Gentoo KDE 4.7.3 going stable now... including KDEPIM

Another KDE version stabilized in Gentoo... x86 is done with KDE 4.7.3 since this morning, amd64 is following right now. For those of you who don't read Portage news items, here's again my message about KDEPIM:

The stable upgrade from KDEPIM 4.4.11.1 to KDEPIM 4.7.3 is a MAJOR upgrade with potential for major breakage. Therefore we will try to keep and support the old, so-far stable KDEPIM 4.4.11.1 as long as possible.
If you don't want to upgrade your KDEPIM yet but keep the old version, please download this mask file and add it into your /etc/portage/package.mask.
If you decide to upgrade, please have a look at the upgrade guide first.

In addition there have been a few reports of problems with the Plasma desktop after upgrade. Usually these are caused by single plasmoids malfunctioning, so what should help is to remove some of the plasmoids from your desktop and add them again... Otherwise the upgrade from 4.6 to 4.7 should be pretty much unproblematic, and bring you a shiny new desktop with quite some new features.
With the new KDE we have finally also been able to stabilize a newer version of digikam and kipi-plugins (both at 2.3.0 now!), and also rekonq gets a big bump to version 0.8.0, which should fix an overdue security bug.
Finally and not related to the stabilization, since yesterday we have a package in the main tree that provides integration of Google calendars / contacts into Akonadi: kde-misc/akonadi-google ... It's a bit experimental still and also not an official release but a packaged snapshot, but anyway, if you are interested, give it a try!

The Regensburg nanotube team is growing!

A lot of things have happened recently in our nanotube / nanomechanics research group in Regensburg... First of all, I'd like to congratulate Peter Stiller for finishing off his Diploma thesis and thereby his degree. Peter is immediately continuing as a PhD student, however switching topic from nanomechanics to charge qubits in carbon nanotubes - a newly founded project in the SFB 631. Here we plan to couple electronic quantum states in carbon nanotube double quantum dots to the electric field of a coplanar microwave resonator.
Then, straight from München and the research group of Jan von Delft, Alois Dirnaichner will join us soon as PhD student to work on experimental and theoretical characterization of few-electron states in ultraclean suspended carbon nanotubes. This is a project pursued together with the groups of Milena Grifoni and Christoph Strunk; we hope that the high quality of our carbon nanotubes enables us to do fundamental observations and analysis on unperturbed electronic multi-particle states.
Next, Sabine Kugler joins the nanomechanics team for her MSc thesis project. She will continue the development of chip geometries and materials suitable for combining carbon nanotubes with complex electronics, and help us with the characterization measurements.
Finally, last but not least, Hermann Kraus starts in december as a Diploma student, and will focus on high-frequency electronics at very low temperatures and superconducting nanocircuitry. Time to get these electrons rock'n'roll!

Real online dilfridge :)

By the way, I just found out there's a real dilfridge (dilution refrigerator) live on twitter... :) Would be interesting to know which research group that is. With the hard-soldered caps on the top IVC plate and the ribbon cables this is for sure an Oxford Instruments model, but whatever else is visible in the lab looks like pretty standard equipment...

KDE 4.7.3 - Identifying Plasma crashes with Gentoo

One of the less pleasant surprises about KDE 4.7.3 was that somehow "upstream" managed to introduce quite some stability regressions in the Plasma desktop. On both my laptop and my work desktop it kept crashing every now and then. This usually does not cause big problems as Plasma is immediately restarted by some KDE magic, however it can be quite annoying (in the British sense). Which is why by now we have kde-base/plasma-workspace-4.7.3-r2 in the Gentoo portage tree, where the worst offenders should be fixed by backporting from future 4.7.4. Please upgrade and test...
A related question is of course, if Plasma crashes, how do I get any more information on the origin of the problem? Usually the KDE crash reporter DrKonqui does not pop up... For diagnosis, you'll have to enable debug info while building, and core dumps while running the software. For doing both in Gentoo we have an excellent howto, which also documents how you use gdb to extract the backtrace information. Then, if you report the bug, please paste the backtrace; only that makes it possible to identify the exact problem that caused the crash! Happy hunting!

Gentoo KDE stabilization and the KDE overlay

Here's two small news items that may be worth your attention.
First of all, we (as the Gentoo KDE team) have to decided to change our stabilization target from 4.7.2 to 4.7.3 - the main reason being that there have been many stability improvements e.g. in KDEPIM. This also means that for now the stabilization process is on hold, since version 4.7.3 needs some time to "ripen on the tree". Anyway, feel free to grab the stabilization list from bug 388279 and try it out. Most likely the list will still be updated a few times for minor fixes.
Second, if you are using the Gentoo KDE overlay, it has now been migrated to so-called thin manifests. This makes using git way easier for us committers. You as a user will however need sys-apps/portage from ~arch, because the current stable version does not support the new Manifest file format yet. This may sound like a dangerous requirement, but actually most the devs use testing portage and do not encounter any big problems. I'm running sys-apps/portage-2.1.10.32 here and all is fine.

Preparing another Gentoo KDE stable upgrade: KDE 4.7.2

With the blessing of the Gentoo KDE team, I have recently filed the request for stabilization of KDE 4.7.2, which means Gentoo stable users will see the upgrade sometime in the coming weeks, after the testing and the resulting bugfixing has completed.
In general the upgrade from 4.6.5 to 4.7.2 should be easy and bring quite some advantages; we're really happy with most of KDE 4.7.2 here. In particular also many quirks of the graphics acceleration have been ironed out.
However, there is one Big Thing happening with the upgrade: While the stable version of the KDE PIM applications (kontact, kmail, korganizer, ...) so far was still 4.4.11.1, we will try to stabilize KDE PIM 4.7.2 now. (Not my idea.) This is a major upgrade with potential for major breakage, especially since many people think that KDE PIM 4.7.2 has not even reached beta quality yet.
Why are we doing this, you may ask? Well, the big problem is, the upstream KDE PIM developers consider version 4.4.11.1 obsolete and unsupported. The first regression has appeared (see Gentoo bug 382411 and KDE bug 279432), and we expect there will be more in the future. We will keep KDE PIM 4.4.11.1 in Gentoo and try to support it as long as we can, but then we're not familiar with the code and cannot do too much on our own if things start to break.
Anyway. If you're brave and want to help us testing, please grab the list attached to the stable request, place it on your Gentoo system into /etc/portage/package.keywords, and upgrade your system.

• If you want to upgrade the rest of KDE but not KDE PIM, grab the corresponding mask file and place it into /etc/portage/package.mask. This means all KDE PIM applications will remain at trusty version 4.4.11.1 until you remove the mask entries again.
• If you want to upgrade the entire KDE including KDE PIM to version 4.7.2, please read the KDE PIM upgrade guide in our new Wiki first. And yes, please feel free to contribute improvements there!

We're looking forward to hearing about your experiences, and if you encounter problems, please file bugs on our Gentoo bugzilla!

Towards Calligra 2.4

I've just committed the ebuild for Calligra 2.4 beta 3, i.e. in Gentoo app-office/calligra-2.3.83, to the portage tree. If all goes well this is going to be the last beta version before Calligra 2.4, the first release of the fork (or should I better say, successor) of KOffice. So, get your penguins compiling and give it a try, for a last big round of bugfixing!