The biggest technology fair in Turkeyhas just been over. More than 100.000 visitors and about 1000 companies met for four days.

Pardus was one of the biggest pavilion as for the last years. We ran out of DVD’s before the fair is over, altough we prepared 10.000 of them with the latest release of Pardus, which is 2011.2 Cervus elaphus. :)

The pavillion was full of fun. We hosted the SigmaRD artist collective with their body/gesture controller based on Kinect, which is written with Qt and runs on Pardus.

Their project Natural Interface, converts human interaction (gestures captured through Kinect) to X events. Thus, you can control desktop applications by simple hand gestures.

We also provided a home entertainment unit with a comfortable couch and a big LCD TV. In the previous events, we were tired and bored from the questions and prejudices about games on Linux. This time we showed everyone, how you rock with Linux! Hundreds of people enjoyed playing World of Goo, Frets on Fire, Crayon Physics, Open Arena, Torcs etc.and watching HD movies (free movies of course like Sintel, Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny ;) )…

But most of the people was interested in the interactive digital board which was powered by Pardus.

I should tell about this a little bit more. There is a project called Fatih, aims to improve technological infrastructure of Turkish educational system. It is planned to install digital interactive boards in all classrooms and Pardus has been chosen as the operating system. This means more than 600.000 interactive boards will be powered by free software and KDE! :) Another chapter of the project is providing tablet PC’s to all school kids where it is still controversial if the OS will be Pardus or another system (Android?). That is a though decision as it means 15.000.000 tablets will be operated which will be 15% of the whole market of tablets. (Yep, that’s right! :) )

Finally I want to thank all volunteers for their great work ! We couldn’t do this without their faith.

Yet another creative developer from Pardus, Renan Çakırerk has created Quickformat. And I wanted to let you know !

It is also integrated to Dolphin !

You can find a lot of information about Quickformat from Renan’s Blog. Have fun !

This release is the 5th major installation release that has shipped since the project had begun in 2003 by TÜBİTAK BİLGEM (Center of Research For Advanced Technologies Of Informatics And Information Security) and offers many new features among a more stable experience.

Some of new features that we made in Pardus 2011;

• YALI, the installer of Pardus, gained LVM/RAID and UUID support.
• The user interface is completely redesigned to improve the usability.
• Users are now able to select between Open Source and proprietary drivers for their NVIDIA video adapters.

p.s. We will be attending Fosdem with my colleague Gökçen Eraslan, we have talks about Pardus Technologies in CrossDistro devroom (COMAR and Pisi) and we will bring some Pardus 2011 DVDs, you have a chance to get an original Pardus 2011 DVD at Fosdem ;)

Users wanted to see service descriptions in service-manager and I tried to find a proper solution, here is the result;

Service Manager meets PDS from Gökmen Göksel on Vimeo.

In Package Manager, when user clicked on a package -to get its details-, details comes with sliding-down animation. And then if user clicks the same package, details goes away with sliding up animation.

But, when user clicks a different package while one of them opened before, it closes the first one directly (no animation) and then shows the new one with a sliding down animation. A small touch;

--- trunk/kde/package-manager/manager/src/rowanimator.py	2010/10/20 13:51:19	32615
+++ trunk/kde/package-manager/manager/src/rowanimator.py	2010/11/07 20:29:59	32912
@@ -45,16 +45,27 @@
         self.direction = DOWN
         self.row = None
         self.lastrow = None
-        self.timeLine = QTimeLine(300)
         self.t_view = updater
+        self.initTimeLine()
+        self.hoverLinkFilter = HoverLinkFilter(self)
+        self.t_view.installEventFilter(self.hoverLinkFilter)

+    def initTimeLine(self):
+        self.timeLine = QTimeLine(300)
         QObject.connect(self.timeLine, SIGNAL("frameChanged(int)"), self.updateSize)
         QObject.connect(self.timeLine, SIGNAL("finished()"), self.finished)
+        self.timeLine.setDirection(QTimeLine.Backward)

