[dot] Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1097096753/

From: Fabrice Mous <fabrice at kde.nl>
Dept: where-less-toolkits-are-needed
Date: Wednesday 06/Oct/2004, @23:05

Interview with Chris Schlaeger from Novell/SUSE
===============================================

   At aKademy [http://conference2004.kde.org/] I had the chance to talk
to Chris Schlaeger about SUSE [http://www.suse.com/] and their
relationship with the KDE community [http://www.kde.org/], his view of a
Linux enterprise desktop and the speed of development of several key
features in KDE. A Dutch version of the interview can be found at the
website Bart&David
[http://www.bartendavid.be/doc/artikels/schlaeger.html].
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Chris
[http://static.kdenews.org/fab/interviews/suse-akademy/IMG_0066.JPG] and
Fabrice

     Please introduce yourself and what's your role within the KDE
project.

     My name is Chris Schlaeger and I'm the Vice President of Research
and Development SUSE Linux at Novell. I'm a long time KDE developer and
I used to be the maintainer of KSysguard and before that I worked on the
previous version called KTop and I hacked on kdelibs.

     Not long ago Novell bought 2 companies that deal with Linux: Ximian
and SUSE. While Ximian is a derivative from the Gnome project SUSE is
well known for their support on KDE. How does this all come together?

     Better than most people seem to believe. Novell is committed to
supporting both GNOME and KDE desktop environments in its Linux desktop.
We are fortunate to have acquired a robust set of desktop technologies
through our acquisitions of Ximian and SUSE LINUX, giving our customers
a considerable amount of choice.

     We are working on our next generation Enterprise Desktop currently
called Novell Linux Desktop which will feature a KDE desktop as well as
a GNOME desktop. In the enterprise market the situation is still very
open regarding which desktop will have the greater following. For a
Linux provider like Novell it is  a great opportunity to offer both
desktops to our customers and see where the market is going.

     During your presentation at aKademy you mentioned that SUSE offers
two product lines now:  Novell Linux Desktop and Novell SUSE Linux
Personal/Professional. What are the differences between these product
lines?

     Novell's Linux desktop is currently still under development. We are
still offering the SUSE Linux desktop, however this is based on the SUSE
LINUX Enterprise Server 8 code base, which has  now been superseded  by
version 9 (released in August of this year). This represents our
business offering as opposed to our consumer product offering.

     They both target very different user groups which have different
requirements. We have the old traditional SUSE  products which really
target the private user who is using Linux at  home.

     The Personal/Professional versions are consumer products targeted
at home users. Users who either want to do very little or very specific
work with their PC like writing email, surfing the web, word processing,
spreadsheets, printing and the like. For those people we have the
Personal version. The Professional version is basically the swiss army
knife of Linux. You've got everything in there that we feel is of some
interest and benefit to our customers. Both products have a
comparatively low purchase price and are therefore very cost effective.

     We provide security updates for a period of 2 years  for these
products which is something customers tend to forget. There is a lot of
work that needs to be done to keep the products secure during their
lifetime. A new version is released roughly every six months.

     However, in the enterprise arena 2 years doesn't cut it as people
want 3 or 5 years support at minimum. So for the enterprise customers we
created a new product which was called SUSE Linux Desktop. The next
version will be a Novell Linux Desktop which will be based on the SUSE
LINUX Enterprise Server 9 code base and  combines the best of SUSE LINUX
Desktop and Ximian Desktop. It will have a lifetime  of around 18months
and we guarantee to provide support and maintenance for the product for
up to five years. Also the quality assurance is much higher. In an
enterprise arena you need to do integration tests to a much higher
degree and we test extensively so that we don't inject any side effects
when we provide fixes. That's the main reason why the enterprise
versions are more expensive and also the software collection is more
targeted to the needs of the customers we try to address.

     What do you think are the strong points of KDE as an enterprise
desktop?

     KDE is a very good enterprise desktop environment and it offers all
the functionality you would expect nowadays  from an enterprise desktop.
So from a desktop perspective it is ready. But there are still missing
features on the application side. People expect more and there are some
areas like the OpenOffice.org integration and the browser question that
needs to be resolved.

     Also accessibility is one of the hot topics where more work is
necessary. But when there is a good foundation we can build on and a lot
of work is being done in all areas to improve KDE. Also I'm very glad
that the KDE team recognizes the enterprise market as a very important
target audience they have in mind when they write software.

     Could you tell me any typical enterprise features of KDE you are
using?

     One of the features for example is the Kiosk lock down mode. That's
clearly something you normally wouldn't use in a home setup. Well maybe
you want to restrict the ability of your kids to do certain things ton
your PC. That is also a way to use the Kiosk mode. But primarily the
Kiosk functionality is meant for use as  an information terminal or on
the corporate desktop where the system administrator just want to expose
the necessary functionality to the users.

     Novell also has its own ZENworks, are there any plans to integrate
ZENworks with KDE ?

     ZENworks is an enterprise management console. ZENworks was
originally written for Windows and now the next version called "ZENworks
for Linux" will also support Linux. It is a complementary tool and  is 
the tool that administrators use for mass administration. So it does
software inventory management and it *controls* the lockdown. ZenWorks
does not provide the actual lockdown functionality, but it provides the
configuration values. On the client you would need the counterpart that
actually knows  how to implement the values that ZENworks has.

