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

All very good i'm sure

[Suchetha]

But if you *really* want to help out.. why not get in touch with some of the organisations that rebuild old computers to ship them to developing countries (with Linux as the running OS)..

i belive techsoup.org has a list of organisations near you

Suchetha

Re:A little more information

[Chris Canfield]

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.

Thinking back to the useless hours being wasted trying to crack the X-Box encryption, how much of this compiling could be distributed? Obviously it wouldn't accelerate live debugging or optimizing tools, but what if there were networks of computers who people volunteered to standby and remotely download, build, and upload code, and a linker on the initiating machine to reassemble globals, etc?

I know nothing about distributed compiling, which probably means that either A: I should go back to college (very likely) or B: compiling doesn't break down nicely into chunks.

If it is possible, a network of volunteer Open Source compilers would probably build in a significantly faster time than many of the aformentioned older systems can, assuming no major bandwidth bottlenecks, and would probably find a rather large home of OSS and Free Software supporters who don't have the time to code as much as they would like to. Such a structure would probably support the compiling of any large linux project, such as X, or Gnome, or... err... Well, Kde, X or Gnome. Any of these projects would be worthwile.

Someone with more experience, please stand up! If it were possible, many people would become that much more involved, and the community would prosper. Could you imagine teams of people competing to help out the KDE developers as much as they do the seti@home project?