Cats

While Yang our cat tries to lure in unsuspecting birds on the bird feeder, I have been busy working on many things. First things first though, a big thank you to all that donated to my Internet bill. I was able to continue my work without interruption. KDE neon: A busy week in KDE neon as https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.9/ was released! We have it ready to update in User edition or if you would like to download the new ISO you can find it here: https://neon.kde.org/download I highly advise the User Edition as Unstable is volatile right now with Qt6 transition and ABI breakage. Which leads me to the next busy work for the week. Plasma 6 exploded breaking unstable desktops all over, including mine! A library changed and it was not backward compatible, so we had to rebuild the Qt6 $world to get Plasma and PIM functional again. I am happy to report it is all fixed now, but I cannot stress enough, if you don’t want to chance broken things, please use the User Edition! I also continued the orange -> green build effort in making sure all our runtime dependencies are up to date. This fixes odd UI bugs and developers have all the build dependencies needed to build their applications. KDE Snaps: Several more 23.08.2 snaps have arrived in the snap store including the new to snaps Kamoso! I have an auto-connect request to the snap-store policy folks, but until it is approved please snap connect kamoso:camera :camera I have a pile of new MR’s in for non release service applications and some fixes for issues found while testing. While this new workflow does take a bit longer waiting for approvals I like it much better as I am developing closer relationships with the application developers. I have made significant progress on the Kf6 ( Qt6 based ) content snap. I am about 90% complete. While this doesn’t mean much for users yet, it will when KDE applications release their qt6 ports starting the next major release cycle. I will be ready! The last bit for snap work is I have almost completed my akonadi service snap. This will connect to all KDE PIM snaps so they share data. Akonadi is the background database that ties all the PIM applications together. Debian: This week I have worked on updates for several golang packages including charmbracelet/lipgloss charmbracelet/bubbles, and muesli-termenv. unfortunately I am stuck golang-github-aymanbagabas-go-osc52. The work is done in salsa but the maintainer has not uploaded. I have shot an email to the maintainer. I have also begun mentoring my first potential future DD! I reviewed his python-scienceplots and python-art which should land in Debian soon. Thanks for stopping by! As usual, if you can please spare some change, consider a donation. All proceeds go to surviving another day to work on cool things to land on your desktop! https://gofund.me/b8b69e54 Donate

It’s that time of year already! We have hit our first freeze of the year. While the kitties keep warm by the wood burning stove, I have been busy with many updates and fixes in a variety of projects. KDE neon: It’s true, Neon unstable has been very unstable. Due to a few factors including a builder being out of space, timed with a new Qt release. There is a cost with living in unstable land with bleeding edge releases. It takes time and finesse to get everything happy, especially with major transitions such as Qt. The drive issue was just bad timing. We worked night and day ( quite literally with people spanning from the US, Europe and Australia ) to get everything happy again. I know it’s frustrating when things are broken, but please keep in mind, most of us are volunteers. I am happy to report, it is once again stable. If you continue to experience issues please report them on https://bugs.kde.org there have been a few cases where there were rogue apt sources lists creating issues. We also have the User edition which is much more stable! KDE Snaps: The big move to snapcraft files per repo continues. With that comes a new version 23.08.2. This big win this week was Audiotube! I have finally got this snap working. With a combination of snappy-debug and snap run –gdb audiotube I was able to find all the hidden dependencies such as yt-dlp needed to be built with ffmpeg support and it needed a newer ytmusicapi as the version it called for was broken with gettext translations. I also had to fix the dbus name as it was not the standard org.kde.app. The final fix was it required the alsa plug and layouts adjusted to point to the snap alsa libraries ( which fixed the very important sound feature ). Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Unfortunately, it still requires –devmode to run, as it has one last network issue even with all the network plugs. I have to set it aside for now, as I have many more snaps to migrate. However, if you want to enjoy youtube music with this super awesome app you can, just append –devmode when installing. Enjoy! The following apps have now migrated to their respective KDE repos and have the snap recipes in launchpad for automated builds: A new content pack with the latest Frameworks 5.110 and Qt 5.15.11 is complete and the neon extension update will follow after the required global autoconnect is approved from the store. Debian: I have caught up on my dashboard with new releases, fixed test failures, and FTBFS on the more obscure arches. The following debian packages have been uploaded to unstable: description umbrello squashfuse golang-github-muesli-mango golang-github-muesli-roff speechpy-fast lingua-franca If you have made it this far, thank you! As you can see I am quite busy and there is still much to do. If you can possibly spare a donation so I can continue my efforts in KDE neon / KDE Snaps / and Debian, it would be so appreciated. I enjoy doing this work and I hope it benefits someone out there. Have a lovely day and thanks for stopping by. Donate https://gofund.me/b8b69e54