Do you use KDE software?

Do you use KDE software for your science?

Gratuitous picture of Einstein

Update: Well, actually, I have plenty of answers now Thanks very much. I don’t need any more responses, but if you’d like to let me know what you think then by all means go ahead (probably won’t make the article though).

There are (I sense) a few scientists in KDE land and some of us (Luca and myself at least) are beginning to ponder how we can achieve world domination for KDE through the sciences.

We have some pretty cool sciencey apps already:

• Kile (LaTeX)
• Cantor (young, but promising)
• KBibTeX (I crave a Platform 4 port)
• LabPlot (Platform 4 port in progress)
• Kalzium
• Kalgebra
• KStars
• Marble
• Rocs
• KmPlot
• Step

We also have external projects such as SciDAVis that are working with KDE projects (LabPlot in that case).

So, if you can spare some time for me, here’s a mini open interview for you:
(Edit: made it an ordered list for easier answering and added questions 9 and 10 from Luca)

1. Who are you and what field to you work in? (Add where and for whom if you’re happy to do so)
2. What KDE software do you use in general?
3. What KDE software do you use specifically for science?
4. Were you aware of all the applications I listed above?
5. If not, are there any you weren’t aware of that could be relevant to you?
6. What is missing among KDE software for you?
7. Would you be interested in a dedicated mailing list/website area for KDE software for scientists?
8. What else would you like to tell me?
9. If you developed scientific software/algorithms, did you ever consider KDE users/platform as a target? If not, why?
10. Did KDE software help you with your research in general? For example, do Kontact or Plasma widgets help keep things orrganised?

I’d like to make you comments up in to some kind of Dot article – they may be edited and it is likely that not everything will be used. You can either drop a comment using the form here or mail me directly at myfirstname.mylastname at gmail.com (if that isn’t obvious then go to the about page and solve a captcha to reveal my email address). If you use the comment form then please use your genuine email address (it is never disclosed) if you’d be willing for me to come back with some follow-up questions.

Also, if you’re making it to Akademy, there are at least a couple of KDE-science things that you can attend: Luca’s BoF at 1500 on Tuesday (see the wiki page) and my lightning talk at 1030 on Sunday.

It could be you... (Image: victoriapeckham CC-by)

1. Not enough time
2. Not sure where or how to contribute
3. I’m not confident enough in my own skills

What stopped me?

Thinking back, there were a few things that delayed my own involvement with KDE. Time was a big one: I didn’t want to be that guy who turns up, makes some suggestions and promises but never delivers, so I waited for when I might have more time. I knew where I would start (Dot articles) but there was a bit of a lack of confidence in my own knowledge too – that I’d get found out writing about stuff I don’t understand as well as all you guys. I still get that , but hopefully it just makes me do my research a bit better

There is never a good time

Eventually, I realised that I will probably be busy for the rest of my working life. Actually I realise now that I had far more time when I thought I was too busy than I have now. The result is that I am that guy who turns up, makes suggestions and promises to do things but doesn’t deliver Most of us are. But the thing I realise now is that a lot of people doing some of the things that need doing some of the time can achieve quite a lot. It really is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

You don’t know enough, but then – who does?

When you start contributing, you’ll likely realise you don’t really know what you’re doing and chances are you will screw up (but people are nice about that, generally). But you will be bringing in some skills that others don’t have. Perhaps you’re a native speaker of a language we need to use for a press release (so you can instinctively see when something doesn’t sound quite right) or you have language skills that allow you to translate useful information or act as a bridge to KDE communities around the world. Perhaps you have useful contacts in education, among artists or in science that allow you to put (potential) users in touch with developers.

Start where you want to start

The possibilities for contributing to KDE are vast. Jos (and us other promo peeps) would like your help, but there are plenty of other options too. There can be few application teams that wouldn’t welcome more developers and we always need artists. Whatever you want to do, you can get involved.

So, why not contribute?

If you would like to help out, but there is something holding you back then why not tell us? We need people and if there are things we can do better to make contributing easier it would be great to know.

Design KDE swag

KDE has a new spreadshirt store with a couple of nice t-shirts by Sebas and some badges including some work by Ingo.

