Embedded and mobile devices are getting more and more attention. This fall, the NLUUG fall conference is on embedded and mobile devices. I can’t point to a CfP though – there was a flyer in the spring conference bag last week, but the website isn’t up yet. Rest assured I’ll get back to it. The conference is in conjunction with the ELC as well – Embedded Linux Conference – so it will be big and Linuxy. Maybe we won’t see all that much KDE4 running there, but we can try, right?

There is also an Embedded Day at Akademy. That covers the KDE4-end of embedded devices, but also has scope for more traditional embedded-and-hidden devices. I was surprised that that particular dot story didn’t garner any comments. It’s a neat topic. It ties in with Marijn’s SFF work, to some extent. It also ties in with the (USB) device plugfest at Akademy, where we will bring in a boatload of nifty consumer devices and work on getting them supported under Linux (or just identifying that they already do work), cross-checking distro support and introducing device support for them into KDE4. Much niftiness follows from being able to plug in, say, USB based multimedia devices and just having them work (seriously, ThinkGeek needs to make a USB cashew).

And this brings me to my next project (do I feel like a conjuror) related to KDE4 and consumer electronics. UPnP support. KDE has a GSoC project for Amarok support already, and there’s bits of code in other areas as well (I believe kopete is doing something in that area, for instance, to support some P2P). KDE e.V., NLnet Armijn Hemel and myself will be pushing forward a few developer meetings and sprints to improve UPnP support across the Free Software spectrum. Details to follow, but a rough sketch (I could post another fuzzy whiteboard photo showing what we’d come up with) is a definition period where we bring together the people who work on this or would like to work on it, define more concrete goals (I’m in this with a “support KDE4 everywhere through good support of consumer home networking protocols” hat on), schedule get togethers (it is generally most productive to sit together for a bit at the start of a project), do a fair chunk of coding, get together and drink beer and finish the coding, and then be off to enjoy seamless UPnP integration in KDE4. Some level of it, at least.

A more concrete announcement with “sp there is our techbase page and this mailing list will be used and these people should really be involved (Will Stephenson, I have not had beer with you in four years, I don’t think, so you need to come for that and for kopete and networkmanager) and you can get involved too,” will follow, probably in a week or so (right around LinuxTag, how about that).

The Wayback Machine ⏲ does not archive everything. Broken links are marked with a 💔.