[dot] Report: KDE at LWE NY, 2004

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1075391314/

From: Ian Reinhart Geiser <geiseri at kde.org>
Dept: we-may-be-weird-but-we're-cute
Date: Thursday 29/Jan/2004, @16:48

Report: KDE at LWE NY, 2004
===========================

   KDE has wrapped up another successful visit to Linux World Expo
[http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/], this year at the Javits Convention
Center in New York.  For three days, 10 KDE developers and a few others
helped deal with a huge amount of interest from the crowd, showing off
the latest and greatest in KDE 3.2.  This year's show was thought to be
at least twice as good as last year's, and a great time was had by all. 
The fun didn't stop after the expo either, with several dinners
providing plenty of time for spirited arguments and the occasional
hacking session.  A new application for KDE was conceived (rss
syndication), as well as a 5-minute hack ("Google Klip"
[http://www.sourcextreme.com/projects/googlesearch.khotkeys]) which
allows a google search on the current klipper selection to be invoked
with a single keyboard shortcut.

     First, we'd like to thank the many groups and individuals who made
our attendance at the show possible.  SUSE [http://www.suse.com/]
generously provided 2 computers with nice LCD screens, plus came to our
rescue on the first day, providing an extra table (at significant cost)
when we realized that we did not have enough table space for all of our
awards and demos. SUSE also provided a boxed copy of SUSE LINUX 9.0 for
us to give away.
     Thanks to Oracle [http://www.oracle.com/] and Linux World
Conference and Expo for the free booth.  Nathan Krause from Nalekra
[http://www.nalekra.com] ran a giveaway of a nice Transmeta
[http://www.transmeta.com/] Crusoe 1.0GHz  laptop.  CodeWeavers
[http://www.codeweavers.com/] donated a copy of Crossover Office for us
to give away.   The developers did not go unrewarded, with a copy of
Xandros [http://www.xandros.com/] Desktop 2.0  Deluxe and a Google
[http://www.google.com/] t-shirt each.  Klaus Knopper dropped by to give
us  copies of the latest KNOPPIX [http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/] 3.3.
     Additional hardware for the booth was provided by SourceXtreme
[http://www.sourcextreme.com]  (mini cube + 21" LCD screen). 
Additionally, due to the persistent efforts of Ian Geiser and great
information from Eric Lafoon (Quanta [http://quanta.sf.net/]) and
Alexander Dymo (KDevelop) [http://www.kdevelop.org/], we were able to
have handouts for the two highly popular KDE projects. These are posted
online: kdevelop.pdf
[http://www.sourcextreme.com/presentations/kdevelop.pdf]  and quanta.pdf
[http://www.sourcextreme.com/presentations/quanta.pdf]. They will be
eventually moved to kdepromo once there is a reliable way established to
keep them up to date. More handouts for other projects could only
benefit us at future shows.   Ian Geiser will be sending out requests
for information from other projects as time permits.
     Finally, a big thanks to those who ran the booth... KDE Developers:
George Staikos, Ian Reinhart Geiser, Mark Bucciarelli, Mathieu
Chouinard, Adam Treat, Hamish Rodda, Nadeem Hasan, Zack Rusin, Benjamin
Meyers, Matthias Ettrich; and our friends Jason Nocks of sourceXtreme;
Matthew Staikos of staikos.net [http://www.staikos.net]; and Nathan
Krause of Nalekra.com. Pictures  of the booth can be found at Adam's
webpage [http://www.mit.edu/~manyoso/LWAlbum/index.html].
     KDE did not leave the show unrewarded, far from it!  We were up for
both the Best Open Source Project and the Best Development Tools awards.
 While the Best Open Source Project went to Real for their Helix player,
KDevelop took the prize in the Best Development Tools section up against
quite a few closed source projects.  This victory was made all  the more
sweet by the judges' comments, who said KDevelop was the most  polished
presentation out of 35 other products and that they were proud to give
an OpenSource project an award on merit alone. Kudos to the team for
being able to accomplish so  much without the backing of a corporation
like all of the other entrants!   We also picked up the
LinuxQuestions.org [http://www.linuxquestions.org/] award for the Best
Desktop  Manager (3rd year running).
     We weren't content to just passively show off KDE.  George Staikos
gave a presentation to the conference attendees on  "Designing
Scriptable and Extensible Desktop Applications"
[http://www.staikos.net/information.php],  Mark Bucciarelli and George
gave Syscon interviews [http://www.linuxworld.com/story/39249.htm], and 
Mark had an interview with Brian Proffitt of Linux Today.
     KDE 3.2 was generating a large amount of interest, with "what's
new?" being the most common question.  Hot favourites with the crowd
were Kontact [http://www.kontact.org/], including Kolab
[http://kolab.kde.org/] and MS Exchange support, KDevelop, Quanta, and
more.  Many people were enchanted by the KStars [!!!