This week has seen some interesting (to me at least) Calamares development, because I was at a Blue Systems meeting in Germany and had the opportunity to sit with people from KDE neon and Nitrux. Meetings like this devolve to “14 hour working day interspersed with big meals” which is great for getting things done. Dinner is also about half shop-talk.

What got done:

  • timezones can now be translated; this means that the name Europe/Berlin can now be displayed as Europa/Berlijn if you happen to have Calamares configured in Dutch.
  • India no longer speaks Hindi by default. Well, it never really did, but Calamares could use GeoIP information per country to determine a likely language. Following the Unicode consortium’s internationalization tables, Hindi is a likely language in India. That’s a bad choice in a country as large and diverse as India, so I’ve edited the table to pick “whatever language the user is already using” instead.

From there Aleix Pol and I sped off to Belgium for GNU Health CON. Aleix gave a talk on Kirigami and UIs for mobile devices. I might give a talk about Pine64 hardware (which I’m hardly qualified to do, but willing). Until then I’m running the KDE booth at the event, with a Plasma Mobile phone (not a PinePhone).

One of the things we did for this booth is slap together a presentation to run on the monitor at the booth. This is a miniature QML application that runs a slideshow; the slideshow is easy to extend by adding more Component blocks to the file. It’s not quite the equivalent of reading in a Markdown file, but pretty close. At 8k of QML source (probably 80% of that is spaces for tidy indentation, too) it’s handy to have around. We’ll add it to the promo wiki once we’re done.

Writing the slides was fun, I got to use the new emoji picker, and Aleix did all the heavy QML lifting. I really need to learn more of that.

The conference lasts through Sunday, and then it’s back home to prepare one last Calamares release for 2019 (with the translation improvements listed above).