Sunday, October 19, 2014

Calligra Gemini - now also for Linux :)


Some people may remember earlier this year when Krita Gemini became (to my knowledge) the first open source software to become greenlit on Steam. For those who don't, yeah, that really happened ;) Krita Gemini was a project created in cooperation between the KDE community's Calligra team, the little software consultancy KO GmbH, and a large semiconductor manufacturer named Intel, who had some devices they needed to be able to show off. Krita Gemini is available on the Steam store, though not yet for Linux (as it turns out, Steam packaging for Linux is even more awkward than building stand-alone installers for Windows, an odd sort of situation for us used to sensible package managers)


Earlier this year (late April 2014) the team from KO and Calligra which built Krita Gemini had a teleconference with the Intel team, and we agreed that other applications would be well suited to a similar attention, and we came up with the idea of building Calligra Gemini, an application which would encapsulate Words and Stage, Calligra's word processor and presentation tool respectively, in the same way that Krita Gemini encapsulates Krita, with automatic switching between the existing desktop UX and a new touch friendly UX created for the purpose. Over the last little while, i've been posting builds on the project minisite (along with release notes and screenshots and such).


So now, with the initial work on that project reaching its conclusion, i decided that it was time to expose a few more people to it than what's been the case so far. So, over the course of this weekend, between making some tasty bread, cleaning and cooking dinner, i have been working on some packages for people who don't run Windows. Specifically, i have made a set of packages for openSUSE (just 13.1, in various guises, for now - others will follow), and they're available right here (and also shown on the project's minisite linked above)


Finally, i also released a short story i've been writing over the last couple of weeks (while waiting on the editors to get back to me on the novel i've also been working on). This is relevant here because i have been dogfooding; it was written entirely using Calligra Gemini, and the pdf and ePub versions were produced using the Calligra features as well. Finally, the work is stored in a git repository, which is also controlled by Calligra Gemini's support for using Git as cloud storage. The story is available as pdf and ePub on my deviantArt page :)

The word of the day is: Geiko

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