Get some popcorn and strap in for a long one! I shall delight you with some insights into crash handling and all that unicorn sparkle material.
Since Plasma 5.24 DrKonqi, Plasma’s infamous crash reporter, has gained support to route crashes through coredumpd and it is amazing - albeit a bit unused. That is why I’m telling you about it now because it’s matured a bit and is even more amazing - albeit still unused, I hope that will change.
Read MoreI’ve finally gotten annoyed enough with inotify failing randomly, because of resource exhaustion, that I’ve built a tiny app to deal with it.
Introducing kde-inotify-survey.
It features a CLI to inspect the inotify state, as well as a kded to warn and help with bumping the maximums. Assuming it turns out amazing for others I hope to progress it to kdereview soon.
For when you are using Feral Interactive’s GameMode and want some UI indication of its use.
https://invent.kde.org/sitter/plasma-gamemode
It’s boring but important! Stay with me! Please! 😘
For the past couple of years Andreas Cord-Landwehr has done excellent work on moving KDE in a more structured licensing direction. Free software licensing is an often overlooked topic, that is collectively understood to be important, but also incredibly annoying, bureaucratic, and complex. We all like to ignore it more than we should.
If you are working on KDE software you really should check out KDE’s licenses howto and maybe also glance over the comprehensive policy. In particular when you start a new repo!
Read MoreAs it recently came up I thought I should perhaps post this more publicly… As many of you will know SMB1, the super ancient protocol for windows shares, shouldn’t be used anymore. It’s been deprecated since like Windows Vista and was eventually also disabled by default in both Windows 10 and Samba. As a result you are not able to find servers that do not support either DNS-SD aka Bonjour aka Avahi, or WS-Discovery. But there’s an additional problem! Many devices (e.g. NAS) produced since the release of Vista could support newer versions of SMB but for not entirely obvious reasons do not have support for WS-Discovery-based … discovery. So, you could totally find and use a device without having to resort to SMB1 if you know its IP address. But who wants to remember IP addresses. Instead you can just have another device on the network play discovery proxy! One of the many ARM boards out there, like a rapsberrypi, would do the trick. To publish a device over DNS-SD (for Linux & OS X) you’ll first want to map its IP address to a local hostname and then publish a service on that hostname. avahi-publish -a blackbox.local 192.168.100.16 avahi-publish -s -H blackbox.local SMB_ON_BLACKBOX _smb._tcp 445 If you also want to publish for windows 10 systems you’ll additionally want to run wsdd wsdd.py -v -n BLACKBOX Do note that BLACKBOX in this case can be a netbios, or LLMNR, or DNS-SD name (Windows 10 does support name resolution via DNS-SD these days). Unfortunate caveat of wsdd is that if you want to publish multiple devices you’ll need to set up a bridge and put the different wsdd instances on different interfaces.
Harald Sitter is a long-time KDE developer who previously also worked on the music player Amarok and the Linux distribution Kubuntu. He loves talking about the nitty-gritty details of technology and making things more automated and reliable. Also on: