KDE developers meet, plan and program

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Jul. 06, 2007

With KDE 4 due out in the fourth quarter of 2007, the KDE developers had their work cut out for themselves when they met in Glasgow, Scotland, for their annual worldwide meeting, aKademy 2007.

Besides a lot of brainstorming and coding, KDE e.V., the official organization behind the popular Linux desktop environment, had to deal with a change of leadership. Longtime President Eva Brucherseifer left office and was replaced as president by Aaron Seigo, a well-known KDE developer from Canada.

Seigo, in his blog, has been very pleased with how the meeting has gone. "It's been an amazing week, however. The things that struck me the most was the growing visibility of teams within KDE. I think we have successfully traversed the conversion from a project to a full meta-project; while in previous years we were obviously a meta project made up of many smaller efforts, this year it is very apparent where there are teams and who they are."

The weeklong gathering kicked off on June 30th, with a keynote by Trolltech and KDE developer Lars Knoll. Knoll explained how Trolltech is using "extreme programming" techniques to further the advancement of Qt, the cross-platform development framework and C++ library that lies behind KDE.

Knoll also described how all of this is leading to new features for Qt's next release, Version 4.4. This version should have improved multimedia, multithreading and IPC (interprocess communication) support. In addition, Trolltech is working with Apple on integrating WebKit as a Qt module. This would enable KDE developers to more easily create applications that would work in concert with such popular Mac OX applications as the Safari Web browser, the Dashboard and Mail.

Knoll was followed by Mark Shuttleworth, president of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux. Shuttleworth spoke on "13 Lessons for the Free Desktop."

Shuttleworth's focus was on making the Linux desktop more attractive to both users and developers. For example, he encouraged programmers to abandon creating different and incompatible systems, like the RPM and DEB package managers, for program installations and updating.

He also suggested that KDE move to a more predictable, say every six months, schedule. Then, to make the Linux desktop even more attractive to users and ISVs (independent software vendors), Shuttleworth suggested that KDE, GNOME and OpenOffice.org agree to a common, regular release period. This, he believes, would lead to the Linux desktop gaining in popularity at the expense of proprietary operating systems like Microsoft's Vista.

The focus continued on making the Linux desktop more attractive, with a talk led by Seigo. He spoke about the need for KDE to make a good first impression on users while at the same time improving its utility for nontechnical users.

During the meeting, TrollTech also announced that Qt 4.3 now includes support for Mono, the open-source project that brings the .Net framework and programs written in languages such as C# and Visual Basic to Linux. The bindings needed to make this happen can be found at the Qyoto/Kimono project page. Further work has also been done with enabling Qt programmers to use the Ruby and PHP languages.

While these announcements and speeches were well-attended, the real focus of the KDE gathering was to work on KDE 4. During the rest of July, the developers will return home to further stabilize and streamline KDE libraries to provide a stable, long-term interface for KDE 4 developers.

If all goes well, KDE 4 beta 1 will be released at the end of July. The final release is planned for late October 2007.

--Steven J. Vaughan Nichols

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Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Except where otherwise specified, the contents of this site are copyright © 1999-2008 Ziff Davis Enterprise Holdings Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Ziff Davis Enterprise is prohibited. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. All other marks are the property of their respective owners.