jkt's blog

When trying to test all these commits that blackie did earlier today, I realized that various libraries in extragear/graphics were apparently moved away from their former location. As it took me almost two hours to fully restore my working environment (thanks for hints, thiago), I think it's worth publishing a quick howto about how to build KPhotoAlbum from SVN. In the following text, I'll use ~/work/prog/kde for the directory that we're going to work in and assume that /usr/kde/4.0 is where you installed KDE4 (you will need to install various development packages for kde4 if you're on a distribution that doesn't install them by default). If you use a different setup, please adjust all commands/variables properly.

Please use the guide at KPhotoAlbum.org instead.

# preparation
mkdir -p ~/work/prog/kde
cd ~/work/prog/kde

# SVN checkout
svn co -N svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdegraphics
cd kdegraphics
svn up cmake libs
cd ..
svn co -N svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/extragear/graphics extragear-graphics
cd extragear-graphics
svn up cmake kphotoalbum

cd ../kdegraphics

# configure, build and install the libraries
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=~/work/prog/kde/_out/lib/pkgconfig \
KDEHOME=~/.kde4.0 KDEDIRS=~/work/prog/kde/_out:/usr/kde/4.0 \
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=relwithdebuginfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/work/prog/kde/_out .
make -j2 && make install

cd ../extragear-graphics/

# configure, build and install KPhotoAlbum itself
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=~/work/prog/kde/_out/lib/pkgconfig \
KDEHOME=~/.kde4.0 KDEDIRS=~/work/prog/kde/_out:/usr/kde/4.0 \
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=relwithdebuginfo -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/work/prog/kde/_out .
make -j2 && make install
# Yeah, this is the same command as used for building libraries

Now that you've built KPhotoAlbum, it's time to launch it:

KDEHOME=~/.kde4.0 KDEDIRS=~/work/prog/kde/_out:/usr/kde/4.0 ~/work/prog/kde/_out/bin/kphotoalbum

It should be safe to do that from any X session, including the KDE 3.5 one.

I hope that this quick howto will prevent people from fighting with .so collisions coming from kde3's libkipi and struggling with FindKipi.cmake (no, you really don't want to symlink libkipi as a "local subdirectory", even when the cmake error message make you feel like you should).

Today I finally got time to open my last cell phone bill and found something which seemed like an error. I picked up the phone, called the customer service and got greeted by an automated voice that by the way mentioned to me that "To improve the child protection on the Internet, Vodafone has decided to filter out access to suspicious or illegal sites" (rough translation of a spoken notice). This made me really surprised as this is the first action of such kind in this country, AFAIK.

When I got put through to the operator and had solved the issue I was calling about, I asked him what the recently introduced filtering is, how exactly it works and if I can have it deactivated (I for one don't like my ISP deciding what I can and what I can't read, that seems too Chinese to me). He explained that this is done to protect the safety of children on the Internet (I don't consider myself a child, and feel pretty much comfortable on the Internet, thank you), works by filtering based on a "list of illegal sites", like those offering child pornography (I don't really suspect crowds of people downloading child pornography through their cell phones and watching it on the tiny screen) or promoting racism.

In their press release, they are nicely making the whole issue sound like an optional filter that allows parents to block drugs/sex/whatever from reaching their children, while in fact this is a ridiculous attempt to filter the Internet for all customers. When I pay for GPRS access, I pay for access to the Internet as a whole, not to a subset of it (and the "subset" is a very precise word here, and I even make the customer care guy say it to me). So, it seems that even Czech republic is starting to follow the admirable leadership of certain countries to censor as much as possible :(...