Busy Days At 23C3, OLPC, WebKit
After visiting the family over christmas, I headed to Berlin on Wednesday to attend 23C3. Together with Holger Freyther I am representing KDE at this event and our friends from Wikimedia have given us a place to hack at their corner of the Conference building. Yesterday I used the opportunity to get contact to some of the mediawiki hackers to pass on some itching bug reports. Some of the problems are already resolved, others will be approached on tomorrows (or todays, depending on your timezone) Developer Wiki Friday.
On another note, I had the chance to get my hands on one of the OLPCs, as the laptop.org developers also seeked the productive and friendly atmosphere of the Wikipedia Corner. I can only agree with Sebastian: This is a device to actually care about and take care of: it’s both cute and powerful. The software (Sugar) still has some rough edges though and gecko-based browser app is really slow and unoptimized for the screen, which is a real pity.
That was motivation enough for us to go a small experiment: Can we run WebKit/Qt4 on the Sugar and have it use less memory footprint than gecko? Since Zack is on holidays, I fixed the Qt port based on a patch from Fredrik and filed the patch in the WebKit Bugzilla. Meanwhile Holger is busy to make Qt widgets work in GTK/Sugar. Let’s see if this will work out :).
I heard the laptop does not come with an harddisk. Does it boot from a network or how is the OS loaded?
By the way: is there any progress with respect to a KDE API for Wikipedia? (http://dot.kde.org/1119552379/)
The OS loads from flash memory. As for the KDE API for Wikipedia: We first need an API from the Wikimedia developers. The API that Wikimedia provides (api.php) is not yet suitable for external users. it’s mostly designed to be useful for bots.
I had no time to persue this, but I will do that before KDE libs freeze for 4.0.