Tag Archive

Kubuntu 24.10 Released, KDE Snaps at 24.08.2, and I lived to tell you about it!


Posted on October 14, 2024 by sgmoore

Happy 28th birthday KDE!
Happy 28th Birthday KDE!

Sorry my blog updates have been MIA. Let me tell you a story…

As some of you know, 3 months ago I was in a no fault car accident. Thankfully, the only injury was I ended up with a broken arm. ER sends me home in a sling and tells me it was a clean break and it will mend itself in no time. After a week of excruciating pain I went to my follow up doctor appointment, and with my x-rays in hand, the doc tells me it was far from a clean break and needs surgery. So after a week of my shattered bone scraping my nerves and causing pain I have never felt before, I finally go in for surgery! They put in a metal plate with screws to hold the bone in place so it can properly heal. The nerve pain was gone, so I thought I was on the mend. Some time goes by and the swelling still has not subsided, the doctors are not as concerned about this as I am, so I carry on until it becomes really inflamed and developed fever blisters. After no success in reaching the doctors office my husband borrows the neighbors car and rushes me to the ER. Good thing too, I had an infection. So after a 5 day stay in the hospital, they sent us home loaded with antibiotics and trained my husband in wound packing. We did everything right, kept the place immaculate, followed orders with the wound care, took my antibiotics, yet when they ran out there was still no sign of relief, or healing. Went to doctors and they gave me another month supply of antibiotics. Two days after my final dose my arm becomes inflamed again and with extra spectacular levels of pain to go with it. I call the doctor office… They said to come in on my appointment day ( 4 days away ). I asked, “You aren’t concerned with this inflammation?”, to which they replied, “No.”. Ok, maybe I am over reacting and it’s all in my head, I can power through 4 more days. The following morning my husband observed fever blisters and the wound site was clearly not right, so once again off we go to the ER. Well… thankfully we did. I was in Sepsis and could have died… After deliberating with the doctor on the course of action for treatment, the doctor accepted our plea to remove the plate, rather than tighten screws and have me drive 100 miles to hospital everyday for iv antibiotics (Umm I don’t have a car!?) So after another 4 day stay I am released into the world, alive and well. I am happy to report, the swelling is almost gone, the pain is minimal, and I am finally healing nicely. I am still in a sling and I have to be super careful and my arm was not fully knitted. So with that I am bummed to say, no traveling for me, no Ubuntu Summit 🙁

I still need help with that car, if it weren’t for our neighbor, this story would have ended much differently.

https://gofund.me/00942f47

Despite my tragic few months for my right arm, my left arm has been quite busy. Thankfully I am a lefty! On to my work progress report.

Kubuntu:

With Plasma 6! A big thank you to the Debian KDE/QT team and Rik Mills, could not have done it without you!

KDE Snaps:

All release service snaps are done! Save a few problematic ones still WIP.. I have released 24.08.2 which you can find here:

https://snapcraft.io/publisher/kde

I completed the qt6 and KDE frameworks 6 content packs for core24

Snapcraft:

I have a PR in for kde-neon-6 extension core24 support.

That’s all for now. Thanks for stopping by!


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KDE, Kubuntu, Debian: Weekly progress report Qt6 updates.


Posted on August 4, 2024 by sgmoore

Thankfully no tragedies to report this week! I thank each and everyone of you that has donated to my car fund. I still have a ways to go and could use some more help so that we can go to the funeral. https://gofund.me/033eb25d I am between contracts and work packages, so all of my work is currently for free. Thanks for your consideration.

Another very busy week getting qt6 updates in Debian, Kubuntu, and KDE snaps.

Kubuntu:

  • Merkuro and Neochat SRUs have made progress.
  • See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.

Debian:

  • qtmpv – in NEW
  • arianna – in NEW
  • kamera – experimental
  • libkdegames – experimental
  • kdenetwork-filesharing – experimental
  • xwaylandvideobridge – NEW
  • futuresql – NEW
  • kpat WIP
  • Tokodon – Done, but needs qtmpv to pass NEW
  • Gwenview – WIP needs kamera, kio-extras
  • kio-extras – Blocked on kdsoap in which the maintainer is not responding to bug reports or emails. Will likely fork in Kubuntu as our freeze quickly approaches.

KDE Snaps:

Updated QT to 6.7.2 which required a rebuild of all our snaps. Also found an issue with mismatched ffmpeg libraries, we have to bundle them for now until versioning issues are resolved.

Made new theme snaps for KDE breeze: gtk-theme-breeze, icon-theme-breeze so if you use the plasma theme breeze please install these and run

for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:icon-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} icon-theme-breeze:icon-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-3-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} gtk-theme-breeze:gtk-3-themes; done
for PLUG in $(snap connections | grep gtk-common-themes:gtk-2-themes | awk '{print $2}'); do sudo snap connect ${PLUG} gtk-theme-breeze:gtk-2-themes; done

This should resolve most theming issues. We are still waiting for kdeglobals to be merged in snapd to fix colorscheme issues, it is set for next release. I am still working on qt6 themes and working out how to implement them in snaps as they are more complex than gtk themes with shared libraries and file structures.

Please note: Please help test the –edge snaps so I can promote them to stable.

