Tag Archive

Some exciting news! Kubuntu: I’m back!!!

Posted on February 2, 2024 by sgmoore

It’s official, the Kubuntu Council has hired me part time to work on the 24.04 LTS release, preparation for Plasma 6, and to bring life back into the Distribution. First I want thank the Kubuntu Council for this opportunity and I plan a long and successful journey together!!!!

My first week ( I started midweek ):

It has been a busy one! Many meet and greets with the team and other interested parties. I had the chance to chat with Mike from Kubuntu Focus and I have to say I am absolutely amazed with the work they have done, and if you are in the market for a new laptop, you must check these out!!! https://kfocus.org Or if you want to try before you buy you can download the OS! All they ask is for an e-mail, which is completely reasonable. Hosting isn’t free! Besides, you can opt out anytime and they don’t share it with anyone. I look forward to working closely with this project.

We now have a Kubuntu Team in KDE invent https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu if you would like to join us, please don’t hesitate to ask! I have started a new Wiki and our first page is the ever important Bug triaging! It is still a WIP but you can check it out here: https://invent.kde.org/teams/distribution-kubuntu/docs/-/wikis/Bug-Triage-Story-WIP , with that said I have started the launchpad work to make tracking our bugs easier buy subscribing kubuntu-bugs to all our packages and creating proper projects for our packages missing them.

We have compiled a list of our various documentation links that need updated and Rick Timmis is updating kubuntu.org! Aaron Honeycutt has been busy with the Kubuntu Manual https://github.com/kubuntu-team/kubuntu-manual which is in good shape. We just need to improve our developer story 🙂

I have been working on the rather massive Apparmor bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apparmor/+bug/2046844 with testing the fixes from the ppa and writing profiles for the various KDE packages affected ( pretty much anything that uses webengine ) and making progress there.

My next order of business staging Frameworks 5.114 with guidance from our super awesome Rik Mills that has been doing most of the heavy lifting in Kubuntu for many years now. So thank you for that Rik 🙂

I will also start on our big transition to the Calamaras Installer! I do have experience here, so I expect it will be a smooth one.

I am so excited for the future of Kubuntu and the exciting things to come! With that said, the Kubuntu funding is community donation driven. There is enough to pay me part time for a couple contracts, but it will run out and a full-time contract would be super awesome. I am reaching out to anyone enjoying Kubuntu and want to help with the future of Kubuntu to please consider a donation! We are working on more donation options, but for now you can donate through paypal at https://kubuntu.org/donate/ Thank you!!!!!

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KDE: Snaps, KDEneon, Debian and my future.

Posted on December 15, 2023 by sgmoore

First I want to thank KDE for this wonderful write up on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kde_akademy-2023-over-a-million-reasons-why-activity-7139965489153208320-PNem?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop It made my heart explode with happiness as I prepped for my interview on Monday. I didn’t get the job ( Just the usual “we were very impressed with your experience, but we went with another candidate” ). I think the cosmos is determined for me to hold out for the ‘project’ even though it is only part time work, it is work and if I have learned nothing else this year, I have learned how to live on a very tight budget! It turns out many of the things we think we need, we don’t. So with hard work of Kevin Ottens ( Thank you!!!! ), this should be finalized after the first of the year. This plan also allows me time for KDEneon and Debian work. I am happy with it and look forward to the coming year and the exciting things to come.

My holiday plans are to help the Debian KDE team with the KF6 packaging, On-going KDEneon efforts, and continue to make sure the snaps Qt6 transition is a painless as possible. I will also be working on the qt6 kde-neon extension.

In closing, despite my terrible luck with job-hunting, I am in an amazing community and I am truly grateful to each and every one of you. It has been a great year and I have added many new things to my skillset and I look forward to many more next year.

As usual, it is that time of month where I have not raised enough to pay my internet bill ( phone company taking an extra 200.00 didn’t help ) If you can spare any change ( any amount helps! ) please consider a donation https://gofund.me/b74e4c6f Thank you!

I hope everyone has a wonderful <insert your holiday here> !!!!!

