I’m an Electronic engineer. I did several embedded projects with hardware and software interworking. So, I am somehow experienced in programming. I also had several projects in Windows in Delphi language. As I became familiar with Linux, it was always one of my wishes to contribute in this huge project. I even wrote some open source projects myself. Which are stored in Sourceforge.net site (autoppp, blackwar and jalaliapplet).
Actually I have some problems contributing to already started projects. To describe you my problems, I bring here Blur effect in KDE as an example and If you know answers of my questions, please do not hesitate to leave me a comment how to solve my problems.
Recently I installed Kubuntu 11.04 with KDE 4.6 on my laptop. Blur effect is enabled on Panel as is working there without any problem. But the problem is that transparent windows are not blurred. The scenario is always like this:

• I searched Internet forums to find a solution for this problem. No joy.
• I searched bug reports to find a solution for this problem. No joy.
• I now want to go to KDE website to find out how can I contribute to this project because I want to solve this problem myself. Regardless of long texts about how to pay donations or introducing KDE to friends(!), It’s a little hard to find how to start developing the code.

I want to know:

• Which source codes I must download to solve my problem with blur effect as I described above. How can I find which source file or which group of source files I must work on?
• Which packages I need to download and Install to be able to compile the sources I downloaded?
• After compiling the source code how can I installed the compiled code on my system?
• How can I uninstall it to bring my system back to the previously installed KED?
• What is SVN?

Thanks a lot people:)

The place to go to learn to develop for KDE is here:

http://techbase.kde.org/

For help getting started, go here:

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started

In order to work with blur you probably need to set up a complete build environment building all of KDE SC. The easiest way to do this is to use kdesrc-build. More information on that can be found here:

http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started ... esrc-build

If you use this it will install the latest version of KDE alongside the existing version. You can choose to login to the old version or to your version. So going back to the old version is merely a matter of pressing a couple of buttons in the login screen. Alternatively you can use a virtual machine like virtualbox or vmware to run the custom KDE version in a place where it can't touch any of your files.

Using kdevelop, or at the very least kate, for doing the developing is highly recommended. kdevelop is highly-tailored to doing KDE programming.

For the most part KDE doesn't use svn anymore, it uses git. They are both what are called "version control systems", they are used to keep track of changes to the source code of KDE, keep track of who made the changes, make it easy to find what was changed and when, and make it easy to go back and reverse a change or pull out the state of the software at a certain point in time.

However, for your particular issue I think the reason why blur isn't enabled for transparent windows is that it hurts performance way too much, so it has been intentionally disabled. You might be able to release an alternative version of the blur effect to override this, but I doubt it would be accepted by the developers unless you fix the performance problems.

Messing around with desktop effects sounds like it might be too complex for your first contribution, considering your lack of experience with version control systems and the underlying KDE code base. It would probably be better to start with something pretty simple. There is a whole class of tasks called "junior jobs" designed specifically for beginners:

https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?keywor ... dtype=doit

I would suggest you look at those. Either that or fix some small annoyance you have (that is what I did). Jumping right into making major changes is not rejected out of hand, I just think it would be easier and probably less frustrating for you if you started with a task that is easier and likely to get accepted by KDE developers. Your proposed change is neither.

Speaking of which, what languages do you know? Are you familiar with Qt, C++, object-oriented, OpenGL 2, OpenGL ES, Mesa, or X11 programming?