Last weekend, on May 21st, some people (including me) met in Berlin for what I believe is the first in-person KDE sprint since you-know-what happened (there was LAS, but that’s not technically a KDE sprint). We met in KDAB’s office, which was incidentally also the location of the last in-person sprint before unamed things happened.

Photo by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss.

During the sprint we set up a measurement lab for the KDE Eco initiative. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for application developers to measure the energy consumption of their applications. To do this a stable and reliable measurement system that is available over a long timespan is needed. KDAB kindly offered to host such a system in their office.

The measurement lab currently consists of two severl-years-old mid-range desktop computers. The first part of the sprint was a discussion about what software environment the PCs should run. There are various considerations for this. The “Blauer Engel” measurement critera recommend using Ubuntu 20.04 for the measurements. Staying close to these recommendations makes sense. However, we want to be able to easily test new versions of KDE software, which often requires newer system libraries than Ubuntu 20.04 provides. We discussed using Flatpak as a declarative and reproducible way to provision specific versions of KDE software and their dependencies independent from the operating system. In the end we settled for using KUbuntu 22.04 on one and with KDE Neon.

After wiring up the machines and installing the chosen operating systems I set the machines up for remote access using SSH and remote desktop (VNC). Other people set up the power measurement infrastructure and how to access its data. There are some finishing touches to be done, including access control, before we can make the lab available to the KDE community. Once that is done we will share how to get access and make use of the lab.

During the day people also worked on other topics like alternative power measurement devices and data visualization. Check the official sprint blog post and Volker’s blog post for more details.