~ Scarlett

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KDE: KDE Snaps 23.08.4, PIM! KDE neon, Debian

Posted on December 10, 2023 by sgmoore

KDE PIM Kaddressbook snap
KDE PIM Kaddressbook snap

KDE Snaps:

This weeks big accomplishment is KDE PIM snaps! I have successfully added akonadi as a service via an akonadi content snap and running it as a service. Kaddressbook is our first PIM snap with this setup and it works flawlessly! It is available in the snap store. I have a pile of MRs awaiting approvals, so keep your eye out for the rest of PIM in the next day.

KDE Applications 23.08.4 has been released and available in the snap store.

Krita 5.2.2 has been released.

I have created a new kde-qt6 snap as the qt-framework snap has not been updated and the maintainer is unreachable. It is in edge and I will be rebuilding our kf6 snap with this one.

I am debugging an issue with the latest Labplot release.

KDE neon:

This week I helped with frameworks release 5.113 and KDE applications 23.08.4.

I also worked on the ongoing Unstable turning red into green builds as the porting to qt6 continues.

Debian:

With my on going learning packaging for all the programming languages, Rust packaging: I started on Rustic https://github.com/rustic-rs/rustic unfortunately, it was a bit of wasted time as it depends on a feature of tracing-subcriber that depends on matchers which has a grave bug, so it remains disabled.

Personal:

I do have an interview tomorrow! And it looks like the ‘project’ may go through after the new year. So things are looking up, unfortunately I must still ask, if you have any spare change please consider a donation. The phone company decided to take an extra $200.00 I didn’t have to spare and while I resolved it, they refused a refund, but gave me a credit to next months bill, which doesn’t help me now. Thank you for your consideration.

https://gofund.me/b74e4c6f

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KDE neon and snaps, Debian Weekly report.

Posted on December 1, 2023 by sgmoore

While the winter sets in, I have been mostly busy following up on job leads and applying to anything and everything. Something has to stick… I am trying! Even out of industry.

Debian:

This weeks main focus was getting involved and familiar with Debian rust-packaging. It is really quite different from other teams! I was successful and the MR is https://salsa.debian.org/rust-team/debcargo-conf/-/merge_requests/566 if anyone on the rust team can take a gander, I will upload when merged. I will get a few more under my belt next week now that I understand the process.

KDE neon:

Unfortunately, I did not have much time for neon, but I did get some red builds fixed and started uploading the new signing key for mauikit* applications.

KDE snaps:

A big thank you to Josh and Albert for merging all my MR’s and I have finished 23.08.3 releases to stable.

I released a new Krita 5.2.1 with some runtime fixes, please update.

Still no source of income so I must ask, if you have any spare change, please consider a donation.

Thank you, Scarlett

https://gofund.me/b74e4c6f

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A Season to be Thankful, Thank You!

Posted on November 22, 2023 by sgmoore

Thank you

Here in the US, we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow. I am thankful to be a part of such an amazing community. I have raised enough to manage another month and I can continue my job search in less dire circumstances. I am truly grateful to each and every one of you. While my focus will remain on my job hunt, I will be back next week at reduced hours to maintain my work. I have to alter my priorities to keep my hours reduced enough to focus on my job search so I will be contributing as follows:

  • I will ramp up my Debian work to increase my skillset here, as it is an important skill and one that I am seeking employment in. I will be increasing the areas of expertise in packaging different languages, security updates and help the KDE team with the Qt6 transition.
  • I will continue to help where I can with KDE neon, because well, I love KDE neon and our team. If time allows, I would like to help with moving forward with Harald’s initial work to transition us to use Gitlab infrastructure. It will be a big move from Jenkins.
  • Snaps: I will only support our Qt5 snaps at this point. That entails possibly one more release and I will maintain / fix bugs on these. Snaps have been a huge chunk of my time ( 191 snaps! plus content packs, extensions, updates, fixes, solving confinement issues ). I simply cannot do it all over again with Qt6. Unless of course someone wants to fund my work. Then I will reconsider.
  • I am also going to expand my knowledge in the containerized world with Flatpaks and refresher on Appimages to flesh out my resume.

