It’s been quite a long time since my last blog entry.. University, family and love took me a little away from the KDE scene.. Anyway i was able to follow the great success the incoming KDE 4.2 release is getting. You all have done a great job and we all should be proud of what KDE is and will be for the Open Source world. Unfortunately i’m in my exam period at university and i hope it’ll last soon.. Btw i was able to get back in touch with Plasma and committed two little patches this morning.. Nothing really relevant, just to feel i’m back to KDE development :).
Due to this busy period i’ve left Lukas all alone with our KConfigEditor port to KDE4 which is still there, just ported but not improved. I’ll get back working on it soon, i promise! š
PolicyKit-KDE is another big project i was contributing to till the end of the last year. Daniel Nicoletti, helped by Lukas, is doing a really great work and KDE will soon be enriched by a great PolicyKit library ;). I hope me and Dario Freddi will be back helping soon.
But the reason i wanted to write this (maybe unuseful?) blog entry was the interest Raptor is getting these days. Do you remember Raptor?? š Me, Riccardo, Lukas, Dario and some others (sorry, i don’t remember your names) started to work back on the abandoned Raptor promising we would have released it by KDE 4.2.. As you may have noticed we didn’t.. Sorry for that..
Someone asked in chat, some others in the mailing list.. I’d like to show you what a dear user said on raptor@kde.org =)
It is quite a sad ordeal that such a brilliantly planned and designed project has been halted. I hope someone can get to work on it. Now that KDE4 has matured though, I realise there may not have as many visionary developers willing to work on it. In saying this, it is still a worthy cause if anyone wants to give it a go. This would be a very powerful system, capable of running on any operating system and may change the paradigm of such systems in the future.
Please, if anyone is reading this. If you are interesting in it and have spare time, please work on it :).Thanks,– Sacha
It is always a big pleasure for us (you, me, us), developers, when users directly ask for our contribution and talk about their real feeling of need for this or that feature. As Sacha says, KDE4 has matured; yes, but i think that just because of the current state of KDE4 there’s now need to make real what Raptor (the idea) is! Unfortunately, for most of us, KDE is a question of spare time so sometimes we need to abandon it a little in favour of university, work, or whatever. So, Sacha, and everyone else interested in, sorry for the slowness of Raptor development, but i’d thank you for your mail. It makes us really proud of being KDE developers and it is for sure a motivation for us. IĀ hope we’ll be able to make Raptor real soon. You can track its development with this repository: http://github.com/ruphy/raptor or just ask on #raptor. =)
P.S.: I have some news about Raptor, technical stuff.. Youll read soon a blog entry about it. š
Hugs KDE devs & users.
alediaferia::hackingAround() 
I’m so thrilled that we may be seeing movement on Raptor again. This is one of the projects that really had me excited about KDE4. After all, what part of a desktop (ok other than window management) gets used more frequently by average users? The design concept behind Raptor is intruiging and innovative – exactly the kind of thing to attract interest from users of other DE / OS’es.
Many thanks for the work that you’ve already put in, and all the best with future development of Raptor.
Your fans are waiting, with baited breath! (c:
Hi Guys!
I am trying to compile Raptor forllowing your instructions but I have many errors. It seems some directories/files are missing.
Only a quick question. I am not a technician but an average user. Is it possible for standard users to compile and test Raptor or it is better to wait more?
Thank you indeed.
@Maurizio: Hi, actually raptor should build fine but it is highly work in progress.. Anyway mail us at raptor@kde.org for any issue, you can paste there your errors so that we can help you..