rat on red » planet.pardus

Universal Apps

Gökmen Göksel — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:43:38 +0000

In Pardus Corporate we use KDE 3.5.10 and some of our new tools from Pardus 2009 which runs KDE 4.3.5 (for now). Tools in 2009 are designed to work with the current desktop environment which is KDE 4.3.5. So, we have a problem in Pardus Corporate side; we need kdelibs4 on KDE 3.5.10. It is possible to use kdelibs4 but in some ways it is not a great idea.

We think that we can create a solution for making universal apps which run on KDE 4.x with kdelibs4 and for others (kde3.5, xfce etc.) which use Qt libs.

Most of the code in our applications just depends on Qt 4.x, but some important parts for the desktop integration depends on KDE.

Basics of desktop integration

Icons
Colors
Fonts
Language Selection
Translations
Notifications
…

I started with KIconLoader port for Qt, which I have found the C++ version on this blog entry and ported it to Python from scratch. For colors, fonts or language selection it is enough to read the user’s kdeglobals files. Notifications are handled by PyNotify on Qt-Only mode… When things started to grow up I decided to merge them under the name of Pardus Desktop Services (Pds).

Example Usage of Pds

>> import pds >> desktop = pds.Pds() >> desktop.session.Name 'kde' >> desktop.session.Version '4' >> desktop.config_file '/home/gokmen/.kde4/share/config/kdeglobals' >> desktop.settings('Icons/Theme', 'default') u'oxygen'

Other Classes

PDS also provides the following classes;

QIconLoader – for icon loading from current desktop settings (Kde 4, Kde 3.5, Xfce ..)

QUniqueApplication – for creating a unique application like KUniqueApplication. It also provides sending commands to running instances through QLocalServer.

I18n – Pds uses Gettext for translations and supports the kdelibs’ i18n-like parameters such as (%1, %2).

Notification – Uses PyNotify if it’s installed otherwise it uses QSystemTrayIcon balloon message.

worth a thousand words..

The following example shows two running Package-Manager instances; first one is running as a KUniqueApplication on Kde 4.4 provided by kdelibs4 and the second one is running as a QUniqueApplication which is provided by Pardus Desktop Services on Kde 3.5. Same application, same features, one code..

You can checkout source code of Pds from here and you may have a look at the package-manager fork for an example usage of Pds.

Pardus 2009 Released !

Gökmen Göksel — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:31:16 +0000

At least our final release 2009 is ready for humanity :) Which includes KDE 4.2.4 and lots of backported features of KDE 4.3, lots of management tools which are fully integrated with KDE itself and following fresh open source softwares:

* KDE 4.2.4
* Linux kernel 2.6.30.1
* OpenOffice.org 3.1.0.6
* Firefox 3.5.1
* Gimp 2.6.6
* Xorg 1.6.2
* Python 2.6.2
* Texlive 2008
* GCC 4.3.3
* GLIBC 2.9

You can grab your own copy from here.

Pardus 2009 Alpha Released

Gökmen Göksel — Thu, 28 May 2009 05:30:24 +0000

We just released Pardus 2009 Alpha with great work of our team and release maintainer \o/ Alpha includes KDE 4.2.3 with some of backported changes, Linux 2.6.30_rc7 and also a series of new managers for end-users. You can grab it from here.

A little time left for the final release ;)

Nokia Developer Summit, New NM \o/

Gökmen Göksel — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 15:11:08 +0000

While watching some great talks in Nokia Developer Summit, Monaco I decided to blog about our new Network Manager which is made with great capabilities of KDE, Qt and Comar.

If you remember from my blog entry about Network Manager Plasmoid, Pardus uses Comar layer for all stuff that needs by a desktop user; networking, user operations, service operations, display management, disk management etc. It also integrated with PolicyKit; so you can define atomic privileges per user. Comar also provides great API that helps Qt’s “Code less, Create more.” thought ;)

For example, to connect a profile that you have in your wireless profile list:

>> import comar
>> link = comar.Link()
>> link.Net.Link['wireless_tools'].setState('Monaco','up')

That’s all ! And if you need a privilege for this operation Comar will call PolicyKit-Kde4 for asking you a password ;) Comar uses D-Bus for communication and it is possible to make aysnc calls just by using async key and proper function to notify by current operation.

And this is the New Network Manager of Pardus !

Don’t forget to watch the screencast in here !

If everything goes ok I will be at Akademy Gran Canaria and I hope we will show you a lot of impressive tools that we made ;)

Pardus lands to GSOC again :)

Gökmen Göksel — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:51:34 +0000

Like last year we have been accepted to Google Summer of Code \o/ You can catch a list of avaliable projects from here.

Good luck Pardus Dudes :)

News from Pardus

Gökmen Göksel — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:41:55 +0000

The Team works great in these days :) We have Qt-Creator, Qt 4.5.0 and KDE 4.2.1 in our development repository just after release announcements :) For KDE 4 based technologies I finished my work on Sysinfo just follow;

Now it uses Solid for Network status, Disk info and CPU info. Also with great helps of Will Stephenson I added Solid::Networking support for updating network status system widely to the our Network-Manager Plasmoid ;)

Network-Manager Plasmoid

Gökmen Göksel — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:44:47 +0000

We had a good time at Camp KDE, Jamaica. We met great people (hackers :)) and we tried to explain importance of KDE for Pardus and importance of Pardus for KDE.. As we said there we are working on our ideas to be useful for upstream too.. Here you are;

Pardus Network Manager Plasmoid:

Network Manager DataEngine;

Now we can use new shiny PolicyKit KDE4 ;) You should watch screencasts [1] [2] .. And always sources are in Pardus repository. Have fun !

A new stuff with the power of plasma !

Gökmen Göksel — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:35:38 +0000

I have just finished my talk at Camp KDE, Jamaica about “KDE and Distros” with great partnership of Marcus D. Hanwell (slide is here), I talked about Pardus Technologies and showed people our plasmoid for service-manager which works with our sub-system COMAR.

When great projects come together results comes great !

Also I have a great video while it is working .. All of these written in Python, PyQt4 and of course PyKDE4 ;) You can grab the source from here.

Oxygen YALI ?

Gökmen Göksel — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:13:32 +0000

I saw this pretty project on Planet and I really like their theme for installer. I looked at source and made some changes for YALI.. Finally the result;

Service-manager for KDE4 with COMAR and PyKDE4

Gökmen Göksel — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:13:31 +0000

These days we are working hard on Pardus KDE technologies for our next release “Pardus 2009″; within these tasks first job is porting (and redesigning) our *-manager family to KDE4.

We have a COnfiguration MAnageR called COMAR which uses D-Bus for communication. COMAR provides a powerful and extendible API for managing anything such as package, network, x.org, bootloader, disk or system service which are also described in model.xml.

From COMAR.Api.qt4 example:

import comar
 
# Create link
self.link = comar.Link()
 
def handler(package, exception, results):
    # do something with these info..
    print package, results
 
# Get all services from comar
link.System.Service.info(async=handler)

It will get you all services status and their info asynchronously to the handler method. Also if you want to start “openssh” service you can call it like;

link.System.Service["openssh"].start()

When you do this, COMAR will call the PolicyKit-KDE(3) and asks password if you have privileges for this action.(I will show it in action)

Yes, COM