Paratype has a set of nice Latin/pan-Cyrillic typefaces including sans-serif, serif and monospace fonts. The sans-serif typeface, PT Sans, released in 2010 has been part of Fedora for a long time and it is the default font for Cyrillic/Russian. It is a nice font for display in desktop, documents and web.
In 2011, PT Serif and PT Mono were added to the collection. They both are nice looking and very good quality fonts. All the fonts are also made available under OFL (Open Font License) and all it needed was someone to package them for Fedora. Something in my todo list for a long time, couple of weeks ago I have leveraged the spec file of paratype-pt-sans-fonts and packaged the serif and monospaced fonts. Paratype distributes the source tar balls separately for each set and Fedora mandates to create individual packages in such cases. Thanks to the review and comments from Fedora Fonts-SIG, especially Parag Nemade, two new font packages – paratype-pt-serif-fonts and paratype-pt-mono-fonts are now in Fedora repositories.
Fedora 20 with KDE SC 4.14 has been very stable, and after a while it gets…boring – especially when Plasma 5 is already released and you see screenshots everywhere. If you cannot hold the urge and feel sufficiently adventurous, Dan Vratil has built the Fedora 20 and 21 rpms here. If you install i386 versions, beware that baloo-widgets cannot be installed due to unmet dependencies. So, once you install dvratil’s copr repo, just do:
I had to manually edit /usr/share/xsessions/plasma.desktop to change "/usr//usr/bin" to "/usr/bin” so that “Plasma 5” appears in gdm list. After logging in, the desktop runs smooth, but you notice the lack of many applications because they are not yet fully ported to KF5/Plasma5.
KDE Plasma 5 desktop
Once I had the Qt5/KF5/Plasma5 based workstation fully operational, I could also develop, build and test KF5 based applications. Most of the KDE apps are ported or being ported to KF5 under 'frameworks' git branch. As the OpenSuSe team already have started building KF5 based apps in an unstable repository, I could leverage the spec files to build rpms.
The first itch I scratched was unavailability of touchpad configuration kcm. Not being able to enable touch-to-tap, vertical and horizontal scrolling is no fun. Looking at the git repo for kcm-touchpad showed that it is not yet ported to KF5. Checked out the git repo and started porting. There are quite some references, blogposts and tools available online to guide and ease the porting effort. As it is a kcm that is being ported, the first place to go is Frameworks Porting Notes. The subtopic of ECM (extended cmake modules) source incompatible changes is also handy updating CMakeLists.txt files. The next thing is reference to Martin Graesslin’s post on porting kcontrol module. And the final tool that is quite useful to port API changes is the kde-dev-scripts. Run the source files through relevant script – like "find -iname "*.cpp" -o -iname "*.h" -o -iname "*.ui" | xargs ~/Programs/Projects/kde-dev-scripts/kf5/<porting-script.pl>". When you hit an API change that cannot be automatically converted by the script, check frameworks at api.kde.org. Then port away, setup a build directory, compile, note the build failure, fix the build – repeat.
Alexander Mezin and Hrvoje Senjan reviewed the patches and after 6 revisions the patch is committed in kcm-touchpad frameworksbranch.
KCM Touchpad on KF5
RPMs for Fedora 20 and 21 (i386, x86_64) are built and available in my copr repo. It contains builds of kmix and konsole as well. More to build and I’ll make them available in the same repo once build completed. You are welcome to try at your own risk 🙂
Recent mass rebuild of packages for Fedora 19 resulted in Meiga (lightweight content sharing tool) failing to build from source. A bug report has been filed which pointed at the build log. Build failure is caused by failing to link to libgssdp properly and my attempts to fix the issue didn’t succeed. Enrique was quick enough to produce a new release fixing the issue and Meiga has been updated to the new version in Rawhide as of last week. Packages can be found here.
Soliloquies 