Adopt a KDE Geek

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!"

Comments

A little more information

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :).

Re:A little more information

[Bronster]

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.

Re:A little more information

[oliverthered]

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.

Re:A little more information

[oliverthered]

? 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'

Re:A little more information

[Seli]

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).

Re:A little more information

[Seli]

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.

Re:Is that kind of like "Hire a Hermit?"

[Suchetha]

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

Suchetha

Know how to ask...

[e8johan]

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.

Re:Better place sto donate

[melonman]

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...

You asked for it...

[barnaclebarnes]

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?

Re:You asked for it...

[1u3hr]

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

Oh I forgot

[oliverthered]

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.