Jolla's SailfishOS SDK was released quite some time back for Linux, OSX and Windows. I had tried it once during that time but only compiled some sample apps until I found some time recently to port one of my N9/Harmattan apps to Sailfish/Nemo.

The problem

The app needed to use the device's GPS system to know its coordinates for which I used QtMobility's location API. However, when trying to compile, the SDK wasn't able to find the QGeoPositionInfoSource header and I found that it was really missing from the SDK's include dir. In fact, the whole QtMobility module was missing.

The solution

SailfishOS SDK doesn't contain QtMobility by default, you have to install it manually. Luckily the SailfishOS SDK control center makes it easy.

1. Click on the SailfishOS button on the leftmost toolbar in Qt Creator
2. Goto Targets and click 'manage' in SailfishOS-i486-x86 (it might be different for you)
3. Scroll down to qt-mobility-devel and install it.

Presto! Now you can use QtMobility in your application :)

Tags: QtqtmobilitysailfishoskdePage Type: Qt

Today I reached Thoughtworks at 11.30 AM(IST). Shantanu, Sudhendu and Golpalk were already there at office. Calligra active team started work by implementing the zoom. And it was working properly according to our expectation. We couldn’t test it on tablet. But resizing the window was enough for us to test zooming. We had pushed our changes to active-calligratouch-shantanu branch. Initially we had a confusion on where to add the QML changes whether to libs or somewhere else. Thanks to Arjen Hiemstra and IngeInge Wallin who helped us in deciding to move to qtquick. We had moved our text document code to qtquick folder in calligra. After the changes were made, the build went fine. But there were issues with QML which needs to be fixed. We took our group photo, which is uploaded here. Overall, it was good experience for us to share ideas and try to work with core team. Personally I thank every one who had helped me or shared information which is required for Calligra Active. We also had dinner together. For dinner we missed Gopalk and Mani. After the sprint TODO’s have increased  That’s brief update I have.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today I reached Thoughtworks office at 11.10 AM(IST). I saw a tall guy walking around the security area of Thoughtworks. Yes, it’s our Gopalkrishna Bhat(gopalK). We had met and talked to each other over IRC. We waited for Shantanu to arrive. While we were having conversation, Shantanu gives a call and said will be in office within 5 mins. And we all got into the office. Yesterday evening Shantanu and me were discussing about the future of Calligra Active. Hence today we decided to discuss with our team at Essen( Linux hotel). Today Boudewijn Rempt gave a presentation which was followed up by Friedrich’s presentation on Kasten framework. After that Calligra Active team came up with discussion about future of Calligra Active. The discussion went so interesting. And came up with good approach. Why couldn’t we have a QML for calligra? So that a user can write his own QML and use Calligra’s active, stage, sheets etc. Shantanu and me were discussing that we can scale down calligra to even run with Sailfish!!! To be honest we loved the idea Special thanks to Inge Wallin, Arjen Hiemstra and Friedrich for participating in the discussion and sharing the idea of Calligra’s QML. After the discussion shantanu started the idea of pairing and working. Shantanu, Me and Mani started working on this idea. And by the end of the day we got a premature text document getting displayed. We were able to edit it. Till now things are fine. Tomorrow we have a plan to focus on the zoom of canvas in text document. That should consume more time. Overall working will be done in a separate branch in calligra( not in the master). I had taken few snaps uploaded here. That’s it for the day.

Calligra sprint 2013 started today. The venue was Thoughtworks office Bangalore. I reached Thoughtworks around 10.45 AM. Shantanu had already booked a room at Thoughtworks for the sprint. There were 5 new faces for me in sprint. 4 were from DA-IICT College and Mani. We talked to each other for a while. Shantanu showed demo of calligra active. Fixed couple of bugs in active( more detail about them will follow in the next blog post). There was a major issue in sheets(when calligra active loads sheets) which we couldn’t resolve. Around 7.30 PM(IST),  team in Europe arrived at Linux hotel. The first session was Krita BoF. And we did with help of google hangout. It was nice to see most of them. By 9 PM we had to move out of Thoughtworks. That was the time limit given to us. I had uploaded snaps of today here.

