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The klik developer team has named a few distinct areas where new contributors could join in and create new features for the current klik2 development effort. Amongst the most interesting ideas are these: klik2 Updater; Enhancement for fakechroot (or a replacement); Porting klik2 to *BSD and OpenSolaris; Automate klik Recipe Testing; Replacing Server-side APT with Server-Side Smart, klik2 Security Framework; Packaging the klik2 Client with OBS. "We know some high-profile people and organizations are keeping an eye on klik's progress, and wishing us well. See for instance this statement we recently found: [...]"

Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter are the authors of Klik, a distro-neutral complement to the existing package managers where 1 app = 1 file which includes all dependencies in that file (!) and where you can install and run software with one 'Klik' from your browser using their online package-repository . Deleting an app is as simple as deleting its file, and (IIRC) root privileges are not needed to install new apps. At the Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) 2008 - to be held in Bruxelles, BE the 23/24th of February, they will talk about the advantages of Klik, and the architecture of the upcoming Klik2. In this interview they talk Linux package management, Klik's future and their presence at FOSDEM.

[ Klik "version 1" already worked very well, it enabled me to use a CLI-program for which Gentoo didn't have a package and which I couldn't compile manually before some reason. It's by far the single best thing for Linux package management I saw since I use open source software, especially since it solves the dependency problem for one and all and my mother and grandmother could use it - hkwint ]

This weekend it's time to announce it. Finally: klik2 development has reached our internal "Milestone 2". --- Remember klik? That project that aims to make Linux end-user software installation and usage more easy than on any other platform? "Grandma-proof", if you like? By making to 'install' an application as easy as copying a single file to a USB thumbdrive or to a different computer? By implementing application-level virtualization, encapsulating each end-user program into a single file, following the 1 application == 1 file principle?

Now that OpenOffice.org does make some splashes in the IT press for the achievement of having created a "portable" version that can run from a USB thumbdrive (for only the Windows version, that is) -- isn't it time for klik to get ready for gaining its own share of public fame sometime soon? That's because klik does not only turn OpenOffice.org, but many thousand Linux applications into "PortableApps". And klik does not need painstakingly recompiling modified source code into portable binaries, one by one. But will re-utilize the marvellous work and special knowledge of all the dedicated Debian, RPM and Slackware packaging heroes out there and repackage 95% of its supported klik bundles fully automatically, including dependency resolution...

[ From my own experience, I can tell KLIK1 is great already, it made the CLI-only program 'csound' work on my Gentoo system. Gentoo doesn't have a csound ebuild in portage, and compiling from source failed. KLIK1 however did the job fine. I read the KLIK2 plans, and I predict as HD-spaces becomes cheaper, this will be the future of package-management and the end of all your dependency problems! - hkwint ]

Poster printing with KDE. From any KDE application. With preview of results. To any print device. Even to the "PDF printer" that ships with KDE. And also for any printable file format (PDF, image, PostScript, text),...

Wanem is the perfect tool for you, if you are *not* a guru when it comes to TCP/IP, networking, routing, proxying, firewalling, gatewaying and iptables commandlines, but if you nevertheless want to test your application's performance when using network connections of all kinds and qualities.

One of the decisions which was made on the OSDL Printing Summit in Atlanta last year and widely accepted by all participants was to switch the standard print job transfer format from PostScript to PDF. This format has many important advantages, especially
* PDF is the common platform-independent web format for printable documents
* Portable * Easy post-processing (N-up, booklets, scaling, ...)
* Easy Color management support
* Easy High color depth support (> 8bit/channel)
* Easy Transparency support
* Smaller files * Linux workflow gets closer to Mac OS X

Adobe developed, specified and published the exact format of PPD files, starting more than 20 years ago. Ever since, PPD files have been used on Apple Macs and Windows PCs (and a few other platforms) to describe and drive PostScript printers. CUPS extended the concept of PPD files to non-PostScript printers as well (because CUPS uses a computer-based PostScript interpreter, and it can direct each job through a conversion filter to create a jobfile with a format feasible for the target printer). A CUPS printer named foobaz has its own model-specific print options represented in the file foobaz.ppd that lives in /etc/cups/ppd/. You can of course look at it in an editor.

