The Open Source Initiative in DA-IICT is our effort to get more students interested in open source, and get them to start contributing to projects. As part of that I evangelized KDE, showed off our cool apps, and demonstrated how Krunner + Kwin + Plasma come together to improve productivity a LOT. Here are the slides, Unfortunately my notes were handwritten, so you can't glean much from here. But someone else might be able to use it ( please attribute it to me though, thanks ).…

With a lot of requests to see tiling in action, I've uploaded my first ever video. Unfortunately I couldn't get my microphone to work. There are also a few glitches, forgive me for that. …

kwin-tiling now features dynamic layout switching per desktop. Use Meta+PgUp for Columns and Meta+PgDn for Spiral. Watch the windows change their place on the fly! A few bugs in both the layouts are also fixed. Overall kwin-tiling is pretty stable for now, so give it a whirl and notify me of any bugs you can find. What it still lacks is Xinerama awareness, but otherwise its virtually feature complete for the first release.…

Cq ( Commit Queue ) is a bridge between Mercurial and Subversion. Its whole objective is to allow you to work offline on Subversion repositories, but continue doing atomic commits. Useful when you are on the move and don't have internet access. The premise is that you copy the working copy into a Mercurial repository. Hack away in the repository, and commit to the repository. Once you are back online, run cq commit to actually commit the changes to the Subversion repository.…

( One of my entries already got aggregated, but this is the traditional introduction ) Hello KDE people! My name is Nikhil Marathe. I'm a relatively new KDE developer ( ~3 months ), currently working on implementing tiling in kwin. I started using KDE when I switched to ( what was ) Mandrake in 2001. I think it was KDE 3.2. Well I loved it, and have stuck with KDE ever since, following every release with great excitement.…

Between yesterday and today I made quite a lot of changes in kwin-tiling. Layouts now have a superclass which manages certain things. Each desktop now has its own layout. The root tile is no longer stored directly by the workspace, instead the workspace stores layouts for each desktop. For now each desktop has the Spiral layout, but it should be possible to dynamically change layouts for each desktop a few weeks down the line.…

I've just returned from watching the Half Blood Prince, and it was a mess. I don't know what they were playing at, but I've never seen a worse Potter movie. The linear plot is suffocating. While the movie begins with somewhat of a bang, the rest of it proceeds at some enforced speed limit, leaving no climatic or anti-climatic moments. In addition some of the key characters are missing or have such restricted roles that is it disgusting to watch ( the Dursleys, Neville Longbottom ).…

I had this really weird bug in kwin for half a week. When you started resizing windows, all of them would start dancing about the screen. There would be little gaps between them and so on. And I couldn't figure out why. So today I finally tried comparing ( x + width ) and ( right ) of a window. Turns out they are always off by one. So to the QRect::right() documentation:…

After a short break due to various other responsibilities and a general lack of clarity in planning some of the code, I've made progress and now you can resize windows while in tiling mode and watch all the others adjust themselves to fit the screen. Admittedly there are a few kinks, and an annoying bug where the resize pointer suddenly makes the window super-tiny, but they should be fixed in two or three days.…

... now with minimize support. KWin tiling has been proceeding forward at a steady rate. If you check out the latest revision, you will not only have a pretty stable experience, but will also get a design document for free. So orientation is horizontal and vertical, and ratio is how much space the left child gets. Using these two properties I expect to be able to do most layouts.…