I was trying to produce a Marble DMG for Mac OSX since February and as all of you know that OSX has its own banana skins to slip you off, especially when you have upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion ( the decision which I am already regretting ). But, finally I have succeeded in producing a Marble DMG. 

Henceforth, I would be privileged if all the KDE developers and users who use OSX gave a try to this DMG on their Macs. Here’s the link to the DMG - https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50262219/Marble-1.5.0.dmg . Also, it would be very helpful if you give me your feedback via the Comments, be it criticism or suggestion, so that I can improve upon my work.

Thank You :)

I had spent good time by squashing some of the bugs which remained in plasma-mediacenter(PMC). The PMC developers are planning for their first release 1.0 in March. Most of the bugs reported have been squashed down. Some of the major fixes squashed by me were:

1) The scroll bar will move automatically to the song which is being played.

2) The “Play All” in the songs section of music will now start playing songs which gets added to the playlist.

3) PMC will now remember some of its old settings. Like fullscreen, volume level, random play in the playlist.

Some highlights of fixes done by other team members:

1) Basic support for SLC.

2) Support to browse disk which is not mounted when pmc is launched.

3) Hiding mouse pointed when video is played.

4) Seeking the video/songs using arrow keys.

5) Improvement in animation.

There are many more. For more you may have a look here. So time to conclude my post. Time to have fun and hack

Last weekend, the KDE community in India organized KDE Meetup at DAIICT, Gandhinagar. There were three primary motives behind this-

• Spread awareness about Open Source software among students
• Lot of students have misconceptions about real world software (the myth that its very difficult to work on a big project), try to address them
• Usually all tech conferences, especially FOSS ones are centered around places like Bangalore, Pune etc - give a chance to people in another region

I am happy to announce that the event was a huge success, not just in terms of number but in the quality of response we got and that we met all the three things we wanted to do!

 

 

To start with, day 1 was mostly focused on getting people comfortable and answering the questions and doubts they had. Pradeepto Bhattacharya, one of the founders of KDE India community shared his experiences with students on how it matters if you contribute to FOSS when in college. The students appreciated that doing real world software helps to understand the real challenges behind software development.

 

Going by the general format of pre-lunch talks and post-lunch hands-on, we started by talking about Qt and its fundamentals. The students were amazed by the power of the framework and the day to day software that is built on Qt. KDE developer Vishesh Handa who maintains KDE’s Semantic/RDF system talked about signals/slots with model/view and it was good to see that people were quick enough to co-relate it with traditional MVC (keep in mind that the majority of students were 1st-2nd year students so thats a big deal).

 

The most interesting part was the post-lunch hands on which the students were excited about, and rightly so - because thats where the fun is. Do something yourself and things start making sense, you start appreciating the beautiful things a small amount of code can produce. Another thing that I have seen in my experiences with students is that version control is one of the things that excites them the most. The realization that there is something that can help you managing your code and that you no longer have to do things like main.cpp.old.old was exciting for them.

 

 

You understand how successful you were with the crowd when they come back on the next day and can’t wait for the event to start. The excitement about the new things to learn, the feeling of being among like-minded people was the best start to the 2nd day full of learning. We had talks on the KDE Education suite software which ranges from chemical calculations, physics simulation to word games for children. It was good to know that children in Brazil use KDE software in schools to learn, and so does a remote village in West Bengal. Vishesh talked about Nepomuk - KDE’s Semantic data system and the three functions it performs - index, organize, visualize. He demoed how you can use the system to organize and find your contents - and if you’re creative enough play your favorite dialogues from videos - just wow.

 

It was a moment of pride for me that we were a part of an event which touched the lives of students - especially the ones who would’ve never got the exposure otherwise. It was amazing, rewarding and people appreciated it and I hope we keep doing awesome things like this.

