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Adopt a KDE Geek

Posted by michael on from the only-32-cents-per-day dept.

sultanoslack writes "In an effort to bring together KDE hackers that are students, unemployed or by other means lacking in hardware and capital with users in that have spare goodies, Adopt-a-Geek has been launched. More details are available on how to help out. Been wondering what you can do to help out? Here's your chance!"

13 of 228 comments (clear)

  1. A little more information by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the Relevant Page:

    KDE developers put their computers through a lot of work. Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours. Many developers are working on systems which cannot fully build KDE in under 24 hours, and many KDE developers do so several times a week. Profiling and debugging tools for optimizing code are very processor and memory intensive. Hardware often is a bottleneck to KDE developers' productivity.

    So keep this in mind before you ask why they're requesting this. Thanks :).

    1. Re:A little more information by Bronster · · Score: 2, Informative

      Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours. Many developers are working on systems which cannot fully build KDE in under 24 hours

      Given that most source files don't get changed every build, the major problem is going to be disk space. We need to donate some of those old 10 Gig disks that are too small for our MP3 (sorry, Ogg) collections now.

      Oh, and we should give them all a pointer to Compiler Cache while we're at it.

      Must install that on my own system, it look sweeeeet.

    2. Re:A little more information by oliverthered · · Score: 2, Informative

      Have you tried KDE 3.1 with a 2.5 kernel, it's actually slick, even with my crap unacellerated GFX card.
      The kernel made more of a differnace than anything else, with kernel 2.4.19 with CK performance patchset KDE is clunky as hell, xine skips frames and isn't smooth. kernel 2.5.54 smooth KDE no missing frames in XINE.

      --
      thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    3. Re:A little more information by oliverthered · · Score: 4, Informative

      ? you may have to relink I suppose or are the core API's/interfaces getting changed on an ad-hoc bases?

      I can compile core.c and is turns into core.o
      I can compile fish.c that depends on core.h compiles to fish.o
      I link fish.o that depends on core.o

      If I change core.h (an API change) then I must recompile fish.c
      If I chnage core.c then I only need to relink fish.o against core.o

      If i use dynamic libraries then I don't need to relink atall.

      Changes to core.h should be in the form of, 'Right lads, were changing the API, get you design and documentation heads on'

      --
      thank God the internet isn't a human right.
    4. Re:A little more information by Seli · · Score: 2, Informative

      2a: You apparently never tried to compile a larger C++ project. GCC needs considerably more time to compile C++ code than C. In general, the GNU toolchain has worse support for C++ as compared to C (yes, C++ is more complicated than C, but I don't think it's _that_ much). Precompiled headers will hopefully help here.

      2b:No wonder remaking kernel after changing one module is so fast. Usually nothing except the module itself depends on it, so nothing else needs to be rebuilt. But if somebody commits a change to some of the kdelibs header files, many files have to be rebuilt.

      1a: Most people probably don't want even to patch and compile even their GCC. It's just one more thing to take care of.

      1b: Moreover, GCC is not the only bottleneck. The linker (not ld.so, but ld, the one creating binaries) is pretty slow as well. Or you could try debugging some KDE app (with debug info compiled in) in GDB - THAT will teach you what 'slow' really means (and maybe you'll even suddenly find KDE's performance quite acceptable).

    5. Re:A little more information by Seli · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hmm, ok, more precisely said, the linking itself is slow. No wonder, ld has to load the huge .o files created by gcc (huge because of all the debug info and things duplicated in every .o). For example all .o files here for libkdeui.so are together 45MiB (101 files), forming 21MiB large libkdeui.so. Creating the library needs almost 30s here (1Ghz Athlon, hdparm shows disk can do 40MiB/s). I don't know how about you, but I call that slow, regardless of what exactly is causing this.

  2. Re:Is that kind of like "Hire a Hermit?" by Suchetha · · Score: 4, Informative

    a (rich) couple in britain actually put an ad to hire a hermit in november.. one of the articles about it is here

    Suchetha

    --

    learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
    or one out of three ain't bad
  3. Know how to ask... by e8johan · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you know how to ask you can quite easily get ahold of most hardware (except HDDs) from technology companies. As long as you can live with 1-2 years old hardware and some DIY to set things up, you can get most for free.

  4. Re:Better place sto donate by melonman · · Score: 2, Informative

    Donate to the opensource programmers today and children of tomorrow won't have to throw their educational dollars away on constant computer upgrades and expensive commercial programs.

    It's a nice idea but, as you say:

    I've been an out-of-work programmer and it's great to spend some of that free time giving back to the community but it's hard when you can't pay rent let alone buy the hardware you need to test so and so feature against.

    Which is surely a good summary of the problem with the open source model. It relies on someone paying the programmers for the love of open source. Now there may be enough university departments and software manual publishers to feed the likes of Larry Wall, which is great, but I can't see this model ever scaling to the point where it 'employs' anything like the number of people currently working on commercial coding projects. You need some way to collect the money, on the basis of what work is the most useful. And the conventional way to do this is called a company in a free market.

    Cf science, which started off as a hobby of the upper classes, was then patronised by the upper classes, and is now mainly funded either by business or the public sector.

    I like KDE. It helps me to earn a living. I already pay for it, in the sense that I buy boxed distros. I wouldn't be averse to paying more, so that some of the money went to the people doing the coding. But I doubt if my French accountant would let me pay the programmers in hardware...

    --
    Virtually serving coffee
  5. You asked for it... by barnaclebarnes · · Score: 2, Informative

    You might want to check out the Woman of KDE Website. Not quite what you were looking for but I guess you are ugly and beggars can't be choosers right?

    --
    [Please type your sig here.]
    1. Re:You asked for it... by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, see the women of KDE here. About half of them are worth a look...

  6. Oh I forgot by oliverthered · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm all for supporting hard up developers, I was once one my self.
    If anyone lives in the Newbury/Reading/Basingstoke area (UK) and could really do with some extra kit, I've probably got some spare bits floatings around (256MB ram a couple of HDD's, boxed Mandrake 8.0) drop me a mail and I'll see what I can do.

    --
    thank God the internet isn't a human right.
  7. Performance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Maybe if it takes two days to compile your program on a 300Mhz system, and then takes 2 hours to draw the windows in the resulting program, maybe that is a clue that you need to take a look at the performance to eyecandy ratio and see if you can make the system a little faster.

    Neither KDE nor Gnome run very well on my 233 laptop anymore, and it is not because my laptop is too slow to provide the services that Gnome and KDE provide or that the architecture of either needs that much (though both could improve in this area as well). They run poorly because of things, like Nautilus for example, that take up all the system's resources drawing simple icons in as fancy a way as possible. Before Nautilus, in the gmc days, Gnome ran just fine on that 233.

    There are numerous ways that KDE and Gnome could improve performance. Unfortunately both projects are headed in the exact opposite direction.

    So forgive me if I don't shed any tears, if I don't jump right out and give you a better system than *I* have (>800Mhz is more processing than my home PC). I don't WANT you to have that much processing space, if you did it would be used poorly and then I won't be able to run Gnome or KDE anymore even on my home PC. My system would be so busy drawing stupid little anti-aliased animations that it wouldn't be able to operate as a PC anymore.

    Forgive the fire, but this is a major pet-peeve of mine. Computers should be useable first, pretty last and as far as I can tell there hasn't been enough gain in useability and useful features to warrant the resources that these desktops continue to require.

    NR