-        self.hoverLinkFilter = HoverLinkFilter(self)
-        self.t_view.installEventFilter(self.hoverLinkFilter)
+    def animate(self, row, reverseOld = False):
+        if self.row >= 0:
+            if not self.row == row:
+                self.timeLine.setFrameRange(DEFAULT_HEIGHT, self.max_height)
+                self.timeLine.start()
+                QObject.connect(self.timeLine, SIGNAL("finished()"), lambda: self.animate(row, True))
+                if not reverseOld:
+                    return

-    def animate(self, row):
+        self.initTimeLine()
         self.setRow(row)
         self.timeLine.setFrameRange(DEFAULT_HEIGHT, self.max_height)
         self.timeLine.start()

Fixed it :) Here are the results;

The old one;

Old Package List Animation from Gökmen Göksel on Vimeo.

The new one;

New Package List Animation from Gökmen Göksel on Vimeo.

Linux Journal just announced the 2010 Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Awards, and good news Pardus is in top five this year !

In three important categories, Pardus catches the top five;

- Best Linux Distribution; 1st Ubuntu and 5th is Pardus

- Best Package Management Application; 1st Apt and 5th is Pisi

- Product of the Year; 1st Android, 2nd KDE lol and 5th is Pardus

The other good news is our best friend Python selected 1st in both Best Programming and Best Scripting Languages categories.

Have a nice Sunday !

Pardus have its own package management system: PiSi (For more information about pisi you can checkout development page). Package-manager uses its backend. As you may remember from my previous posts, we are using an infrastructrure for managing operations called Çomar. Package-manager calls Çomar where it can check that if the user have necessary priveleges to use PiSi by using PolicyKit (which calls PolicyKitKde on KDE). You may see that this operation resembles KAuth. One can ask why we are using this method, instead of KAuth. Well, the simple answer is that this infrastructure is nearly 4 years old. :-)

Let’s look at the new features of package-manager…

The most significant change is the new interface where you may see that there are tabs similar to rekonq and chromium. Package-manager doesn’t have anything to offer in file menu but settings, so this menuless aspect works better for our needs and it saves a one line space, which is getting more and more important for netbooks and other small screen devices.

Another great improvement you may catch from the first screenshot is rating stars for packages. The rating option was a feature requested by our users for a long time. Since we kept them waiting so long, we thought that the solution should worth. We put out a new project called AppInfo which can work with any package management system. At the moment, only PiSi backend is completed but anyone can write a new backend for rpm, deb or any other package-manager of choice. AppInfo provides a rating for each package from its main database. Clients uses AppInfo API to check out the rating database from a predefined AppInfo server which provides screenshots and rating info for the requested package. Below you can see the information of package-manager in use.

In the last screenshot you may be interested in the overlayed widget. The trick is the PDS.Gui class. I’ve written about Pardus Desktop Services before. This Gui class is a new add-on for PDS aiming to improve usability. It also supports animated transitions which based on QTimeLine and to achieve an animation infrastructure similar to QPropertyAnimation. Using QPropertyAnimation was an option for sure, however I wanted to experience to create a basic animation framework with power of Qt. So this choice was totally personal… :-)

Package Manager in Action

While integrating the new search mechanism to achieve an auto completion for packages, I used PDS.Gui as well.

I embedded the basket window and the progress dialog into the main window with PDS.Gui as well.

You may download Pardus 2011 Beta and check the new features.

Thanks for the fish…

* KDE 4.2.4
* Linux kernel 2.6.30.1
* OpenOffice.org 3.1.0.6
* Firefox 3.5.1
* Gimp 2.6.6
* Xorg 1.6.2
* Python 2.6.2
* Texlive 2008
* GCC 4.3.3
* GLIBC 2.9

You can grab your own copy from here.

A little time left for the final release ;)