urs’ blog

I’m happy to tell you that I have successfully finished my SoC project, KRDC.
The work on KRDC was very interesting and I have learned quite a lot. The resulting work is already in trunk and included in the to KDE 4.0 beta releases. Try the new KRDC out! It is usable for productive work. Please report any issues or wishes to the KDE bug tracker. I’m committed to fix such things as soon as possible.

Thanks to my mentor, Brad Hards. To work together with him was really great! And thanks of course also to Google for making such a project possible!
Thanks for the people who have offered me a VNC or RDP testing server. Thanks to all the people reading my blog and comment on things.

Of course the work on KRDC continues. First I will try to resolve as many issues as possible (I have already more than halved the bugs.kde.org issues for KRDC until now…). For KDE 4.1 a very much requested feature is planned: NX support in KRDC!

I will keep you up-to-date in my blog.

Now a screenshot of the current state of KRDC (Btw: thanks to the KDE-artists for the brand new great KRDC Oxygen icon):

Development is going on very well. This week my mentor and I have had to do a midterm survey for Google.

Now I need to start testing out all the things. Especially important is the VNC part. This part has been completely rewritten by me. It works very well in my local network, but I also need to test it over internet. This is why I’m asking you: Do you have a server where you can give me at least view-only access? I would like to test it with servers on slow and fast links with low and high latency. It is very important to do this testing, because I would like to ship a rock solid and mature piece of software.

Please contact me here in the comments or drop me an mail (uwolfer @ kde.org) if you have any VNC or RDP testing servers for testing purposes. Thank you very much.

Of course it would also be nice if you could do own tests with the new KRDC and report any issues to me.

BTW: Thank you for all the comments in my last blog entries. Comments help me very much!

It’s time again to write what happened the last days on KRDC.

I have finished to work on the host preferences dialog. Now there is a also a way to reconfigure already configured hosts in the preferences dialog.

At startup there is a start page. It should help the user to find the correct action he would like to do. This can of course be improved. See the sceenshot later.

KWallet support is back! Now it’s also usable for RDP, since it also saves the username in the wallet. In the old KRDC it used to take for every username on the same host the same password… Somewhat useless…

Improvements everywhere. If you find more problem, please report them to me! If you would like to try out the new KRDC, you can find build instructions on the Techbase KRDC page.

The last days I have worked on a new config dialog which opens when you connect to a host. There you can set for example the quality of the remote view. At the moment it has almost the same options as it has had in the old KRdc. The configuration files are now XML based. It’s really fun to work with Qt XML.

I have also worked together with Christian Ehrlicher, one of the KDE Win guys. He has done quite impressive work. He has rewritten the libvncserver / libvncclient build system in order to work also fine on win32 with CMake. Even better: This build system will most probably also go in libvnc* SVN! We have had contact with one of the authors of it and he agreed to put it in SVN if someone of us is going to maintain it.

But that’s not all of Christian’s work… We have also improved the KRdc CMake scripts and made the working fine on Win. You can see the result on the following sceenshot. RDP support will most probably not work on win32 for the moment because rdesktop is not ported. Thank you Christian for the nice work!

It’s time to write about KRdc again. I have done quite some work the last days.

Some things to mention:

• A new shiny config dialog (-skeleton only at the moment)
• A lot of work on KUrlRequestor in kdelibs in order to fit into KRdc
• Improved some parts of the VNC backend
• Small improvements everywhere…

Of course I’m going to show you also a screenshot!

BTW: As you can see, it is using the Oxygen style. It has moved to kdelibs some days ago. A very nice thing to mention: when switching the tabs, there is a very nice fading animation.

The work on KRDC is going on very well. I have worked mainly on the userinterface the last week.

Fullsceen mode is working now. It uses the toolbar you can see in my last blog entry. Thanks for the feedbacks! It has helped me very much.

Now I’m working a “special” url input field. Thanks aseigo for the input! KUrlNavigator is a good idea IMHO (you can see it already in action in Dolphin). I have hacked today a bit on KUrlNavigator in kdelibs. Together with Peter Penz, the Dolphin developer, who has also done a lot of work on it, I’m going to improve it more in order to make it better fitting in KRDC. Of course I’ll also show you a sceenshot of the work-in-progress url input field

As I have promised some days ago: Here is the first screenshot of the new KRDC mainwindow.

Please keep in mind that I am at an early state of development. A lot is not completed yet and will change. Most of this code is already in SVN, except the “remote view toolbar”. That’s the floating toolbar inside the remote desktop. I would like to know if you like the idea of this toolbar. Would you like it better if there is a “normal” toolbar; and only in the fullsceen view this toolbar? At the moment, this toolbar has the ability to be transparent (you can change it when you scroll up and down on the widget) and you can move it around the sides. Ah BTW: I have stolen most of the toolbar code from okular…

Please let me know your thoughts about this toolbar (or generally about this sceenshot)! Thanks.

SoC coding phase has started on the 28th of May. I have already done some initial work on KRDC.

What I have worked on so far:

• VNC part: The VNC part has been completely rewritten. This means that it is based now on an external lib, libvncclient (it is included in the libvncserver package). This is the same lib as Krfb from trunk is also based on for the last few weeks. Alessandro Praduroux has rewritten Krfb to use libvncclient. He has also gave me some very helpful hint how to use libvnc*. Thank you, Alessandro! Of course this is work in progress; nothing is really stable at the moment.
• Mainwindow: I have started working on a new mainwindow for KRDC. The new interface of KRDC will be tab-based. Screenshot will follow. Just wait a bit to see more progress…

For more informations you could see the KDE Techbase page about my project. I will update the wiki page from time to time. You can also find the code location on that page.