Under construction by Ingo

One of my suggestions - help needed

So, what’s in it for you? Well, you get to say you contributed to KDE and might get to see your creation wandering around Akademy, plus there is talk of giving the designers a free copy of the t-shirt, or whatever, containing their design.

Here’s some additional info courtesy of Justin on the kde-promo mailing list:

1. We do have some existing logos and things you may want to use or at least be aware of which are stored on the Community wiki. Logos are in the KDE clipart link at the top.
2. Spreadshirt allows for both “vector” and “pixel” designs but due to the nature of of the t-shirt medium it is highly advisable to design in a program that produces the vector graphics so we can scale them as needed without distorting your images. Though I think in some cases if we only have “pixel” versions we might be able to work with it if the resolution is high enough.
3. Since this is printed media you should design everything in CMYK colorschemes rather than RGB.
4. More details about the Spreadshirt “design” uploading process can be found on the Spreadshirt site
5. “Be Creative”…”Be Inspired”….”Be Free”

Provide your science photos for LabPlot

Something I started working on a number of months ago and have recently come back to is working on a website redesign for LabPlot.

The current draft is at lp.asinen.org (there’s still a lot to do, integration of the logo in the header definitely needs a lot of work). One of the things I want to have is a rotating image in the sidebar. I have a few already – one is displayed and the rotator is implemented but I’ve lost the copyright info for the others so only displaying one at present. It would be great to get photos from actual KDE people in Science – I’m after things that are fairly simple, optionally quite abstract from any branch of science. You should be prepared to license the image under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (or something more liberal). You can send images to me at stua…@gmail.com (click on the dots to solve the CAPTCHA) or just put a link to an online image in the comments. Please specify the license and make it clear that you’re the copyright holder in your comment or email.

My operating system hard disk has failed (again – kinda, poking it from a live CD shows that the filesystem isn’t recognised, though I can mount it if I explicitly state it is ext4 and a fair bit of the data is still there). It’s a vintage 70GB Seagate, the SMART diagnostics are not good, it has got corrupted before and I didn’t really trust it anyway – data is on another disk.

So, it’s time for a new disk.

Broken PC, by Sarah Baker (cc-by)

I also need to decide what distro to put on the new disk. The old system was Fedora 12 and I’m pretty happy with that, but I always have a bit of a look around when I’m doing a new install. I have a laptop on F12 too and my work PC runs F11, while a geriatric Shuttle PC acting as a media centre runs Arch.

I’m looking for a distro that:

• Packages the latest KDE SC (and does it well)
• Installs only free software by default, including drivers
• Has good repos for multimedia stuff, if not included – 3rd party is fine
• Isn’t obsessed with re-inventing the wheel (use NM, one of the major package managers/PackageKit – or have a good reason for not doing so)

Bonus points for working well with upstreams and contributing to KDE. Good (free) Radeon drivers are also a plus. I’ve recently played with Kubuntu and Mandriva in VirtualBox and not been convinced they’d be better, but maybe I missed something?

Any thoughts?

Wow, by Robyn Gallagher (CC-by)

How do we get more people interested in KDE software? We can talk about it being Free (and free), point out that it does everything that the proprietary competition can do (if that’s true) but there is always a cost in changing software: you have to learn new stuff. Therefore our biggest openings are when the alternatives suck and so people are looking for change or when our stuff just leaves the competition for dead. The latter one is about the wow factor – something in our software that makes the casual observer sit up and take notice and think “I want that”.

The wow factor could be visual, but it needn’t be. Here are a few things that have prompted people who see me using KDE software to ask what the application is:

• KWin – the desktop effects are really pretty slick now (this one works best on people who don’t use Macs)
• Konqueror shortcuts – I use the gg shortcut for Google and have set up ‘go’ as the shortcut for Google I’m Feeling lucky (it’s shorter and, to me, more intuitive than ggl). Several people seeing me use ‘go bbc news’ (or whatever) have been pretty much dumbfounded – “you mean you can just tell it where to go without knowing the address?”
• Kopete – “You’ve got all your chat accounts in one app?”
• Amarok – the Wikipedia integration, mainly
• Okular – people love that presentation progress indicator
• KRandR – people are suprised I can just plug a projector in and activate it with a couple of clicks
• Digikam – it’s just so cool all round, but the Facebook upload plugin is a particular winner
• KRunner – it looks fairly funky and people are impressed by the speed of launching applications (most menu launchers suck)
• Marble – fairly cool anyway, but fire up the OpenStreetMap view and people want it
• Kile – simple things like code completion and syntax highlighting impress people trying to use Notepad for LaTeX
• Gwenview – it’s just so shiny, particularly in full-screen mode

Several items in that list surprise me a little, because they’re things I take for granted (Konqueror’s web shortcuts for example) and I’m sure several of them would leave a lot of people cold. So which can we push when promoting KDE software, which can we demonstrate at events and what others can we add to the list?

I’ve started a page to track these on the wiki, so please add your own or comment below.

My Plasma Desktop at work

Thomas Hannigan suggested on kde-promo the rather good idea of making a flickr group to showcase some of the ways you can build your own ideal workspace using KDE’s Plasma Desktop. This can act as a store of various ways people have built working environments different to the ones you normally see (that could be handy for us in our own promotional activities) and also, being on flickr, can help expose KDE software to an audience that might not be aware of us.

So, if you’ve done something a bit different with your workspace, please upload the picture to the group. You can be super helpful by applying a Creative Commons license to it so that we can re-use it easily any time should we want to do so. CC-by-sa or something even more permissive would be ideal.

Update

I just noticed on the thread relating to this on kde-promo: there is also a screenshot thread on the KDE Forums which is a great additional (or alternative if you don’t have a flickr account) place to post your screenshot.

If you feel like a budding KDE news or features writer then you can check out our new brief guidelines on what is suitable content for the Dot and get writing. There are plenty of possibilities.

* Not guaranteed, but you will give us a warm fuzzy feeling inside by lightening our workload

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK. There are many differing opinions over the wisdom and even legality of various military adventures by the UK and its allies over recent years, but I don’t believe that should stop us recognising the sacrifices made by military personnel at the front lines.

If you’re in the UK or are in the fortunate position of having been helped rather than hurt in the past by UK military action then please consider making a donation. Or see if there is a similar organisation in your country supporting your veterans.

Firstly, a quick about me bit. Well quickish, I do meander a bit sometimes.

I first encountered KDE in 2004. Wow, that seems a long time ago now, but I know that still makes me a relative newb compared to some of you. I didn’t know it was KDE, only that is was a world away from CDE, that I’d encountered while studying Physics at a university near Birmingham in England and that I liked it better than whatever was on Red Hat.

Places I’ve lived (from Marble). Wales was wet

For reasons that now escape me, I made like Einstein and became a patent examiner at the Patent Office*, but after three years and no inspired breakthrough in physics I left and now I’m working here in Southampton on the south coast of the UK on a project with these guys from Sweden. I spend most of my working life looking at or thinking about mud.

I finally got around to contributing something (other than a bug report) to the community I’d been freeloading off for four years at the end of 2008, making some comments on KDE-promo and writing a couple of articles for the Dot. Then it went quiet for a bit before I popped up again a few months ago and started getting a bit more active. I’m lucky enough to be going to the KDE promo sprint so I’ll actually get to meet some of the great promo peeps in person. I have high expectations since they all seem pretty awesome

* Interesting place to work while getting into free software. I did spot certain inconsistencies between what I did for a job and what I believed in and they were some of the reasons for me leaving that world. Probably I’ll come back to that in a future post.

Now, the call for help

Ok, enough about me – I’m surprised you’re still reading really, or did you just skip to the interesting bit? I’m currently researching an article on KDE on Windows and I’d like some help. I’d like to hear from anyone reading this who encountered KDE applications for the first time on Windows and is therefore here because of the KDE on Windows project. Bonus points if you got in to KDE development or any other kind of contributing as a result, but I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who simply got in to using KDE software after using an app on Windows. Just drop me a comment here and use your genuine email address when filling in the comment form and I’ll get in touch (your email isn’t published). Or you can contact me directly at stua…@gmail.com