 

 

Along with tweets, you can browse photos from the event-

• Photos from Rishab Arora https://plus.google.com/photos/118197889888669218025/albums/5848587267275257153
• Photos from Sinny Kumari https://plus.google.com/photos/117964207644299576171/albums/5849122661494292049
• Photos from Yash Shah https://plus.google.com/photos/111190811569413754438/albums/5848734834675184865
• caKe for KDE 4.10 release! http://wstaw.org/m/2013/02/23/DSCN2297.JPG

Tags: kdeQtkdemeetupindiadaiictgujaratPage Type: Activities

Many of you must have read on various blog posts, Facebook statuses and tweets about the success of recently concluded KDE Meetup at DA-IICT. I could attend on the Day 1 of event and I must it was most definitely fun and inspiring to be there at the event. I saw a young team of volunteers lead by young Yash Shah organise a successful KDE event in a very short period of time. Maybe Yash and his team should blog about how they did it. This post is not about that. Most interesting stories have interesting sub-plots or smaller stories that have to be told as well. This post is about one such small story (pic).

KDE Meetup was organised in the state of Gujarat. The organising team had sent out event notifications to various colleges and universities of Gujarat ( and other states of India ). One such invite reached Bhulabhai Vanmalibhai Patel Institute of Business Management, Computer & Information Technology a constituent of Uka Tarsadia University, Bardoli. Bardoli is a small municipality in Surat region. A group of 50 students from this college had registered for the meetup. That meant, these 50 students had to travel around 300-400 KMs, an overnight journey to reach Gandhinagar to attend the event. Reach their early in the morning, freshen up in the hostel/hotel and then run to the venue. And brave those chaps were, they did all that. It was a bit amusing to see a bunch of 50 people in suits ( some kind of college blazer/jacket it seems ) in a FOSS event *.

Day 1 commenced with a introductory talk by student mentor, Professor Muthu and then my talk. Following that, it was all "how to code in Qt / KDE" talks by our own awesome dudes - Vishesh and Shantanu. Those talks were pretty much live coding and explaining how to get started with Qt and KDE development. At 1 PM we broke for lunch for an hour or so. Post lunch we had a group photograph ( a la Akademy style ).

This is the point where, I decided to not attend talks and rather spend time talking to some folks. I wanted to talk to Mitul Maniar, professor from a nearby college who was attending as a delegate. As I sat on one of those benches in the sprawling gardens in the campus and spoke to him about FOSS and related things, I noticed something suspiciously worrying. A big gang of students, standing exactly on the opposite side of the garden near the lecture hall 1, were deep in discussion among themselves. They were not sure what they wanted to do. They were trying to decide on something. All of them wearing the familiar navy blue blazer.

I told Mitul that definitely there was something wrong as they were the only delegates who didn't go back in to the lecture hall to attend the post lunch workshops. I wanted to go upto them and check if everything is alright. But I hesitated and waited for them to make some kind of move. The discussed a bit more and then I saw the big group breaking up in two. The first group started walking away, I thought they were going to the lecture hall. No! They didn't. I was wrong. They were leaving the campus. I decided to ask. By the time I, along with Mitul, reached the big tree in the middle of the garden, most of them had either already left the garden or about to leave.

I stopped Gaurav Prajapati, one of the delegates from that group and asked him whether they are leaving. And why? He said, yes many of of them want to leave because they were not able to understand much during the pre-lunch sessions. I asked them exactly what they didn't understand. Gaurav was not joined by another guy, who told me that they are having a very difficult time after the initial introductory bits. I requested Gaurav and his friend to immediately tell his group to stop and talk to me. It took some amount of convincing from my side that I wanted to listen to them and hear them out and their issues. Mitul talked to them in Gujarati as well and told them to wait and listen. Slowly, one by one Gaurav and his friends convinced most of them to come back.

The huge (Neem?) tree was a perfect place to sit and talk. So I sat right there and told them to sit along with me if they are fine with that kind of setting. Luckily most of them were fine with it. So we sat there and started talking. I asked them what happened and why they were leaving. They told me that  they were really stressed out and fatigued because of the overnight journey and the amount of new things they heard was just too much information thrown at them in a very short time. They were dejected and had given up all hope to get anything out of this event.

They told me that most of them are doing an Integrated M.Sc. IT course and were in Second year of their course. They also told me that they were new to many concepts that was told to them during the talks. They knew about "Open Source" (which is a subject in their course) and knew what FSF was. I asked them if they use Linux, most of them said yes, at least in college. Some used it even on their personal laptops. I asked them if they know or have used GCC, surprisingly every one did. How about Vi/Vim? Everybody raised hands. One dude in the group said, they have Python in their next semester. I immediately told them that they had pretty much all prerequisites they needed to be in the KDE Meetup and the workshops.

