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Upgrading Digikam from 4.x to 5.x and wrong AlbumRoots

(Not so) recently I upgraded a Debian system from Jessie to Stretch. Along with that came an upgrade of the Digikam photo management application from version 4.x to 5.3. After starting that the first time the albums were empty. WTF? Putting the modified digikam4.db aside, creating a fresh one and restoring the old one and comparing those revealed that they differed in how the AlbumRoots path was stored. Digikam 4.x stored it as volumeid:?path=%2Fhome%2F... (with URL encoded %2F as / slashes) where Digikam 5 stores a literal / slash. Changing that to what Digikam 5 expects did the trick and the albums were there again. So when upgrading, before you start Digikam 5 for the first time, do the following (assuming the database is /home/you/Pictures/digikam4.db)

  • backup your original digikam4.db file
  • install the sqlitebrowser package if not installed yet
  • on a terminal command line invoke: sqlitebrowser ~/Pictures/digikam4.db &
  • go to the Browse Data tab
  • Table: AlbumRoots
  • select (click into) the identifier field
  • in the right edit field change its content from volumeid:?path=%2Fhome%2Fyou%2FPictures to
    volumeid:?path=/home/you/Pictures
  • Write changes and exit

Start digikam. All good (hopefully ;-)

Update 2017-11-27T14:50+01:00
Forgot to mention that when starting Digikam 5 the first time a dialog appears offering to migrate from version 4, it advises to not do so but has migration preselected, do not migrate there or it will mess things up. You may lose some existing personal preferences, but the migration for me at least simply did not work.
Related seems to be KDE bug 364258 though claimed to be fixed.

Nitrokey Storage: USB Security Key for Encryption

I rarely advertise any products, and even though this is not physically available yet: get your USB Nitrokey Storage at Indiegogo until tomorrow. Realized with Open Hardware and Free Software it will enable secure logins, encryption, backups, ... Further information is available at the Nitrokey web site.

Happy Birthday, OpenOffice.org!

15 years ago the original OpenOffice.org source code was published by Sun Microsystems, on Friday, October 13, 2000, a Full Moon day. The source code that changed the Free Software office suite world and laid the basis for LibreOffice.

www.openoffice.org as scraped by the archive.org WayBack Machine on 2000-10-13
StarOffice Code Released in Largest Open Source Project – Linux Today article from 2000-10-13

Five years of LibreOffice – Happy Birthday, LibreOffice!

The huge success of LibreOffice, not only as a software package but as a Free Software project as a whole, can only be measured and expressed by giving credit to all who are involved and all that has been done. So thank you, all contributors to the project! To celebrate, The Document Foundation has compiled a history "leaflet" (well, it's more like a midsize tree ;-) of blog posts, articles, release notes, work that has been done etceteraetcetera. It is available in two versions, the "mini" (700 pages, 11MB) and the "maxi" (1300 pages, 18MB) versions as PDF files. For URLs see the TDF's Five years of LibreOffice blog post.

Happy Birthday, LibreOffice!

Open HUB is dead — or worse, it's a zombie

Some may recall it as Ohloh, then it was taken over by Black Duck Software and now runs under the name of Open HUB, the open source network to Discover, Track and Compare Open Source. What a laugh. Since Black Duck took over things continuously have gotten worse, spinning repository updates became infrequent, and now OpenHUB simply can't catch up with all projects, their engine for months was months behind with updating source code, and now completely fails on big repositories.

For example, take a look at the statistics for my commit accounts (which today, 2015-08-17, are said to be Analyzed 9 days ago).
Most recent commit 6 months ago — yeah, sure
Has made 178 commits — seriously? used to be in the thousands
and ... all commits of the entire LibreOffice project are missing.

So let's dig into the LibreOffice project statistics. In the Activity section there's a 30 Day Summary Jul 9 2015 — Aug 8 2015 which lists — tadaaa ... — 2 Commits of 2 Contributors, and for the 12 Month Summary it says 124 Commits by 12 Contributors. Of course that's nonsense. Compare with the LibreOffice repository clone pulse at GitHub, which is updated with every commit.

But, there may be people who think OpenHUB delivers accurate numbers, and for smaller projects the numbers may look "not so wrong in a non-obvious way". Or they were used to (half) accurate numbers from Ohloh, and may trust those numbers and quote them in publications or even make decisions based on those numbers. That's why I think OpenHUB is more than dead, a zombie delivering false data is worse than no data at all.

I ♥ Free Software

I especially like this year's I ♥ Free Software contribution from The Document Foundation in the bug tracker they host for LibreOffice.

I ♥ Free Software from TDF
I ♥ Free Software from The Document Foundation

14 Years Freedom of Choice, 14 Years Choice of Freedom

Today we can celebrate an anniversary, on Friday 13 October 2000 Sun Microsystems published the OpenOffice.org source code. I won't say "Happy Birthday, OpenOffice.org" because OpenOffice.org as a project died in April 2011 when the company who bought Sun Microsystems gave it the final stab, and there is a well alive successor now. But the birth of OpenOffice.org marked a milestone in the history of office productivity software. It provided the freedom of choice to a wider audience of users, being available on several platforms it freed users from being dictated what productivity software to use. For many people, developers, quality engineers, translators, authors and users it also meant the choice of freedom, the choice to contribute to Free Software, the choice to change the software world even if just a little, line by line. And it triggered another birth, the birth of the OpenDocument Format for office applications, starting the standardization of office productivity file formats.

For me it also provided the freedom to be able to work like I work today, being employed by a great company that pays my bills while I work on this freedom is a privilege I much appreciate.

Thank you OpenOffice.org!