Tag Archives: Linux

KDE Community Forums present the new KDE Brainstorm

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The KDE Brainstorm, where users can post and vote for feature requests for KDE, is the most visited area of the KDE Community Forums. In an effort to improve the experience of both users and developers, the KDE Community Forums staff is proud to present a brand new version of the KDE Brainstorm.

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The new interface resembles the IdeaTorrent sites, but it is still powered by the forum software (phpBB), a clear example of the flexibility of the platform. Posting new ideas, voting, commenting and filtering the lists is now extremely easy and requires just a few mouse clicks.

For those who have Javascript-enabled browsers, the KDE Brainstorm sports a complete AJAX interface. In case Javascript is not available, the interface gracefully degrades to a non-AJAX version, making it useful even for people who do not want to run Javascript in their browsers.

Aside from the new looks, the KDE Brainstorm keeps its strong foundations: the Idea Moderators, whose hard work is essential to pre-screen and approve the ideas, the KDE Community Forums staff to keep the system up and runing, and of course the KDE community.

Check out the new Brainstorm, and let us know what you think!

The next iteration of the Plasma FAQ – call for help

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A few may know that I more or less maintain the Plasma FAQ page on KDE’s UserBase. Given the rapid advance of Plasma between KDE versions, each time a new version is out a new FAQ needs to be made, as the content rapidly becomes obsolete. For 4.3, unfortunately, I’m not sure I’ll be able to put a new version up in time for the 4.3 release.

The reason is mostly practical: it takes a bit of work to collect and add information, and currently my free time is limited due to a rather heavy workload and some other commitments. As UserBase is a wiki, I thought I could ask the KDE community at large if I could get some help in having a new version ready before release.

The big advantage is that you don’t need any special coding skills, just a knowledge of Plasma and being able to run 4.3 (RC2 at this stage). I have already made a skeleton page: people can edit bits of information, removing outdated items and adding new ones. Also, Aaron’s excellent screencast can be used to see which new features are in Plasma.

If you have wondered how to help KDE without being able to code, this is a good opportunity to do so!

New, refactored System Settings

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A rather big change has gone into KDE’s SVN recently: Ben Cooksley (bcooksley) and Mathias Soeken (msoeken) have committed a complete rework of System Settings.

Compared to the previous implementation, System Settings now has two operational modes, one being the current icon-based view since KDE 4 (and also seen in Kubuntu prior to KDE 4), and a second view, named “Classic”, which reimplements the old KControl look and feel. The latter change is probably very welcome to anyone who found System Settings less useful than the old KControl. The current view used can be changed in the configuration options. In addition, upon hovering an icon or module that show if there are any sub-modules associated.

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Gene search applet: suggestions and code review needed

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In the past months I’ve always wanted to write a small Plasma applet to aid me in some boring tasks as a bioinformatician. One example (for the non-scientific crowd out there) is when I find a specific gene out of my analysis work which I want to take a look at. I am often lazy, so instead of firing up the browser to look at the online resources, I wanted to write something which could access said resources programmatically.

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