Then they told me that, they have never used KDE SC before and weren't sure what was happening. I asked them why didn't ask questions. Then came and amazingly interesting answer. One of them told me that they were scared to ask questions ( a standard Indian student thing, imo ), and they were more scared about asking them in English. They said, they understood English fine but were just scared when it came to asking a question when surrounded by 320 other people. Funny, how that resonated so well in my mind. I immediately told them, that is hardly a worry. When I was in school in Panvel, I was shit scared to talk to people in English especially when I used to go to Mumbai for college/classes. I remember writing my questions before hand, modifying them to fix grammar etc and then finally raising my hand to ask the question. FWIW, I know, somewhere deep in my heart, I am still scared to speak in English. I know, I have made a lot of grammatical mistakes in this post and the previous ones.

I spoke to them for almost 2 hours. Told them what KDE and KDE SC was. I told them what we do. I told them the benefits of contributing to KDE Project or to any FOSS project. Tried to tell them how that makes a difference to them and their lives. How it helps in their career? Told them not to run away and give up. Tried to convince them to stick around. I requested Yash to arrange a special workshop on the next day for all the 50 delegates. Yash was kind enough to organise it. We roped in ex-GoC students Sinny Kumari, Aditya Bhatt, Yash Shah, Jigar Raisinghani to conduct a workshop. The agenda was set. Show them what KDE SC is. Demo a few KDE applications. Then show them how to write those applications. Also the most important bit was to make sure the workshop was conducted in both English with splattering of Hindi and Gujarati so that they would be comfortable. All of them readily agreed. We told the delegates the time and place for their special workshop.

I left the event that very night. Next day from Pune, I remotely followed their workshop (pic) over IM messages with Jigar and Yash. Did a quick Google Hangout with them ( thanks Yash ). I couldn't believe what I saw. I remembered the dejected eyes and droopy shoulders from the day before. All of them were smiling now. They were enjoying their special workshop. KDE SC and KDE Edu was demoed to them.  They clapped when saw Simon at work. They were a happy bunch. They even fixed Qt related mistakes that Aditya did at the end of the workshop. They asked questions about their doubts. Epic! Interestingly, they finished their workshop in two hours ( 2 hours less than the first workshop on Day 1 conduced for the rest of the delegates ). Post lunch they attended the regular workshops with the rest of the delegates.

Before leaving, the Bardoli Gang, as we now call them, thanked all the volunteers. In their own words  - "We want you to come to our college and organise KDE Meetup there too.”. Another quote as Yash remembers, "agar hum koi dusre workshop mein hote toh chale bhi gaye hote aur hume kisi ne roka bhi nai hota" ( translates to - "if we would had gone to some other workshop, we would have left. Mostly nobody would have stopped us" ). To quote Devaja Shah ( a regular dot writer now and event volunteer ) - "Words can’t describe their enthusiasm and eagerness and our joy and happiness. The sole aim of the KDE community was met - everyone is a part of our community and we do our best to help them."

Personally, for me, I am happy that this event was a success. One of the metrics for success would be when we see contributors coming out of this event. I am already getting reports that people are hanging around on #kde-in and looking out for Junior Jobs to get their feet wet. We already have Devaja Shah and Kesha Shah who plan to actively contribute to Dot. I had told the Bardoli gang, please hear me out, I don't want them to leave. You have come a long way to attend this event. You have even paid for it. Hear me out. Then decide if you still don't want to stay here. If you leave, I would consider this as my personal defeat. I am super glad that they stayed and will stay. I am very happy and satisfied about this, more so than any other achievement I have had since my association with the KDE Project. KDE, the community is the most friendly community I know of, it always welcomes newbies with open hearts. Glad that I didn't fail.

What I like most about this incident is that it associated with a place which has huge significance in Indian Independence. The Bardoli Satyagraha. Do read about it.