Again, thank you all ever so much for your support. Though, this didn’t end up being my year, I am confident I will find my place in this career path in the near future.

I could still use some funds to make land and car payment or at least partial. We purchased from friends so they won’t take away my wheels or home, I just feel bad I haven’t been able to make payments in awhile. Thanks for your consideration.

https://gofund.me/f9f0fb53

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Farewell for now, again.

Posted on November 15, 2023 by sgmoore

I write this with a heavy heart. Exactly one year ago I lost my beloved job. That was all me, I had a terrible run of bad luck with COVID and I never caught up. In the last year, I have taken on several new projects to re-create a new image for myself and to make up for the previous year, and I believe I worked very hard in doing so. Unfortunately, my seemingly good interviews have not ended in a job. One potential job I did not put as much effort into as I should have because I put all my cards into a project that didn’t quite turn out as expected. I do hope it still goes through for the KDE community as a whole, because well it is really cool, but it isn’t the job I thought. I have been relying purely on donations for survival and it simply isn’t enough. I am faced once again with no internet to even do my open source work ( Snaps, KDE neon, Debian and everything that links to those ). I simply can’t put the burden of my stubbornness on my family any longer. Bills are long over due, we have learned to live without many things, but the stress of essential bills, living expenses going unpaid is simply too much. I do thank each and every one of you that has contributed to my fundraisers. It means the world to me that people do care. It just isn’t enough. So with the sunset of Witch Wells, I am sun setting my software career for now and will be looking for something, anything local just to pay some bills, calm our nerves and hopefully find some happiness again. I am tired, broke, stressed out and burned out. I will be back when I can breathe again with my finances.

If you can spare some changes to help with gas, propane, internet I would be so ever grateful.

So long for now.

~ Scarlett

https://gofund.me/1346869d

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KDE: Krita 5.2.1 Snap! KDE Gear 23.08.3 Snaps and KDE neon release

Posted on November 10, 2023 by sgmoore

Krita 5.2.1
Krita 5.2.1

Today https://kde.org/announcements/gear/23.08.3/ !

I have finished all the snaps and have released to stable channel, if the snap you are looking for hasn’t arrived yet, there is an MR open and it will be soon!

I have finished all the applications in KDE neon and they are available in Unstable and I am snapshotting User edition and they will be available shortly.

Krita 5.2.1 Snap is complete and released to stable channel!

Enjoy!

I fixed some issues with a few of our –classic snaps, namely in Wayland sessions by bundling some missing wayland Qt libs. They should no longer go BOOM upon launch.

KF6 SDK snap is complete. Next freetime I will work on runtime and launcher.

Down to the last part on the akonadi snap build so PIM snaps are coming soon.

Personal:

As many of you know, I have been out of proper employment for a year now. I had a hopeful project in the works, but it is out of my hands now and the new project holder was only allowed to give me part time and it is still not in stone with further delays. I understand that these things take time and refinement to go through. I have put myself and my family in dire straights with my stubbornness and need to re-evaluate my priorities. I enjoy doing this work very much, but I also need to pay some very over due bills and well life costs money. With that said, I hope to have an interview next week with a local hospital that needs a Linux Administrator. Who knew someone in nowhere Arizona would have a Linux shop! Anyway, I will be going back to my grass roots, network administration is where I started way back in 1996. I will still be around! Just not at the level I am now obviously. I will still be in the project if they allow, I need 2 jobs to clean up this mess I have made for myself. In my spare time I will of course keep up with Debian and KDE neon and Snaps!

If you can spare any change to help with my gas for interview and 45 minute commute till I get a paycheck I would be super grateful. Hopefully I won’t have to ask for much longer. Thank you so much to everyone that has helped over the last year, it means the world to me.

https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

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KDE: Big fixes for Snaps! Debian and KDE neon updates.

Posted on November 3, 2023 by sgmoore

KDE Snap Marble

A big thank you goes to my parents this week for contributing to my survival fund. With that I was able to make a big push on fixing some outstanding issues on some of our snaps.

