It features not only our traditional but nevertheless excitingly awesome blue but is alltogether striving to be as subtile as possible.

(also we fixed a long-standing bug in GRUB, I hope you noticed )

So, Mark, let us take a step back and look at what actually happened.

Kubuntu has always taken pride in being the link between the Ubuntu and KDE communities, and looking out for each’s best interest in order to facilitate the creation of exciting and revolutionary free software products. Jonathan personally has been a great advocate of the Ubuntu way even at times when KDE did not find it appealing; right now appears to be such a time.

Recently members of the Ubuntu community raised concerns about the path we are on as a project and Ubuntu Desktop as a product that Canonical has a great interest in. Not because they were being melodramatic, or because they disagreed, but because presenting divisive software after 8 months of development as a new key part of the software stack is nothing more than infantilizing the community.  Jonathan as a result suggested to join a different part of the Ubuntu project rather than leaving altogether.

You may think that KDE and other upstreams failed to deliver what is necessary to succeed in taking down the proprietary operating systems, however that does not make it true. Our colleagues creating flavors of the Ubuntu base, as well as the Kubuntu team, are part of the broader Ubuntu project, we are part of the Ubuntu community and we all share the common goal of bringing free software to all the people. Suggesting that only the Ubuntu products Canonical holds a stake in are part of the broader Ubuntu project is outright insulting to all the great community members pouring their passion into a flavor of the Ubuntu vision. Perhaps you think that what we do does not matter, but I say it does.

Download from KDE

Changes:

• Major reduction of power and CPU consumption
• Correct HTTP user-agent identification
• Fixed a seek regression introduced in 0.6.1
• A vlc-style config can be supplied at $HOME/.config/Phonon/vlc.conf to configure VLC’s behavior

Enjoy your multimedia!

Download from KDE

Changes:

• aboutToFinish() signal has been corrected to only be emitted when the source is actually about to finish
• A paused-play mechanic was implemented to enable pausing as initial playback state
• Audio output selection on Microsoft Windows was improved
• Desktop file now passes freedesktop validation

Enjoy your multimedia!

Half the council is nearing the end of their 2 year appointment so we need to hold elections for the open positions to the council. This could be you! If you are a Kubuntu Member and are willing to turn up to Kubuntu meetings as much as possible for the next couple of years do consider putting your name forward.

We are particularly encouraging non-developers to put their name forward, as we feel that a less development focused council is beneficial for the Kubuntu community.

To put your name forward make sure you update your wiki page and then post to the kubuntu-devel email list (you will have to subscribe first).

To nominate someone else also write to the kubuntu-devel list. It might be a good idea to first have a chat with the affected person. Please note that everyone who was nominated by someone else will have to verify their nomination.

Closing date for nominations is June 9 at 23:59 UTC.

The poll will start on June 10. Voting instructions will be sent to members of the kubuntu-members team with public email addresses on Launchpad directly. If you do not have a public email address in Launchpad and wish to vote, email me privately with the address you’d like used you will get a ballot as well.

regards,
Harald for the Kubuntu Council

Phonon VLC 0.5.0 may be obtained from KDE’s servers as usual.

For more information on Phonon GStreamer 4.6.0 head on over to Trever’s amazing blog post.

by su-lin@flickr

Phonon VLC 0.5 is the most stable release yet to see the light of day!

Almost the entire code base was redone to be faster, more efficient, more maintainable and of course more reliable. Additionally this release introduces compatibility with the upcoming VLC 2.0 release as well as improved support for more advanced video features such as subtitle and audio channel selection.

Enjoy your multimedia!

Harald and the Phonominals.

For those who have not yet read about it, let me quickly recap the situation. Up until now Kubuntu was a Canonical supported flavor of Ubuntu. This essentially means that you can buy a support contract from Canonical to help you with your Kubuntu infrastructure. Every once in a while Canonical would stamp ‘LTS’ on a Kubuntu release to indicate that they would support this release for 3 or 5 of years to come (delivering security and major bug fixes primarily). The 11.10 release is the last release for which Canonical offers these services. As a direct consequence Jonathan Riddell, a good friend of mine and fearless leader of Kubuntu, will work on other technology during work hours.

You might have noticed that I was writing a lot about Canonical just now, and the reason for this is that the change mostly is about Canonical and not Kubuntu.
Kubuntu is and always has been a mostly community driven project. To give you an idea what mostly means in this case: out of the 25 people who notably contributed in the past year, 1 person was employed by Canonical to do so (i.e. 4% of general Kubuntu work was financed by Canonical). Please do not get me wrong though. Jonathan is a great developer and does a considerable amount of work, particularly in those areas where the community currently lacks motivation, hence some workflow revision is in order to make the ‘new’ Kubuntu equally efficient.

