Category: Qt

Summary of 2016

So, 2016 has been a great year to me. Interesting in many aspects, but most has turned out to be for the better. I’ve gotten to know a bunch of awesome new people, I spoken about open source, Qt and Linux in Europe and USA, I’ve helped hosting an open source conference in Gothenburg, I’ve learned so much more professionally and as a person, and I’ve really enjoyed myself the whole time.

2016 was the year that…

  • … myself and Jürgen where Qt Champions for our work with the qmlbook. It feels really great getting recognition for this work. I really want to take QML Book further – during 2016 both myself and Jürgen have been too busy to do a good job improving and extending the text.
  • … I had to opportunity to visit the Americas (Oregon and California) for the first time in my life. Felt really nice having been on another continent. Now it is only Africa and Australia left on the list :-)

  • … I picked up running and has run every week throughout the year, averaging almost 10km per week. This is the first year since we built out house and had kids (so 11 or 12 years) that I’ve maintained a training regime over a full year.
  • … foss-gbg went from a small user group of 15-30 people meeting every month to something much larger. On May 26 the first foss-north took place. This is something some friends of mine and myself have discussed for years and when we finally dared to try it was a great success. We filled the venue with 110 guests and ten speakers and had a great day in the sunshine. In the events after foss-north, the local group, foss-gbg has attracted 40-60 people per meeting, so double the crowd.

  • … Pelagicore, the start-up I joined in 2010 when we were only 6 employees, was acquired by Luxoft. We had grown to 50+ employees in the mean time and put Qt, Linux and open source on the automotive map. It has been a great journey and I feel that we being a part of something bigger lets us reach even further, so I’m really excited about this.

2017 will be the year that…

  • … I make more time for writing – on qmlbook, this blog and more.
  • … I improve my running and increase my average distance per run as well as distance per week.
  • … foss-north will take place again. This time with double the audience and dual tracks for parts of the day. I will share more information as it develops. This time, the date to aim for is April 26. In the mean time, foss-gbg will have fewer, but larger, meetings.
  • … Qt, Linux and open source becomes the natural choice in automotive. I will do my best to help this turn out true!

Even as 2016 has been really good, I hope that 2017 will be even greater. I’m really looking forward to learning!

foss-north – Schedule available

Just a short update on foss-north – the schedule is up. We have a whole list of speakers that I’m super excited about and tickets are selling well. I still don’t know what to expect, but more than 1/3 of the tickets are gone and the sales numbers are actually even better for the full priced tickets than the early birds.

Speakers will cover everything from design, methodology, licensing, embedded tech, networking, IoT, start-ups, innovation – a broad spectrum demonstrating the versatility of free and open source.

To sum things up – it looks like we might actually pull this off and I still can treat my family with a vacation instead of paying for unused catering ;-)

Vacation 2015

IMG_20150703_172538So, vacation has finally arrived in 2015. To the despair of some, and joy of others, the Swedish standard vacation is 3-5 weeks over the summer. I’ll be having five weeks of this year.

So, what do you do with five weeks? Generally, I start out ambitious and end up in reality after 3-4 weeks and then scramble to get something done. Here is my list for the summer 2015:

  • Hang out with the kids and wife and do fun stuff.
  • Do some work around the house (a shed for our bikes and some general painting are on the wish list).
  • Get the calendar for foss-gbg into place. It does look as if we will have an awesome autumn.
  • Work on a whole bunch of little Yocto projects that I’ve been planning for a while (meta-kf5 being one of the high priority ones, playing with various targets such as the Raspberry Pi 2, Beagle Bone Black and more another).
  • Getting my 3D printer back into shape and do something fun with it (if it rains a lot)

That summarizes my ambition pretty much – but first things first – lets spend a few days hanging out with the kids before they grow tired of me and think that I’m old and boring :-)

Saving code

As you probably know by now, Gitorious is shutting down. A lot of history sits on that site, and much of the code is no longer maintained. Browsing around, I ran into the maemo-tools that has not been touched since 2013. There are still some useful stuff there, so I decided to save it. All tool repositories has been cloned to the maemo-tools-old organization on github.

As I’m only a happy user, I would love to invite the original maintainers, or other interested developers to come work on it, so if you want an invite to the organization so that you can maintain the code, just drop me a mail at e8johan, gmail, com.

QmlBook Making Progress

It has been a long time since the last update of QmlBook was announced – but the project is definitely live and kicking. Jürgen has put in a lot of great work into the contents and gotten the collaborative work over on github started. To simplify the publication, the contents has been moved to github hosting, but you can still use the old qmlbook.org (and qmlbook.com) addresses to get there.

qmlbook-screenshotThe reason for the standstill on the qmlbook.org/com sites, and much of the perceived lack of progress is due to my personal time situation. Small children and family life takes time, as does my work (which is awesome and includes Qt/QML – go Pelagicore). Unfortunately, I’m a bit of an optimist, so I want to, and truly believe that I will have time to work on side projects such as this book. But the 24h/day limit sucks, so sometimes I realize that I fail to do so.

However, this is not a post where I complain over my own situation – instead – I want to thank all the contributors who keep feeding us issue tickets via github! I would also like to thank our readers – it is great to hear from you! And finally, I’d like to thank Jürgen who has put down a lot of work and kept the project moving forward.

It is not my intention to leave this project, I’m just short on time at the moment due to other awesome things in my life (kids, wife, work) – I’ll be back!

meta-kf5 usable

Finally I’ve had the time to work over the final issues in meta-kf5. Right now, I build most tier 1 and tier 2 components. I’ve packaged most functional modules and integration modules from these tiers.

When it comes to integration modules, there might be missing dependencies that need to be added – but that should not be too hard to add.

To be able to create useable cmake files, I had to employ a small hack modifying the cmake-files from KF5 before installing and packaging them. This seems to work (i.e. tier 2 builds), but there might be other sed-expressions that are needed.

Also, the autotests are not built as long at Qt5Test is left out form the build. If you would add Qt5Test, I believe that the unit tests will be included in the same package as the libs. I’ll address this as I integrate the autotests into ptest.

Summing up all of this, I’d say that the meta-kf5 layer now is usable!

That is all for now. As always, contributions are welcome! If you find a use for this, I’d be happy to add your project as a reference to the layer!

meta-kf5 – almost there…

So, as of tonight, all but three tier 1 modules from kf5 are built in meta-kf5. The ones remaining are KApiDox, which does not really apply, and KConfig and Sonnet, which both needs to be part built for the native host environment, and part cross compiled. So, any Yocto hackers out there, please have a look at the issues linked to from the meta-kf5 status page.

meta-kf5 progress report

The meta-kf5 Yocto  layer is coming along nicely. Most of the modules are proving to be fairly easy to integrate, much thanks to the excellent ground work in meta-qt5, including the cmake_qt5 bbclass.

My plan for the summer vacation was to do one module a day, so around 5 would be ok. Until now I’ve done 9. Only KConfig has been providing any resistance (it does not like QT_NO_SESSIONMANAGER). My current pipe for tier 1 modules has 6 more candidates in it, so hopefully I can say that I’ve done 15 modules tomorrow night.

Right now, I have only one big worry – I have no code using the packages, so it is a bit of a if-it-compiles-it-works mentality right now. This should be fixed by integrating the test cases from the KF5 modules with ptest and building a test image. This is something that I’ll have to look at further along the road.