markey

I'd like to welcome Peter Zhou (peterzl on IRC), one of the Amarok SoC students for 2008. I'll let his words introduce him:


Hi my name is Peter Zhou, I am a Mainland China student pursuing bachelor degree in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

I am glad that I can now witness the growth of Amarok by involving the core development team. I will redo the scripting interface and rewrite some GUI functions in order to enable the external access to the whole Amarok GUI interface. Then the wolf would have a even more powerful inside.^_^

Good to work with all of you! This is indeed so exciting! Looking forward to seeing you guys in Akademy!

Hi All!

I'm really happy to say that I'm a new artist for the Amarok project. You might remember me as a programmer, but now we Amarok programmers also create artwork for the project.

Please check out my first contribution, a new logo:




Isn't that awesome? I've always had a talent for drawing, and I think this really shows.


Ooooooook, I realize that it's maybe not a really good idea if programmers also do artwork. But we have no choice. While we really can't complain about lack of coders in the project, we have about 0 artists left, so someone's gotta do the job.

If you are a talented SVG artist and if you like Amarok (or if you know such a person), please contact us and help making Amarok 2 a beautiful application!


Sincerely,
Mark Kretschmann, Amarok Founder (and artist from hell).

It was just a matter of time, but now I am proud to discover that the first Amarok fanfic has surfaced on the web. Here's an excerpt:


Runeclaw paused in front of the larger-than-life portal and curled back her lip. "Easy there, Amarok," she said softly while reaching down to pat the bristling fur on her wolf's neck. "I don't like the smell of this place either, but Kitahl wanted to meet here. Always one for the dramatic, he is," she continued. The sound of her own voice and the steady deep breathing of her mount helped to calm her nerves.

"Maybe we should go back and lure that dragon we saw down here as a surprise gift." Amarok flatted his ears back and chuffed stubbornly as she tried to turn him back towards The Blasted Lands. "Sissy," she chuckled affectionately.



Original can be found here. Have fun reading

Recently Patrick Lauer interviewed me for "Not the Gentoo Linux Newsletter", which is not the Gentoo newsletter. In fact it's much better than that, because it's funny and at the same time informative.

In the same style, our interview turned out really nice, especially because Patrick actually took the time to do this live on IRC, instead of sending me a standard questionnaire (Yes, I'm looking at you, "People Behind KDE" editors). Without further talking, I present you the following link:


Interview with Mark Kretschmann

Heya,

today I've listened to an interesting episode of Chaosradio, a podcast created by the famous German Chaos Computer Club (CCC). Episode CRE068 features a one hour long interview with KDE's very own Danimo (Daniel Molkentin) about KDE4, and they also talk quite a bit about the upcoming Amarok 2!

Check it out, if you can parse German. (sorry, there's no English transcript at this point. Any takers?)

THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN BY LYDIA PINTSCHER.
You can find Lydia's regular blog over here.


Less than 13 hours left until Sven (sven423) and I are taking the train to Krefeld for Ubucon to meet up with Mark (markey), Myriam (Mamarok), and Marcus (czessi) and give two talks.

Our talks will be:

“Kubuntu :: Collaboration To The Core” on Saturday
“Amarok :: Forming the Core 2" on Sunday

So get out to Krefeld this weekend and join us on the first German Ubuntu conference!

Harald (apachelogger): Sorry you can’t make it to Ubucon. We will miss you there and hope things turn out well.

And since I didn’t post a proper FrOSCon photo yet - here is one of markey, gnux, me, sven423 and apachelogger:



You just have to love this team

And don’t forget to donate to Amarok. It is ROKTOBER, folks! Only 1287 Euro left to reach our goal right now. Please help us make Amarok even more awesome next year (pssst: you can win a Cowon iAudio7). The money will be used to pay for developer meetings, travel costs of the booth staff and server costs.

Ahoy, ye scurvy sea dogs. Today be the day for talkin' like a pirate! Have a mug o' fine rum an' set out for some swashbucklin' fun. Show them land lubbers what a pirate is made of, yarrrr!


Fair Winds,
Yer Cap'n Marrrrrkey

Wtf is going on with our society? I am living in Germany, one of the richest countries in the world. Life is good here. It's common here to have a nice flat, wear beautiful clothing and to drive comfortable cars like Mercedes. We should not complain. And yet, life isn't good for everyone here. There is a small minority of people who cannot afford to buy a car, or a flat, or nice clothes; in fact they cannot afford to buy food to survive the day.

When I'm strolling around our shopping mile, I see this fat guy walking, stuffing his fat face with food to get fatter. And then I see this thin guy, who's sitting on the ground. Begging for money. Oh and this guy has no feet, and no legs. He's sitting there all day, begging for people to give him some money. To survive another day. I'm asking myself what's going on with this country.

Does the rich guy need another Mercedes, or could he afford to give 10 Euros per month to keep the guy without legs from starving? Personally, I'm not sure what the solution to the poverty problem is. Myself I'm not rich; in fact at times I'm quite poor as well, but I try to help homeless people where I can. And still I realize that this isn't a real solution. Giving some bucks to a guy is just a very temporary remedy. Our oh-so-smart society must be able to come up with a better plan.

So the Twitter hype has finally reached the Amarok team as well. If you want to follow us doing exciting things like washing dishes or eating pizza (maybe in the opposite order), get a Twitter account. Here's a list of Amarok personalities you can follow:

mark_k (that's me!), nhnFreespirit, sebr, apachelogger, Nightrose

And some KDE folks I follow:

aseigo, sebasje, danimo

I'm really looking forward to using the Twitter Plasma applet, once I'm running a KDE4 session permanently. I guess that's like the perfect use case for an applet

This is me on Sunday.. "the day after". What you cannot really see on this photo are the giant bandages around my head, arm, shoulder and knee. They were the result of my little stunt I did the night before at the social event @ Froscon 2007. The Amarok team is known for being party animals, and of course we could not make an exception this time! We hit the dancefloor, and we hit it hard. And then I hit the ground, and I hit it hard. Missing this 1m deep step to the dancefloor, I met the ground horizontally, beer glass in hand. That's Amarok entertainment for ya! Stunts included. After all I was very lucky though not to have any serious injuries, just lots of bleeding skin wounds all over my body. Again many thanks to the Froscon dudes for patching me up in the night.

Here you can see the original Amarok party animals at work:



And here's our Beermaster Sven, Kranz in hand:



A Kranz is a great thing. It's round. It's got a handle. And the best part about it: There's beer in it. Lots of it.




On the next day Harald, Lydia and I held our talk about Amarok's team structure and upcoming features of Amarok 2. The talk wasn't exactly great, but I think considering our damaged state and short time to prepare (I wasn't really prepared at all, since the talk was originally scheduled for another conference), we got the message across and did quite well.



Overall the Froscon was a great experience, and I hope to repeat it next year (although maybe without the stunt show; we'll see). The organizer team was *awesome*; everything went so smoothly. Catering, location, social event, it was all very well organized. I met a lot of great people from other projects, and I had the chance to meet some Amarok teamsters that I had not seen in real life before.

What really bugs me about conferences like these is the constant background noise level though. Maybe it's just me (a hearing problem?), but I find it very stressful to talk to people over such a noise level. It was a great experience to talk to people face to face and demo Amarok2 to our users, but it's no fun having to shout constantly. This wasn't helped by the fact that our booth was next to the Jacklab dudes' booth, who were showcasing their music software with a real guitar and drum kit

On the monday after Froscon we still had some time left until our flights/trains/etc departed, and we (Amarokers) spent some hours in Cologne with Miriam and Florian from the FSFE. We visited the famous cathedral of Cologne and after that went shopping and had beer at a nice place directly at the river Rhine. Quality time, and it was great to meet Miriam and Flo, who are really nice folks.

You can find more photos of the event here and here. Also, here is a very nice blog entry (in German language) from Valerie.

Hi, my name is Mark Kretschmann. I am the founder of the Amarok project. Amarok is the leading music player for the Linux desktop and one of the most popular KDE applications. We often hear it being called a "killer application" for Linux.

Since spring 2007 we have started to work on Amarok 2, a very ambitious project in many ways. Instead of going the easy way and doing a quick and dirty port to Qt4/KDE4, we have decided to renovate the program from the ground up, rewriting about half of the source code and exploring new and exciting ways in user interface design. We want to innovate; we want to make sure that Amarok is ready for the future and will stay at the top of its game. At the same time we are porting the application to Windows and MacOS X, opening the program to a whole new audience and potentially many more users.

Up to now I have been working in my spare time on Amarok, often struggling to keep real life work and Amarok development in balance. All of us Amarok developers invest an immense amount of time in the project, and we love doing it. But we have to make both ends meet. The Amarok project does not have sufficient financial resources to allow for paying developers. It's becoming increasingly clear that we need to have people working full time on the project to meet our goals with Amarok 2. The work cannot be done purely in our spare time.

If you as a company have an in interest in Amarok's continued success, please consider hiring me to work on the project full time. As the founder and lead developer of Amarok my contribution is crucial for its future, and I would love to continue working on this great project.


If you are interested, please contact me via email at kretschmann(at)kde.org.

I felt I need to share this article with you; here at Amarok HQ we are very happy about the news.

Another race won, and we are looking forward to the next challenge. Go Go Amarok!

Then you're lucky: The Amarok project is giving away 20 tickets for LinuxTag 2007! All you have to do is head over to our site and participate in our little contest.

After reading this article on the dot I decided to give the new KDE-Games for KDE4 a spin. I have to say they've done fantastic work. The SVG graphics look just as good as on the screenshots, and scale beautifully to any resolution. Of course the best graphics technology is useless without actual artwork, so the kudos must also go to the artists. It's all very pretty. Likewise I was impressed by the relative maturity; many of the games seem already perfectly playable and in good shape.

The only small downside of the SVG rendering seems to be that it's quite CPU intensive. Resizing e.g. KAtomic to full screen takes a few seconds on my box (5000+ X2), and I can imagine that the application might appear to freeze on slower machines. However, in-game the performance is just fine, so I don't think that's a big issue.


I'd say gaming on KDE4 is going to be shiny. Check it out if you haven't already

We sometimes get asked by users how one can achieve to install Amarok in a different prefix. This can be handy if you'd like to check out a SVN version, but you don't want this to interfere with your packaging system. On our wiki there is already a guide for obtaining Amarok from SVN, so I won't detail this here (I am referring to the stable 1.4 branch here; Amarok 2.0 requires a lot more work to build). Once you have the sources, give the configure script your desired installation path ("prefix"):

./configure --prefix=$HOME/amarok_install

Then compile and install as usual. After that edit your ~/.bashrc and add the following lines:

export KDEDIRS=$HOME/amarok_install/:$KDEDIRS
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/amarok_install/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export PATH=$HOME/amarok_install/bin:$PATH

Now log out from KDE, and log in again. Voila, that's it