Search This Blog

Friday, April 19, 2013

Solid Forge 2

Some of you may have noticed that there are some KDE sprints happening right now. One of them is Forge 2, the Solid sprint. If you do not know what Solid is you should be ashamed. Everytime you configure a network connection, change screen brightness, use a bluetooth device, insert a usb stick and Device Notifier pops up it is because Solid is working to make that happen for you. Solid abstracts the computer hardware and makes it simpler to create programs that helps the user to control their computer's hardware.

As the maintainer of network management in KDE I am really interested in making things work better and better in Solid, not only for network management. The sprint started last Thursday and I finally met the guys from RedHat, which by the way are hosting Forge this year. I was particularly interested in meeting them because they have been doing a good work in improving NetworkManagerQt library (yes, former libnm-qt changed its name again) and creating a new applet for NetworkManager. Both the current applet (in networkmanagement repository's master branch) and the new one (in plasma-nm repository) share NetworkManagerQt library. One of my wishes for NetworkManagerQt was to move the dbus parsing code from networkmanagement to it. Now that is a reality thanks to Jan Grulich (one of our RedHat hosts). I also need to thank Lukáš Tinkl and Daniel Nicoletti for their work on improving NetworkManagerQt.

The list of things to improve in the new applet and in network management in general includes several items. We are going to discuss those items and tackle them in the next months. It also good to know that there are some GSoC candidates interested in working in KDE's network management :-) This year looks promising for KDE's network managment.

PS: Today we finally removed Solid::Control from kde-workspace (yeah!!) One step ahead to simplify libsolid.

Migrating to kmail2

Ok, I know, migrating to kmail2 is old news now. But only today I decided to try migrating to kmail2. Gentoo is going to remove kmail1 from their repository in a few months so I did not have much of a choice.

My kmail1 configuration included one pop3 account, one gmail account and some local folders. The migration process finished and then nepomuk started indexing my e-mails (my laptop's fan screamed for several hours hehe). During the indexing process kmail2 exited with the message "Failed to fetch the resource collection". After some search on google I found this blog that explained how to fix that (it is simple, really). Then I had a problem with e-mails not being sent. The error message talked about mailfilteragent, which is installed by kmail2 itself but is started by akonadi. Restarting akonadi made it recognise the new agent and the problem was fixed.

After importing my local folders manually (the migration process did not do that) I configured my mail filters and waited until nepomuk finished indexing my e-mails.

So far so good using kmail2, no crashes and everything works almost like the old kmail1. One exception was the "go to the next unread message when opening a folder" option that is disabled by default. Alex Fistas helped me with that and now I can do with kmail2 everything I used to do with kmail1.

Update: well, the "so far so good" did not last a day :-/ I have found this really annoying bug and submitted a patch to reviewborad to fix it. With luck this will enter 4.10.3.