Why did I fight for Wesnoth?

I'm really upset with Wesnoth developers for bringing out such an enjoyable game. It has lots of maps, scenarios and campaigns to explore, pretty attractive graphics and theme. It even has multiplayer support over network. What a good combination to ruin your night... Like me, my wife and a friend of mine (Meren) did tonight.

Wesnoth gained my attention while I was fixing it's PiSi package. And tonight before we go to sleep, I suggested to give a chance for a network game. Even I'm not a gamer type we all fall in to the game till 4am. You now, that's no good. Having that we have a meeting to attend this morning, that's really not good...

My curse on you Wesnoth developers and it's first PiSi packager. Now, without a sleep we'll have to go to work. But at least, this gave us 2 more hours to hack on our projects ;).

Shortening the time

Another "long time, no blog" writing :). But for now, I won't give a summary of the past news, but a new one.

Before I've mentioned about COMAR - the COnfiguration MAnageR for Pardus. For 1.0 release we're using it for a couple of jobs. Namely for network, time/date and automatic X.org configuration. But we wouldn't stop there. After the release we thought to use it for the overly complicated init system. Today the new module is committed by Gurer to our public SVN.

We're playing with our new init system for a while. Although it's in an early stage, personally I'm very happy about it. The new system is written in Python for COMAR. Using a real programming language makes things cleaner. And speed comes for free as a side effect :). Take a look at the bootcharts:

Bootchart for the new init over COMAR.


Bootchart for the decent old init system.

The only missing part in the new system is mdnsd. I think that's promising :).

Pardus KDE packages

A few days ago we have uploaded KDE packages for Pardus.

We'll also relase a release candidate for 1.0 tomorrow. It's really exciting for me after the two years of work :). But I'll write about it and other upcoming events later on.

It is a shot of YALI (yet another linux installer) on the left.

Gaining Awareness

Long time without a log... Was a kind of busy with many things, will write about a few :).

Plasma appeared on the press, Focus Magazine Turkey this month. It's somehow short (half of a page) but is very encouraging.

Yesterday we made an interview with Focus Magazine Turkey, but this time for Pardus Linux. It seems that we will be the cover subject next month :). As KDE is the main (and currently only) DE for Pardus, in the interview we have also talked about KDE.

Today I've attended CeBIT Eurasia and made another interview with a TV (TRT). They said that we'll be on the news tomorow. There will be scenes of Pardus, with its KDE desktop, on the TV.

Tomorrow, our project manager Erkan Tekman will join another TV (CNN Turk) program. The topic is "National Operating System". Vise Chairman of Microsoft Turkey will also attend the show.

Conclusion: We are gaining more awareness on both sides, Pardus and KDE, in Turkey. I'm sure more will come in the future. And this is just great :).

Yes, we're there!

Yesterday we've released our code for PISI (a package manager for our distribution; for the uninformed ;) with the revision history for your curious eyes :). Yes, we've reached alpha state with a few missing parts.

There is a separate documentation, describing the requirements and architecture but sadly its only in Turkish currently. Anyway I think the distinction of PISI is its simplicity. It was possible for a person from irc to build his first package within an hour after he first seen PISI. Without the documentation, without an help but just with looking at the tests. That's good :).

Today we've made a meeting to schedule our time for the forthcoming days. PISI development is going steadily and it seems that I'm stepping to a new area, YALI (Yet Another Linux Installer).

A long time friend of mine, Gorkem started to work part-time with us at Pardus. He'll mainly work on the quality-assurance and usability issues. Being the Project Coordinator at KDE Turkey, KDE community is familiar with him too :).

On the KDE part, again I don't have much to write :(. But I've made a new build of trunk (now KDE4) and will try to work on that soon. I've ported my KDE Programming presentation to beamer with an update. It was fun.

In other news, KDE Turkey has a new logo. You can see it at the top of the site. Reading the conversations at the mailing list, it seems that we have also some new interested community members with the affect of last translation marathon. This is very encouraging :).

Happy News

I've some updated news, that I've reported earlier.

The call for Turkish KDE translations is a big success :). With new comers and the motivated old translators Turkish translations raised from 72% to over 80% in less then two weeks. Great!

I'll be the first to give this news :). After Eray (exa) another KDE developer joined to our project, Pardus. He'll help us improving our desktop projects, mainly working with Tasma and Captain Desktop at first. Welcome Cartman :).

Manifestation of life

It's been so long after my last post. It's because of our busy schedule for the release of Pardus Linux. We have lots of things to do with a small but qualified team.

Nowadays we are working hard on our package management system PISI. I know it sounds banal, "A new distribution and a new pkg system". But I'm pretty sure we'll fix some bits in current packaging systems. Okay, others said so too, but one way or another we'll have our simple and smart system working with our configuration manager which is also in development currently :).

Yesterday we've reached pre-alpha stage providing the bare minimum package system functionality; package creation and installation. Didn't release any code to public for now. But we will release the system with GPL like all work we do.

Today after doing some work on PISI, I didn't feel like coding/documenting anymore. First we went out with my wife to the Bosporus and ate fish. We walked for a while searching for a new apartment to rent, but couldn't succeed :(. Coming back to home I made a call to the public for Turkish KDE translations with a small how-to. We need more hardworking translators. Now after the call we are waiting in our cave for newcomers :).

Soo... I didn't have time for KDE works in the last two/three weeks. I just had chance to touch some Turkic locale problems. And that is all... Ops! I've forgot to mention about my LyX plugins for KDE, but that's to small amount of work and not finished yet :).



I'm pretty sure upcoming days will be same too. But I'll try to be more responsive :).

I've forgot to add... Now we have two KDE developers in our team at Pardus. Some of you may remember Eray Ozkural (exa) :). It's a pity that we can't do any KDE work for now, but we will after our dear PISI :)...