6.2 - looking for testers!

You may already have heard that a new version of the desktop environment came out today. (No, not the other one.) I'm talking about KDE 4.6.2. It is in my opinion shaping up rather well, and we in the Gentoo KDE team consider it a candidate for stabilization in a while. (It's about time, since upstream considers our "stable" KDE 4.4 rather "dead".) You can look up the list of important known issues on our bugzilla; some of this definitely has to be fixed before stabilization, but on the whole the list looks manageable.
So, we need testers. Especially since we all from the KDE team have been running newer KDE versions for ages by now and have never tried the direct step from 4.4 to 4.6. If you are brave - sync your portage tree, grab the keyword file, place it in /etc/portage/package.keywords - and update your system! As additional bonus, you will get also updates for QT, koffice, digikam, and some more packages...
If there are dependencies missing in the keyword file, please file a bug! If you encounter any build problems, please file a bug! If you see any misbehaviour after the upgrade, please file a bug! Thanks a lot in advance!
Oh yes, one last note. The kdepim guys obviously don't feel like releasing at all, so everything from kmail to blogilo will remain at trusty version 4.4. This is, however, nothing to worry about. (I'd worry a lot more about the kdepim update should it ever happen...)

Impressive sci meeting

As you can see from the above picture, it's travelling time again for me. The weather is great, the snow as well, there are a lot more photos to prove it... :) However, not all is skiing and vacation. The real reason for the stay here in La Thuile at the top end of the Aosta Valley is a scientific conference, "Rencontres de Moriond 2011: Quantum Mesoscopic Physics". This is indeed one of the scientifically best meetings of this field, with worldwide attendance. (The excellent skiing opportunities and the great Italian food may of course help attracting people.) Talks go from 9:00 to 12:30 and from 17:00 to 20:00. (I'm writing this at ~22:00 of the last evening and don't count the coffee cups anymore.)

I met here a friend again, one of the powerusers who initially introduced me to Gentoo. As we're at a conference we got talking about doing presentations with Linux, and he showed me a really neat Python program for that. (Normally I don't touch anything Python except with a very long stick, as it would interfere with my daily prayer to Larry Wall. Just kidding, well about the prayer at least...) I found out that a previous version of it had already been available in Gentoo before as "keyjnote". Keyjnote development is not continuing, but a new project named Impressive picked it up. With its new upstream name the program also got a new ebuild name: app-office/impressive. Apart from being a pretty stylish pdf viewer, and integrating/cooperating nicely with dev-tex/latex-beamer and (open|libre)office impress, one of the great advantages of Impressive is that arbitrary python hooks can be added to each slide. Want to play a sound, a video, ...? Want to have a robot voice read out your presentation? Sure, can do! Give it a try!

Gentoo's Reform and Future @ FOSDEM

For all those interested who could not make it to Brussels, the talk by Petteri, Roy, and Jorge on "Gentoo's Reform and Future" is now online at YouTube - or below. Cheers!

Most obscure e-mail of the year (so far)

I have the vague feeling that somehow this is out of my field of responsibilities.

From: xxx xxx <xxx@gmail.com>
To: dilfridge@gentoo.org
Date: Today 05:24:03
Spam Status: Spamassassin 0% probability of being spam.

Andreas K. Lord Huettel

gcam-2010.07.27.ebuild USD?

A DEMO PLEASE AND MANUALS

THANKS

FERNANDO

Fries, FOSDEM, Delirium Tremens

And here I am now reporting from an extended weekend in Brussels. It's kind of stupid that I have to leave Regensburg just at the moment when results in the lab get really interesting. But then, I'm staying online all the time anyway, and this weekend is FOSDEM time. Definitely a great opportunity to meet with some of the other Gentoo devs face to face. We had the Gentoo developers FOSDEM dinner yesterday, finishing with good Belgian beer near the Grand Place. So far it has been a lot of fun. We even have quorums for both the Gentoo Council and the Gentoo KDE team here...

At the conference site I sometimes have this weird feeling of visiting the nerd pole. One of the events definitly freaking out the locals was the outdoor GPG keysigning. Imagine cold windy weather and 150 geeks standing in a line along the curb and swapping passports for two hours... Just now I'm listening to an interesting and very funny talk about the LibreOffice fork. ("Are you German? We need your help deciphering the code comments! What does 'Manta-Hack' mean? And, 'Wenn Sie das lesen können, haben Sie eine Waschmaschine gewonnen!'???)

The weekend is way too short anyway. Somehow I was not that much excited about visiting Brussels for the third time. Frites and mussels, bah. Now that I'm here, though, I think I should definitely come again. I barely remember the place, there are so many things to (re)visit, art nouveau buildings to discover, flea markets to stroll across, and everything related to Gaufres and Chocolat just has to be good. Cheers!

Gentoo and GPIB (IEEE 488.2) device control: sci-libs/linux-gpib

Most of you will probably never have heard of the GPIB (IEEE 488.2) bus before. It's a pretty ancient (1960!), but robust parallel bus for addressing lab measurement equipment, which now supports up to 8 Mbyte/s. A clear specialist application, but one that is common for example in university labs all across the world. A typical PCI adapter card costs somewhere around €1k, a typical 3m cable (heavily shielded) somewhere around €250, but then, in many cases the attached hardware is far more expensive.

Under Linux, there are basically two ways to adress GPIB hardware:

As much of the hardware is bought from National Instruments, one is the proprietary National Instruments VISA driver stack on top of NI's GPIB hardware driver. This works very reliable (once it's installed), supports e.g. LabView for Linux (eurgh), and NI is actively developing drivers for (some of its) hardware. So much for the good sides. Here are it's disadvantages:

1. installation is basically doing its own package management, only very few (mostly outdated) linux distributions are really supported and trying others can be a serious pain, and the entire installation process is fundamentally incompatible with portage (I've been trying to beat it into an ebuild for a while and this is a sure way to madness); 
2. since the Linux kernel USB interface is declared GPL-only, no GPIB-USB devices are supported since kernel 2.6.24.

For those trying to use the excellent NI GPIB-USB interfaces in their labs, even NI employees point to the second option: the open-source (GPL) linux-gpib package. While its development has stalled in terms of features, it supports the usual hardware fine and interfaces even with most recent kernels, and the author wants to maintain it further to that effect. For this package, we now have an ebuild in Gentoo: sci-libs/linux-gpib. It is still package-masked since the installation needs testing. While we do have the required hardware in our labs, I have not had a chance to set up an entire Gentoo system there for it. But- if you have been working with linux-gpib and maybe even with one of the inofficial ebuilds before, please give it a try and report your experiences on bug 165399.

As a final remark, probably the best possible support would be to combine the open-source linux-gpib hardware driver with the NI VISA intermediate layer. Unfortunately, this would mean linking a GPL library and proprietary code, so no-go. At least as long as nobody budges...