  • Marble! Now shows all maps and finds its plugins properly.
  • Neochat: A significant fix regarding libsecret in which left users with endless loading screen because it could not authenticate. Bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473003 This actually affected any app in KDE that uses libsecret… KDE desktops do not ship with gnome-keyring, so this is why sometimes installing it would fix the issue ( if the portals were installed and working correctly AND XDG variables were set correctly). In most cases it works out of the box. In some cases, you must install gnome-keychain via apt and reinstall neochat to setup a new account and it will then prompt to save to keyring. If you are a KDE desktop user and wish to use Kwallet you can sudo snap connect neochat:password-manager-service :password-manager-service , my next order of business is to set up kwallet as a service inside the snaps. Should funding allow.

KDE neon:

No major blowups this week. Worked out issues with kmail-account-wizard thanks to David R! This is now in the hands of upstream ( porting not complete )

Worked on more orange -> green packaging fixes.

Debian:

Fixed bug https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1054713 in squashfuse

Thanks for stopping by. Please help fund my efforts!

Donate

https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

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KDE: KDEneon Plasma Release, Unstable BOOM, Snaps, and Debian

Posted on October 27, 2023 by sgmoore

KDE snap Kamoso
Yang the cat bird
Yang the cat bird

While Yang our cat tries to lure in unsuspecting birds on the bird feeder, I have been busy working on many things. First things first though, a big thank you to all that donated to my Internet bill. I was able to continue my work without interruption.

KDE neon:

A busy week in KDE neon as https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.9/ was released! We have it ready to update in User edition or if you would like to download the new ISO you can find it here: https://neon.kde.org/download I highly advise the User Edition as Unstable is volatile right now with Qt6 transition and ABI breakage. Which leads me to the next busy work for the week. Plasma 6 exploded breaking unstable desktops all over, including mine! A library changed and it was not backward compatible, so we had to rebuild the Qt6 $world to get Plasma and PIM functional again. I am happy to report it is all fixed now, but I cannot stress enough, if you don’t want to chance broken things, please use the User Edition! I also continued the orange -> green build effort in making sure all our runtime dependencies are up to date. This fixes odd UI bugs and developers have all the build dependencies needed to build their applications.

KDE Snaps:

Several more 23.08.2 snaps have arrived in the snap store including the new to snaps Kamoso!

KDE snap Kamoso
KDE snap Kamoso

I have an auto-connect request to the snap-store policy folks, but until it is approved please snap connect kamoso:camera :camera I have a pile of new MR’s in for non release service applications and some fixes for issues found while testing. While this new workflow does take a bit longer waiting for approvals I like it much better as I am developing closer relationships with the application developers.

I have made significant progress on the Kf6 ( Qt6 based ) content snap. I am about 90% complete. While this doesn’t mean much for users yet, it will when KDE applications release their qt6 ports starting the next major release cycle. I will be ready!

The last bit for snap work is I have almost completed my akonadi service snap. This will connect to all KDE PIM snaps so they share data. Akonadi is the background database that ties all the PIM applications together.

Debian:

This week I have worked on updates for several golang packages including charmbracelet/lipgloss charmbracelet/bubbles, and muesli-termenv. unfortunately I am stuck golang-github-aymanbagabas-go-osc52. The work is done in salsa but the maintainer has not uploaded. I have shot an email to the maintainer. I have also begun mentoring my first potential future DD! I reviewed his python-scienceplots and python-art which should land in Debian soon.

Thanks for stopping by! As usual, if you can please spare some change, consider a donation. All proceeds go to surviving another day to work on cool things to land on your desktop!

https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

Donate

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KDE: Snap transition complete, 23.08.2 released!

Posted on October 18, 2023 by sgmoore

KDE Mascot
KDE Mascot

I have completed the the ‘Big move’! There are still a few lingering MR’s, but I am sure they will be approved so I can merge soon. With the move I was also able to release 23.08.2 for most release service applications. Enjoy!

You can find them all here: https://snapcraft.io/search?q=KDE

I still need to raise a bit more to pay the Internet bill. If you can spare some change please consider a donation.

Thank you!

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Donate

https://gofund.me/b8b69e54

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