One of the results of the weekend in FOSDEM was that I wanted to try CentOS. After downloading the DVD (5.1), the installation within VirtualBox went very smooth. It gives you the options ‘GNome Desktop’, ‘KDE Desktop’ or ‘Server’. Although I’m testing it for the last option, I, of course, picked the second, just to see what it looks like.

After installation and the usual wizzard for the usual stuff, it started KDE 3.5.4. The panel at the bottom showed some icons to the OpenOffice.org applications and an icon for ‘E-mail and managing calanders’. I clicked on it and… voila it started… EVOLUTION. Although I *might* understand that shipping Firefox as default browser instead of Konqueror ( not really, but ok ). I do not understand why they choose Evolution over Kontact. The rest of the KDE seems pretty standard.

Now it’s time to find out what CentOS does differently compared to say Debian when used as a server and explore their tools.

This weekend was FOSDEM, we went with 4 people and a baby of 9 months, while the woman left after the Tux in Hollywood talk to the city centre to find some chocolate, we went to see various talks.

I’ve seen a couple of interesting talks. Not only did I want to catch up on the state of some things, I also had some things I wanted to know more about which we run into at work. Some random observations:

I missed the KDE for some unknown reason. Amarok2 talk was ok, although it started with sheets, which were a bit boring. It was called ‘Amarok2′, so I expected more of the live demo. It’s always a bit difficult to determine from the title of a presentation in which direction it will go, but the playlist looks nice and smooth, compliments for that.

After that we went to ‘Clutter: animating the desktop’ in the GNome room, it was interesting to see, but I missed the start and could not really recover from that. I don’t understand where to place the thing they made in the software stack. But it’s good to see they are working on nice libraries which makes the desktop appealing to the public. The presentation after that was about Elise. It’s a piece of software which aims to be the equivalent of Microsofts Media Centre. It uses the Clutter stuff and the presentation was awesome. As soon as they have television integrated to their software I will switch from mythtv to that. Or at least give it a shot.

To end the first day, we went to the presentation about dstat, it is a cli tool which can be used to analyse your system, you can actually determine what your system is doing, which process is at the top of the kernel’s oom-first-to-be-killed list and to enable as much details as possible. That’s something we can definitly use at work to analyse some servers.

After that we teamed up again at the hotel, eat krokodile steak in some african like restaurant and played a game of Cluedo before we got interrupted by the baby requiring both parents to try to calm here.

On Sunday we wanted to get to the Virtual Box presentation. But we were not alone in that wish. We could not join the room anymore so we decided to find something else, the result of the random pointing at the schedule was Miro. And it was good. Miro is application which is made under the Mozilla umbrella. It’s aim is to make it possible to watch movies. They pointed out that it’s not really The Internet Way to have all the video’s and movies on centralised servers like youtube or google video. It’s a valid point, but we decided the actual cause (bandwith) is not solved by this solution. Although it’s absolutely cool software which I’m happy to try out soon.

The Farsight presentation was given in the cross desktop room. They explained how they have designed their video conferencing software, and that makes a lot of sense to me. It will make video conferencing so much better if they succeed. Linux / Desktop still lacks a bit in those areas and this can fill that gap. Being able to add videoconfering to random applications with not more then 100 LOC as the way it should be and give a large boost. Especially when integrated in all the popular IM applications. Not sure if it will play nicely with Phonon, or why decided not to use it. Could have been a good question for a cross-desktop talk.

LVM2 presentation was fun, the presention was a demonstration about what has changed lately. I always found LVM difficult to understand when you haven’t worked with it for a while. Some operations are difficult for me to understand why they implemented it that way. But they’ve fixed some, like making a volume bigger, no longer requires to extend the filesystem as well, it’s now done automatically. I think we’ll make lvm standard on new servers from now on.

