Filipe Saraiva's blog

This year I have a project accepted to Google Summer of Code. This is my second time in the program and I am very happy and grateful for it

This year I come back to Cantor, the KDE mathematical environment for several mathematical softwares like Maxima, Sage, Scilab, etc. In 2011 I developed the Scilab backend during Google Summer of Code. My mentor was Sylvestre Ledru, from Scilab team.

This time my project is conclude the scientific python backend for Cantor. I began the development of this piece of software during LaKademy. The communication between Cantor and python is working properly. The software miss some features of IDE, like tab-complete and syntax highlight. I intent provide support to scipy, numpy and matplotlib too. Alexander Rieder, from KDE, is my supervisor.

There are some ideas about how to implement tab-complete and syntax highlight. It is possible using XML files (like I implemented in Scilab backend) or use the Kdevelop technology. I am researching which I will use.

More updates will come soon! Follow the tag gsoc2013-python-backend this blog!

This is just a manner of speaking. = D

May 27, 2013. I officially became a packer on Mageia, Mandriva-based Linux distro. The date marks the creation of an account with access permission to repository and build system for me.

I started contributing to Mageia since the early days of the project, translating the manifesto to Portuguese. Since then I helped on forums, IRC, mailing lists, got mirrors with high performance in Brazil, and did more work in promotion. However, I wanted to provide software for Mageia, because this is a job who not everyone can contribute.

To become a packers I had to participate in a mentoring program where I was guided by my Portuguese friend José Jorge or zezinho. I learned a lot about the art of creating RPM packages. Thanks zezinho!

I’m packing SWI-Prolog and abnTeX2. I intend to maintain some scientific-related software and KDE stuff like themes and plasma applets.

Well, this is my way to contribute to free software. Thank you, community!

In the night of May 18, mages, sorcerers, witches, and fairies took from the cauldron the new stable release of Mageia, now in your third version.

Mageia is a community Linux distribution based on Mandriva. This version have several softwares in their recent versions: KDE 4.10.2, GNOME 3.6, XFCE 4.10, Linux 3.8, systemd 195, rpm 4.11, LibreOffice 4.0.3, and more.

This release is dedicated to Eugeni Dodonov, former employer in Mandiva and a great free software developer. In your last work, Dodonov was in Intel developing a better integration between Intel graphics cards and Linux kernel. Dodonov died very young. He was cycling when was hit by a car. This accident happened in Sao Carlo city, Brazil, in 2012.

This release is special for me because the packages that I am the maintainer are available for Mageia users now. I am packing SWI-Prolog and abnTeX2. I intend make packages for scientific softwares and KDE stuff like themes and plasma applets. And, maybe, make a package to Cave Story because it is a beautiful game and everyone must play it! =)

Release notes, download link, tutorials to update from Mageia 2, and more news  are here.

Several Linux distributions have specific commands to download build requires of a package. For example, Debian and its derivatives have apt-get build-dep; in OpenSUSE is zypper si -d; Fedora have yum-builddep; etc.

There is in Mandriva and derivatives distros using  urpmi a command to do this too!  But it is mandatory to link the package SRPM source.

The command is:

urpmi –buildrequires <package.src.rpm>

Remember, there are two hyphens in buildrequires option. You must to substitute <package.src.rpm> for the src.rpm package address. For example, to download Choqok build requires you uses::

urpmi –buildrequires ftp://mageia.c3sl.ufpr.br/mageia/distrib/cauldron/SRPMS/core/release/choqok-1.3-5.mga3.src.rpm

To find the SRPM package you must visit a repository of your distro and copy the complete package name. For example, there is a Tier 1 repository to Mageia in C3SL, the link is http://mageia.c3sl.ufpr.br/mageia/distrib/cauldron/SRPMS/.

Yes, São Carlos will have a KDE 4.10 release party!

 The party will take place on February 20 at 19:30 in GIG pub.

Let’s talk about KDE in terms of technology and community, free software in world, free software community in São Carlos, and, of course, let’s drink some beers too! =)

More information about release party here.

Read more about KDE 4.10 news in release notes.