Month: January 2013

As KDE-LightDM prepares for heading into extragear, I'm busy tying up all the loose ends and final bits of polish on the product. One of the final items left is working on making it easy for modders and hackers to build their own themes and make these really easy to install for all users.

In recent weeks, I've had two people contact me with regards to making their own themes which is really encouraging.

Stoica-Marcu Andrei (FlowRiser) has developed a login manager theme that looks like the login theme that mimics the video game "League Of Legends". As an old person I don't really know what that is, but I do know it looks very nice. The still screenshot shot does not do it justice, there's things animating and moving and there's sound and all sorts.

Whilst this obviously isn't to everyone's taste and won't ever be shipped with KDE-LightDM, it's really encouraging to see someone take the flexibility the QML-powered theme engine provides and make something really unique with it beyond anything I had imagined. It also helps to confirm a lot of design decisions I made along the way.

There's also been some interest from KDE's graphic artist Nuno Pinheiro, working on some interesting ideas.

This requires the git-latest version of KDE-LightDM, as well as some manual installation for now.

In the long term I hope to have a category on kde-look, or equivalent.

Contact me (d_ed) in #kde-lightdm on Freenode if you're interested.

With the second RC of KDE4.2 just released, now is a really important time to get involved in testing KDE 4.10.

During this release, due to changes based on feedback, two areas of KDE have undergone a significant change between Release Candidate 1 and 2. This isn't typical, so to ensure the final release goes as smoothly as possible an extra release candidate is going to be created. This will delay the KDE 4.10 release, but it does help ensure that KDE 4.10 is the best ever.

As part of the KDE quality team, it's now our task to make sure these changed areas still get the same level of coverage and testing. To help with this we've arranged a series of checklists covering all the items in the two modified areas.

Once you have RC2 installed, it would really help us if as many people as possible go through the checklists to check for any regressions.

• Changes to Dolphin
• Changes to PIM

As usual you can help test all the areas of KDE that have changed between KDE 4.9 and 4.10, or simply by using the release early and reporting back with any problems.

Thanks to everyone who has worked hard in testing so far. During the release phase is when developers are most attentitive to bug reports, and it really does make a difference.