We ended with a presentation of ZeroConf in the OpenSUSE room. What we could see was nice, the API for KDE is nice and I might have some idea’s for Mailody in that area now. But first I want to try some things to see how it works in practise. They said it was already available in Kopete, but I couldn’t get find it in my Kopete (KDE3). It’s great technology and strange it is not more popular…

I also liked meeting a bunch of new faces. Ana was of course the most important ‘new face’ ;-). It was great to say Hi to everyone again, although I didn’t have time to discuss things or talk to people for longer.

I went to see Janneke Pis, the female version of Manneken Pis in the centre of Brussels, eat something in that area and went back to The Netherlands. Awesome weekend!

Yesterday after we made the planning for kdepim for the next KDE release, we started discussing Akonadi. Kevin Krammer and myself shared our experiences when working with Akonadi. We had some questions about the API, which Volker Krause could answer and clarify. Some ‘small’ things, like -what do I use as a parent widget for my dialogs in the resources- lead to some intensive thinking about how to solve that. You can not imagen how helpfull and productive such discussions are when you can do them in a group.

After that we went to the Italian for dinner – I guess they don’t deliver here ;-). Dinner was sponsored by KDAB this time! After dinner we went back to the Intevation building to do more hack. I determined we work best on Pizza, because the commits were flying in like crazy. Volker was working on the cache policies for Akonadi, that are the setting which deal with how long the data should be in the database – you can imagen for pop, you never want to expire/delete messages and for IMAP you want less restrictive settings. It also deals with the interval for checking for new mail for example, he also committed code which loads the contents of a folder on demand, crucial stuff. Tobias Koenig and Sebastian Trüg are working on the Nepomuk stuff. Thomas McGuire and I started to work on the server test library. Those are needed to determine the capabilities of a server, to determine the authentication types possible for IMAP, SMTP. Thomas extended that for POP3, so KMail can soon make use of that library. What the other ones are working on, is slightly beyond my scope. but it must also be important as they continued after I went back to the hotel.

Today we started hacking again. I will try to get Mailody a bit more stable in showing the headers and working with Akonadi. It should be possible. Yesterday just before we left, Volker was reading newsgroups with Mailody. I guess I can write a sequal to my ‘how to write a mail reader in ten minutese’, I will call it ‘how to write a newsgroup reader in 1 minute’. Awesome stuff.

Yesterday I drove to Osnabrück. After checking in, I was just in time for the start of the meeting. After some small conversation we went to the restaurant, and had a good dinner. The dinner was sponsered by Intevation. Even if I wanted to spent money on this event, it is not possible ;-)

Today we kicked off with a demonstration by Thorsten Staerk, which showed us Krep. Krep is an interface around the GNU tool grep. It makes it really easy to find certain strings in a big text. You just get a window splitted in two parts. One part shows the text and in the other area you can enter multiple regex based expressions of items you want to find. It also works on streaming output, so you can actually redirect the debug output of your application to it, filter out what you want and see the lines you are interested in.

After that Jaroslaw Staniek gave a presentation on his Windows laptop about the current state of kdepim and his tools. Most of kdepim is working and we got a great presentation of it. He also showed us the Windows way of debugging and the possibilities of it. We were all so jalous….

Currently it’s Carnaval in Osnabrück, so even when we are on the third (or is it fourth?) floor, we hear a lot of noise from outside, there are many, many people out there, all starting to get drunk. It’s kind of amusing. We joined the crowd and went out for a small lunch at the “Subway”, just before we discussed the plans for 4.1.

That discussion was pretty short and on-topic. Till Adam joined the discussion with a video link. We agreed what we want to do and when. Basically for 4.1.0 the plan is to deliver a stable kdepim. Not based on Akonadi, but a complete port. After the release of 4.1.0 we can start porting the application piece-by-piece to Akonadi and hopefully present that for 4.2.0, but that’s almost a year away, so that’s difficult to plan at this point of time. It’s important to have the applications stable and provide the infrastructure/platform of Akonadi first. With that, it should be possible for Mailody to make a release somewhere during the 4.1.x cycle.

It has already been posted in the digest of last week. But for those who have missed it, here is a How to write a mail client in 10 minutes….