Thank you all those who attend the event. Thank you Vishesh, Shantanu, Rishabh, Sinny, Jigar, Rohan, Aditya. Thank you Professor Mutthu. Organisers/Volunteers you have probably read my email. Thank you Devaja, for helping me write this post. Thank you Smit Shah for pestering me daily to write a blog post :).

Trivia : Only other person wearing a blazer was the event lead - Yash Shah :P.

Update : Since it is a rocket science to embed photos in LJ. I am just including the whole set from Sinny Kumari. Here you go.

Hi all!

Last week, I attended KDE Meetup held in DA-IICT college. It was much more better than what I expected. Everything went so well from start till end.

Day 1 (23rd Feb 2013)

I reached venue in morning around 9:30 am, registration was still going on. It was quite amazing to see more than 300 people who came to attend this KDE meetup.

After opening ceremony, Pradeepto Bhattacharya gave talk on Introduction to KDE, where he spoke on why, how, who should contribute to KDE and other general KDE stuff. People were so  interested and asked so many questions during his talk.

 

Later, Vishesh Handa gave talk on Introduction to Qt. He talked about various features available in Qt and showed some demo too. Participants were so interactive that this session was extended till lunch break and we postponed next talk to tomorrow which was supposed to be given by Shantanu Tushar.

Post lunch, there was workshop on Qt apps. Almost 300 people were there for this workshop. Most of the people have brought their own laptop. All of us helped them in installing Qt SDK. Workshop went  so well and all of them were able to follow it. All of us were running here and there to fix errors and issues if encountered by participants during workshop :D

Later, Vishesh Handa took one session on version control mainly git. People were so smart here too and asked so many questions.

Post lunch, one more session was taken by Pradeepto Bhattacharya for around 50 people who came from Bardoli . These people were going back from conference due to some reasons like not able to follow first half day talk, hesitated in asking questions in crowd, language problem and many more reason. Pradeepto noticed and talked to all of them and tried to understand their problems. At the end, they promised to come tomorrow and we promised to take separate session for them in college lab.

 

In evening we planned to celebrate KDE 4.10 release party :D Awesome cake was arranged by Yash Shah and volunteer. It was so kool celebrating release party together.

 

Day 2 (24th Feb 2013)

I, Aditya Bhatt, Jigar Raisinghani, Yash Shah and some more (forgot name) of us went to lab to take sessions for Bardoli students. Aditya showed first kool KDE desktop and then yash talked his experience with KDE. All of them responded so well and asked questions without hesitating. After making them comfortable with KDE, we demoed them how to make Qt apps and told them to do same too.  At the end of this session, all of them were confident and inspired too.

Parallel to this session, in Main Hall talk was going on  Our Plasma workspaces - desktop, tablet etc by Shantanu Tushar , Contributing to KDE EduSuite by Rishab Arora and Understanding Nepomuk - Semantic Data by Vishesh Handa.

Post lunch, there was Workshop on hacking on KDE apps (opted rekonq). Initially, we faced little problem due to slow internet connection, after sometime this issue was fixed. People learnt to compile and build rekonq source. They played around source code and done changes in code.

At the end of Day 2, all participants got participation certificate. Many participants who asked questions got kool KDE t-shirts too :D

This meetup was so awesome, we all had lot of fun helping them. We were able to motivate and inspire so many people from this KDE meetup.

 

Thanks to all who were there and participated actively in it.

More snaps are available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/49657487@N07/sets/72157632863576726/

Cheers!

This is a month of FOSS events - and one of them was GNUnify 2013 at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research. There were talks ranging from systems stuff like GCC, about Android hacking to KDE development. We met people from communities of KDE, Mozilla, Wikimedia, friends from RedHat and of course the awesome awesome organizers and volunteers.

It is nice to see a Free Software event like GNUnify to turn into a tradition where teachers and students work hard to create what is rightly said a forum to unite open minds.

Day1 of the event had lots of talks including our very own KDE - we planned a full day track on KDE primarily aimed to introduce people to KDE (and Open Source in general) and give them starting tips on how to get started. The talks started with introduction of Qt and a hands-on where people tried writing sample applications. Something new here was that we had to cover QtQuick/QML which these days is the preferred way of doing GUI in Qt, but at the same time we couldn't leave out the traditional QWidget style of doing GUI. This was primarily because of two reasons, first most of the current KDE applications are written in QWidget so people will need that if they want to contribute and secondly the desktop components of QML still aren't widely used.