WIP Snaps or MR’s made

  • Juk (WIP)
  • Kajongg (WIP problem with pyqt)
  • Kalgebra (in store review)
  • Kdevelop (WIP)
  • Kdenlive (MR)
  • KHangman (WIP)
  • Ruqola (WIP)
  • Picmi (building)
  • Kubrick (WIP)
  • lskat (building)
  • Palapeli (MR)
  • Kanagram (WIP)
  • Labplot (WIP)
  • Ktuberling (building)
  • Ksudoku (building)
  • Ksquares (MR)

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KDE Snaps, Kubuntu, Debian updates and “Oh no, not again..”


Posted on July 28, 2024 by sgmoore

This week our family suffered another loss with my brother in-law. We will miss him dearly. On our way down to Phoenix to console our nephew that just lost his dad our car blew up. Last week we were in a roll over accident that totaled our truck and left me with a broken arm. We are now in great need of a new vehicle. Please consider donating to this fund: https://gofund.me/033eb25d . Kubuntu is out of money and I am between work packages with the ‘project’. We are 50 miles away from the closest town for supplies, essentials such as water requires a vehicle.

I have had bad years before ( covid ) in which I lost my beloved job at Blue Systems. I made a vow to myself to never let my personal life affect my work again. I have so far kept that promise to myself and without further ado I present to you my work.

Kubuntu:

  • Many SRUs awaiting verification stage including the massive apparmor policy bug.
  • sddm fix for the black screen on second boot has passed verification and should make .1 release.
  • See Debian for the qt6 Plasma / applications work.

Debian:

  • qtmpv – in NEW
  • arianna – in NEW
  • kamera – uploading today
  • kcharselect – Experimental
  • Tokodon – Done, but needs qtmpv to pass NEW
  • Gwenview – WIP needs kamera, kio-extras
  • kio-extras – WIP

KDE Snaps:

Please note: for the most part the Qt6 snaps are in –edge except the few in the ‘project’ that are heavily tested. Please help test the –edge snaps so I can promote them.

  • Elisa
  • Okular
  • Konsole ( please note this is a confined terminal for the ‘project’ and not very useful except to ssh to the host system )
  • Kwrite
  • Gwenview
  • Kate ( –classic )
  • Gcompris
  • Alligator
  • Ark
  • Blinken
  • Bomber
  • Bovo
  • Calindori
  • Digikam
  • Dragon
  • Falkon
  • Filelight

WIP Snaps or MR’s made

  • KSpacedual
  • Ksquares
  • KSudoku
  • KTuberling
  • Kubrick
  • lskat
  • Palapeli
  • Kajongg
  • Kalzium
  • Kanagram
  • Kapman
  • Katomic
  • KBlackBox
  • KBlocks
  • KBounce
  • KBreakOut
  • KBruch

Please note that 95% of the snaps are free-time work. The project covers 5. I am going as fast as I can between Kubuntu/Debian and the project commitments. Not to mention I have only one arm! My GSOC student is also helping which you can read all about here: https://soumyadghosh.github.io/website/interns/gsoc-2024/gsoc-week-3-week-7/

There is still much work to do in Kubuntu to be Plasma 6 ready for Oracular and they are out of funds. I will still continue my work regardless, but please consider donating until we can procure a consistent flow of funding : https://kubuntu.org/donate/

Thank you for reading and have a blessed day!


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Kubuntu, KDE Report. In Loving Memory of my Son.


Posted on March 28, 2024 by sgmoore

Billy and Mason

Personal:

As many of you know, I lost my beloved son March 9th. This has hit me really hard, but I am staying strong and holding on to all the wonderful memories I have. He grew up to be an amazing man, devoted christian and wonderful father. He was loved by everyone who knew him and will be truly missed by us all. I have had folks ask me how they can help. He left behind his 7 year old son Mason. Mason was Billy’s world and I would like to make sure Mason is taken care of. I have set up a gofundme for Mason and all proceeds will go to the future care of him.

https://gofund.me/25dbff0c

Work report

Kubuntu:

Bug bashing! I am triaging allthebugs for Plasma which can be seen here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/plasma-5.27/+bug/2053125

I am happy to report many of the remaining bugs have been fixed in the latest bug fix release 5.27.11.

I prepared https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.11/ and Rik uploaded to archive, thank you. Unfortunately, this and several other key fixes are stuck in transition do to the time_t64 transition, which you can read about here: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/64bit-time . It is the biggest transition in Debian/Ubuntu history and it couldn’t come at a worst time. We are aware our ISO installer is currently broken, calamares is one of those things stuck in this transition. There is a workaround in the comments of the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/calamares/+bug/2054795

Fixed an issue with plasma-welcome.

Found the fix for emojis and Aaron has kindly moved this forward with the fontconfig maintainer. Thanks!

I have received an https://kfocus.org/spec/spec-ir14.html laptop and it is truly a great machine and is now my daily driver. A big thank you to the Kfocus team! I can’t wait to show it off at https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/.

KDE Snaps:

You will see the activity in this ramp back up as the KDEneon Core project is finally a go! I will participate in the project with part time status and get everyone in the Enokia team up to speed with my snap knowledge, help prepare the qt6/kf6 transition, package plasma, and most importantly I will focus on documentation for future contributors.

I have created the ( now split ) qt6 with KDE patchset support and KDE frameworks 6 SDK and runtime snaps. I have made the kde-neon-6 extension and the PR is in: https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft/pull/4698 . Future work on the extension will include multiple versions track support and core24 support.

I have successfully created our first qt6/kf6 snap ark. They will show showing up in the store once all the required bits have been merged and published.

Thank you for stopping by.

~Scarlett


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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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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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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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