As anyone who ever tried to set up an Apache2 web server may know, this can be an insanely complicated task, because the thingie can use multiple configuration files at once, which are included and nested into each other with (you guessed it?), Include directives. Kochizz makes that job much easier now... [....] ...you get Linux, Windows as well as Mac OS X versions... for free. Not least because the license is GPL v2...

Microsoft did a lot of work in the last few weeks to influence votes, stuff the ballots and manipulate participants in the various country ISO committees to enforce favorable decisions for themselves: ... [....] ...So the cartoon shown in this post, directly from the No-OOXML website, summarizes MS's efforts rather nicely (and may be not so funnily)...

Lennart Poettering, developer of Avahi, discusses Ubuntu's "No Open Ports!" policy in his blog syndicated on Planet GNOME. That policy is supposed to create a more secure workstation after a default installation, but at the same time makes its usability and comfort for users go down considerably. Lennart questions the validity of the reasons behind that decision as far is Zeroconf/Avahi is concerned. Another blog, this time on www.kdedevelopers.org takes up that policy in relation to the crippling of CUPS's convenience features on a default Ubuntu installation and puts it into the nutshell "you can't use your system for printing, but at least it is super-secure".

It's hot and you're melting? The KDE.org hardware infrastructure owned by KDE e.V. is melting as well! Out of the desperate need to upgrade our current disk RAID, we need new hard drives. If you have visited bugs.kde.org any time the last couple of months, you've noticed that this site often responds extremely sluggish. To improve the situation, we need to employ a new server, but need some more money for the hard drives for this beast! If you can help us with that, please consider to donate to the fundraiser. All amounts happily accepted through Paypal and other means.

We nearly missed the news... but already a week ago Raph Levien put some exciting news into his blog (Raph is the lead developer of Ghostscript since Peter L. Deutsch stepped down a few years ago): Ghostscript's latest release 8.54 is available. And it is not just under their commercial license (AFPL) -- they also put it under the GPL! In the past, AFPL versions were "made free" after about a year (and when again a newer leading edge version of AFPL Ghostscript was out). Now it looks they put even their development branch under GPL. Read more....

Exhausted, but happy about the work we've done I'm now back in Stuttgart. I have attended the 3 intensive days of discussions and work that were the Desktop Linux Printing Summit, jointly organized by OSDL (John Cherry) and Linuxprinting.org (Till Kamppeter). It was held in Atlanta, hosted by Lanier at their Education Center. The hosting was made possible by Uli Wehner. Uli is one of Lanier's senior support and testing engineers (responsible for Lanier's ever-growing business of non-Windows system printing); he is also quite active on the Linuxprinting.org user support forums.

Altogether we had nearly 40 people there. They represented a broad range of backgrounds. See yourself:

A few weeks ago, Jonathan Riddell had asked me on IRC in passing why kprinter and KDEPrint 3.5.1 didn't work with CUPS-1.2. My reply had been like "CUPS-1.2 hasn't even released an alpha or beta tarball -- w.t.h. does Ubuntu Dapper plan to include an SVN version of a piece of core software which has a yet unknown release date??" Of course, this is not Jonathan's personal field of work -- Kubuntu just inherits the CUPS version and setup which the Ubuntu main developers decided for.

Regarding an impending CUPS-1.2 release, prospects have become much brighter in the meanwhile. During March, Mike Sweet released 2 Betas and the first Release Candidate. So a final 1.2.0 release seems pretty close now.

After reading this morning that "Dapper Flight 6" was available, I decided to download the Live CD version of Kubuntu. Download took 6 hours, but luckily was completed after I woke up.

I think it is time to reveal a nifty little tool that I like to simulate a slow network connection, even without a network. It is called "tc" (think "traffic control") and is present on every modern Linux system. It is part of the "iproute" or "iproute2" package. tc lets you simulate (amongst other things) latency. We all know how network latency of even the slightest degree kills off every amount of remote X11 usability. Even if you throw multi-Megabits of bandwidth towards it, that will never compensate -- because it is just the wrong cure for an illness that consists of many thousand roundtrips undertaken by minuscule packets.

Back in October, when the Windows-only Xara company tooted their plans to port its vector graphics flagship product, Xara Xtreme to Linux, I didn't quite believe them. Now I stand corrected.