So what changes for real?

• No commercial support from Canonical for future releases.
• Jonathan Riddell will work on non-Kubuntu stuff during work hours.
• Alignment of Kubuntu with other siblings like Edubuntu, Lubuntu and Xubuntu.
  For those who care: on a technical level this means that a considerable amount of Kubuntu maintained software will be moved from the main to the universe archive.
• Probably some workflow changes that are yet to be discussed.

Is this bad?
It probably is if you wanted to adopt Kubuntu in your company and were counting on a Canonical support contract. However this is probably more of Canonical’s loss than your’s. As noted earlier there is a pool of more than 25 people one could employ directly to get the same result, perhaps even better. It is certainly sad that Jonathan will not be able to continue getting payed for working on his baby though.

Is this good?
Moving to universe bares a great deal of opportunities for Kubuntu. Primarily it gives the community yet bigger control over what the distribution looks like as we do not need to get software approved to be worthy of Canonical’s support. At the same time it also reduces the policy overhead (main inclusion for those who have heared of it). The detanglement allows us to move even closer to KDE without having to worry about conflicting interests, as what is good for KDE is not necessarily what is good for Canonical.
All in all I expect Kubuntu to become more agile and continue to regularly deliver an easy to use Linux distribution featuring the latest and greatest KDE software.

There is an occasional and not very amusing urban myth that Kubuntu is a stepchild of Ubuntu based on the idea that Canonical is not giving the same amount of care to Kubuntu as other flavors of Ubuntu. It’s not true because Canonical has given much more care to Kubuntu than many other flavours. But all those who believe in this myth may now rejoice as the stepchild is moving out and going to share a flat with its much loved siblings \o/

Some time ago I started writing a mobile UDS app to manage UDS affairs on my mobile phone. Being a Qt fanboy and owning multiple phones with Qt the choice of toolkit was rather obvious. And oh boy is it awesome.

Right now there are stable versions for Meego 1.2 Harmattan (Nokia N9 and N950) as well as Symbian^3 (basically every Nokia Symbian device after the N8). Additionally there is a working prototype for Maemo 5 (Nokia N900) as well as platform UI code for Android >= 1.6.

Get it while it is hot! From the Nokia Store (for the N9) or here (for Symbian^3).

If you want to help with the Desktop/Maemo5/Android UI please poke me on IRC or drop me a mail.

The code is available at projects.developer.nokia.com.

In 2004 a new video player named Codeine was presented by former Amarok rockstar Max Howell, later adopted by Ian and turned into Dragon Player 2, which has served the KDE workspace as default video player for almost 4 years now.

Today the KDE Multimedia community is proud to announce the next evolutionary stage of this simple but powerful player.

Dragon Player 3 is being created using the latest terrific technologies: Phonon’s currently evolving support for QML/Qt Quick and Qt Quick itself. The combination of these technologies allows for rapid creation of awesome looking graphical applications for media playback.

The estimated feature set of Dragon Player 3 is definitely something to long for.

• As simple and easy to use as its predecessor
• All the features of its predecessor
• Smooth animations on startup
• A more visual and more usable recently viewed display
• On playback start both Video and Audio fade in, on stop they fade out
• A revolutionary approach that will make it tons easier to watch a series of videos (yet to be unveiled ;))

Dragon Player 3 will earliest arrive with the KDE workspace 4.8 release, though 4.9 seems more likely.

The current development version of Dragon Player 3 is available in my scratch repository on git.kde.org. It depends on the qml branches of both Phonon and Phonon GStreamer as well as the Qt Quick Desktop Components.

Now available on a KDE FTP mirror near you.

This thrilling new release of the VLC backend for Phonon features vastly improved subtitle loading, support for it, s3m and xm, as well as greater stability in case of a broken libvlc  installation.

But above all it enables audio CD playback in Amarok. Yes. We also care about legacy media . With latest Amarok and Phonon VLC 0.4.1 you are finally able to play audio CDs properly. Of course this improvement is not limited to Amarok, but available to every application that uses Phonon, thanks to the wonderful architecture of Phonon.

by xcode@flickr

Amarok’s Myriam Schweingruber said the following about this wonderful new release:

you people rock and really help us improve the user experience!

VideoLan’s Jean-Baptiste Kempf added:

 pVLC will rock your audiophile poney!

Have fun with Phonon VLC 0.4.1!