  

We started with the Qt talk and the hands-on was very well received by the attendees. They tried Qt Creator and created sample apps, winning KDE.in tshirts in the process  After lunch Sinny talked about and gave a demo on using QtQuick/QML for writing fluid and modern GUI. This was followed by a talk on getting started with KDE development where we demo'ed a small hack in rekonq (a KDE browser based on WebKit) so that people get confident that its pretty easy to get started. We also spent an hour or so in answering questions that people had in mind about contributing.

 

The organizers were kind enough to arrange a pool-side dinner for us and it turned out to be a nice opportunity to socialize more, and meet all of the volunteers at one place. And whats more, I got a chance to be picture'd with the हैकर

 

Day2 saw talks on various kinds of topics like Android, Python, Drupal etc and I gave a Plasma Active demo to a group of volunteers. After Day1 which was kinda tiring due to the day long session, the 2nd day was quite fun with meeting friends again and chatting over lots of stuff :) Not only this, we had a nice evening and dinner, thanks to Siteshwar.

(Photos courtesy Sinny Kumari, view full album here )

Tags: kdegnunifyPage Type: Activities

On this day of love, while people are busy with their significant others, I would like to show and celebrate my love for Free Software. Today is also an international “I love Free Software” – Day.

Free software is not about software, It is about people

The phrase ‘Free Software’, to many people, means ‘software you don’t have to pay for’—but really it’s so much more than that. It’s a way of thinking and working focused on transparency and collaborating with others. It’s about sharing ideas, plans, and developments for the benefit of the commons. I feel that Open source software is not just about Software, it is about Community.

Why i love Free Software?

Freedom! Be free is important, I should be able to manage and shape computer the way I live. It feels amazing to know how they work and what they’re doing. Money matters, but people can’t buy your soul.

All of this is possible only with Free Software, and since I am part of most amazing and friendly community KDE, I couldn’t live without it anymore. That’s a great feeling, and it inspires me to tell others about it. No matter if I have to write a document, do some Physics simulation, solve chemical equations, write software code, create some graphics, or simply enjoy a game or watch a film. Free Softwares are always there with a simple and effective solution for me in any field.

I am more positive and confident than ever. I get to learn something new almost every day.  I also got chance to attend Akademy 2012,  which is KDE annual conference. It gave me opportunity to meet people in real whom i just knew from the IRC nick. The opportunity to code, interact and share thoughts with highly intelligent and experienced minds was a life changing experience.

Without Free Software, there would be no KDE. I love Free Software because I take care about my Freedom.

KDE Meetup 2013

KDE Meetup is an event for Free Software enthusiasts to meet up, share their knowledge, contribute, learn, play, have fun and create limitless possibilities using Qt and KDE. It is the first large scale open source Meetup in Gujarat and the largest KDE event in India after conf.kde.in in 2011.

If you are in India, Do not miss the opportunity to become a part of the most amazing community.

In India, KDE awesomeness never stops, and this is going to be the case even at GNUnify 2013 at Pune. GNUnify is hosted every year at Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research in Pune and composed of talks and workshops.

       

What kool stuff are we doing?

Coming to KDE, we have a full day track on Day1 of the event, which is on Friday 15th February. We are going to tell you about what KDE is, how we use Qt - one of the world's most powerful cross platform development framework, what kinds of applications one can contribute to in KDE. The attendees will come to know about the large variety of projects within KDE - from Photo Management to Office Suite to Learning science.

Who should attend?

Are you interested in writing cross platform native applications? Interested in participating in one of the biggest Free Software communities? Or, you'd love to work with awesome people from around the world and learn how to write effective code? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this is for you!

Also, if you are a student, there are even more reasons for you to attend - we are going to make sure that the workshop/tutorials are straightforward so that when you go back home, you'll be writing Qt apps in no time!

Want to reach the KDE India community?

