Kubeplayer running on KDE Plasma Active powered ExoPC tablet

on Kde, Ruby

Hello Planet KDE, hello RubyCorner!

Much time has passed since i wrote my previous blog post about Kubeplayer. Things doesn’t change so much, but nowadays Kubeplayer is quite stable and doesn’t crash anymore. :wink:

After a lot of difficulties I got Kubeplayer packaged for opensuse. It’s ready to install with only one click in the case you are using openSuSE 11.4—thanks to the open build service.

Before delivering any further details, you may want to see the video demonstration on how Kubeplayer performs using Meego and KDE Plasma Active.

If you don’t like watching the video using Youtube, you can download the webm file directly.

How To

If you want to turn your ExoPC into a Youtube-Player, too, here is the way to go:

That was the easy part. The rest is quite hard, due to the fact, that I didn’t found the ruby KDE language bindings. So maybe it is easier to use the opensuse based Plasma Active Installation.

  • Try to compile smokegen, smokeqt, smokekde, qtruby and korundum

Because the KDE Plasma Active team doesn’t seem to use KDE vanilla and there might be some other reasons, too, it is quite hard to do that. I had to monkey patch (commenting) a lot of files.

The installation of Kubeplayer is again quite simple, as you don’t have to build anything, but to meet the conventions, you can use cmake to copy the files to the right place. By now, the Kubeplayer repo is in playground.

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/kubeplayer
cd kubeplayer
git checkout -t -b tablet origin/tablet
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
make # nothing happens
sudo make install

Next Steps

There are plenty different tasks yet to do:

  • Up to now there are no packages for any other distro than opensuse. It would be awesome if someone could help me to build packages for other distros (using the openbuild service), too.
  • Do you have ideas which other video platforms could be added? I checked vimeo, but it seems to be complicated. I didn’t found any other app doing something similar with youtube. Weird.
  • Probably the interface could be made more touchfriendly by using some QML. I have absolutely no experience with that. Maybe someone can propose an idea how to make the list view be more slide friendly (flickable).
  • To be able to deliver any ruby-KDE application to the not so experienced KDE hacker, it would be necessary to package the kdebindings for Meego.

So if you can help me, please get in contact!