The KDE India community is one of the most biggest and vibrant Free Software communities in India. You can reach us (and join us in creating awesome software)-

• KDE India mailing list https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-india
• Our identi.ca profile, or our twitter handle
• Facebook page for KDE India
• #kde-in on Freenode IRC

Got questions? suggestions on what you want to see at the event? Let us know! Tags: kdegnunifypunePage Type: KDE

The KDE Community with Google Developer Group, DA-IICT is pleased to announce “KDE Meetup 2013“. KDE meetup is the largest KDE event in India after conf.kde.in 2011 and the first large scale open source Meetup in Gujarat. It will be held on February 23rd-24th at DA-IICT, Gandhinagar and it shall be a really great opportunity for all those who wish to get started on Open source contribution to learn about it.  Our primary focus is to introduce people to the world of infinite possibilities of Open source development by teaching them about the basic tools for development including Qt. This event also appeals to those who are already familiar with the tools since there will also be specialized talks on certain topics by experts. Also there will be hackathons after the talks which shall make this event enjoyable and fruitful for everyone involved with Open source including teachers, developers and students.

conf.kde.in 2011, Photo by Kushal Das

We needed a forum to gather as many KDE contributors as possible at one place again after conf.kde.in 2011. FOSS events like those of KDE itself have been always concentrated around then same region in the country and we are trying to keep that going in another region as well.  So Indian KDE volunteers along with GDG DA-IICT came together to organize a conference solely dedicated to KDE with an aim to spread KDE and FOSS as far as possible. Our main target is to include more and more students from India in the KDE community and also to get them involved with Open source development and what better way to spread awareness and knowledge than to organise a really lively and enjoyable event which shall appeal to the students and combine the core elements of learning and fun. The expertise of the speakers and the quaint and cool campus environment shall also serve as prime factors in making the event a pleasant and extremely insightful one.

KDE

The KDE® Community is an international technology team dedicated towards creating a free and user-friendly computing experience. It is one of the largest international free software community. It has an integrated set of cross-platform applications designed to run on GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and OS X systems.

To find more information about KDE, please visit  http://www.kde.org/

KDE-India is a group of volunteers who are a part of this community, and have been meeting up at various FOSS events in India and abroad. Over the last few years, there has been a substantial increase in contributions to KDE from India to various avenues like coding, localization, marketing, website/infrastructure maintenance etc. There has also been a lot of contributions as a part of programmes like Google Summer of Code and Season of KDE.

Event Schedule

The event is a two day conference to be held on the 23rd and 24th of February.

Pradeepto Bhattacharya, Shantanu Jha, Vishesh Handa, Rishabh Arora are some of the deemed speakers that shall be giving talks at the event. The talks shall introduce people to the KDE community and Qt Development. KDE workspaces and applications, Nepomuk and KDE Edusuite shall also be covered in the talks.

Apart from the talks there will be hands on workshops wherein the experts shall be teaching everyone about Qt application development and also help them with bug fixing in KDE appss. This shall be followed by hackathons for all those enthusiastic participants who wish to take the learning process a notch higher and want to delve further into bug fixing or development and they shall be guided by the Open source developers.

We are still working on the agenda, you can check it out here.

Venue

DA-IICT Campus

DA-IICT is Located in the peaceful city of Gandhinagar, the capital city of Vibrant Gujarat, which is on its way to becoming an IT hub. While at a distance of just 17 kms from the international airport and with an efficient public transport system in the city, the beautifully lush and green campus of DA-IICT serves as the perfect environment to host such events. With incessant Wi-Fi access throughout the campus and fully equipped computer laboratories, the event can go on uninterrupted with adequate provision of all the necessary equipments.

Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology(DA-IICT) is included in the top ten Technology Schools in the country and is ranked as the topmost private technology university in the country.

Lecture theatre during GDG DA-IICT Session

Also, last year 17 students from the institute were selected for the google summer of code internship program out of which 8 students were selected in KDE. This was the highest number of selections from any university in India.

 

Registration

Registrations for KDE Meetup are open now.  Do not pass on the opportunity to become a part of the most amazing community.

The early bird student registration fee is only ₹400.

For more details regarding the event, please visit our website.

Special thanks to Devaja Shah for helping me in writing this article.

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