     There has been some rumours and also some CVS logs
[http://cvs-digest.org/?issue=aug202004] which show the work going on in
KDE-PIM on a configuration wizard for the Novell Groupwise client. Also
the aKademy interview with Will Stephenson
[http://dot.kde.org/1093691383/] talks about the integration of
Groupwise functionality in Kopete. Can you elaborate more on this?

     We are working on the integration of KDE tools in the other
products from Novell. Groupwise is the most prominent of these and is a
collaboration tool that offers messaging, calendar and mail services to
the user. You can now use KDE tools such as  Kopete together with the
Groupwise messenger and you can use Kontact to access the corporate
calender and address-book and also for email.

     Just curious, how long did it take to program the Novell groupwise
integration into Kontact/Kopete/KAddressbook and how many people were
involved ?

     It was quite amazing that we were able to do this. The messenger
integration was done by Will Stephenson in 2 months. Even more
surprising was the integration of Groupwise into Kontact. In less  than
a week developers got it running. We were able to exchange data from the
server to the client.  Sure, there are still bugs in there and we need
to iron these out but I'm glad that it was done so quickly.  I'm sure we
can get it ready for the next deadline for the Novell Linux Desktop.

     How will this evolve with regard to KDE and who will maintain this
stuff?

     We have some KDE people on board and we currently have an offer on
our website for a KDE developer especially for the KDE-PIM area. One of
the tasks would be to maintain the Groupwise and messenger integration.

     During your talk at aKademy [http://conference2004.kde.org/] you
said we needed less toolkits, what do you mean by that?

     Linux is plagued by too many toolkits. We've got Tcl/TK, Java,
Motif, Athena Widgets or the old X toolkit, GTK, and Qt and all of them
look and feel totally different. Applications written in those toolkits
do not follow the same standards and guidelines and are a mess to use. 
Especially if you have them side by side or you need to use them
frequently.

     Some of toolkits do not really cut it today. There is little
support for accessibility, there is hardly any support for hotkeys. We
just need to get rid of them. It was great that they were there and they
served their purpose but I personally would  like to see as few toolkits
as  possible in the future. They are still projects that come with their
own toolkit like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org. I'm sure we can find a
solution there that these toolkits can integrate and behave very well
with the rest of the desktop.

     During aKademy the Accessibility and Usability Forums were held
were very successful. What's your opinion about these disciplines and
how should they take part in the KDE development process?

     I think it is important especially because the most interested
enterprise customers we have are government agencies and they have
strict rules on accessibility conformance (section 508 is mandatory in
most of the US in the government agencies).  If we want to get involved
in that market then we need these features and they are not there yet.
So I am glad that there is work going on in these areas and SUSE is a
very active contributor. Fore instance, we have a blind developer on our
team who did the first support for braille displays. SUSE Linux was the
first distribution not only usable but also installable from scratch by
a blind person using YaST in text mode. Of course text mode is fairly
easy compared to graphical user interfaces and having a good off screen
model and screen reader is a significant amount of work. Trolltech and
SUN have done really a lot of work in this section and we really hope
that with Qt4 and KDE4 we can profit from this and offer this technology
to users.

     What will Novell/SUSE do to improve the experience on the desktop?

     We are working on OpenOffice.org to make it integrate better with
the desktops.  On SUSE 9.1 you saw already the first fruits of this work
if you started OpenOffice.org it looks like a KDE application. It is a
first step but it is by far not complete: if you open a file you get a
totally different file dialog that is not only awkward to use but also
doesn't fit into the KDE look and feel. The same for printing. That is
still something we need to overcome but we are working on this and
probably will have better integration with the next product.

     So that's one piece of the experience on the desktop, the
OpenOffice.org part is there. Something going on with the Mozilla
browser part as well?
 Well that started on aKademy where we discussed this on the first day.
The question came up during a discussion I had with Matthias Ettrich and
a few others. It is currently a pain to the user to have 2 browsers
installed as one browser works with this website and the other browser
works with the other website.  Konqueror is fast and nicely integrated,
but Mozilla renders more pages better.

     Customers that do web application development heavily use DHTML and
other special features that Konqueror doesn't handle very well and  it
is a lot of work to implement this.  Although I like KHTML and the
architecture quite a bit I am sad to say that probably the Gecko 
rendering engine will be the dominant one used in the enterprise arena 
and as KDE developers we've got to make sure that we can integrate Gecko
fairly well into KDE.

     So Lars and Zack started working on this at aKademy and I was
delighted when they put me aside and showed me what they have done in
just three days. It is amazing! I think it is the right way to go! It 
is a bit sad for KHTML and I hope that despite this people will still
maintain as it is a nice lightweight browser. If it would be a purely
technical decision KHTML has the better architecture but sometimes you
need to go the shortest way to get to your target.

     What about technology like DBUS and HAL? What are your thoughts on
that?

     I think DBUS will come probably with KDE4, not earlier then that.
It is a lot of work to implement that   properly but I think it is going
in the right direction. We need to integrate the desktop and the
operating system much deeper. So that you can control the hardware on
the desktop or have the right feedback on the desktop.

     If I connect a camera currently I get a nice icon on the desktop
where a Konqueror browser is opened. SUSE has that for quite a while,
but if you look at how we implemented this ...  It is a real pain and
doesn't work 100% reliable. The problem is with the hotplug system of
the underlying OS and the way we have to communicate those kernel events
into userspace. DBUS hopefully will solve some of these problems in the
long run. It is a lot of work but it is going in the right direction and
I'm sure we will adopt that.

     Do you think the KDE desktop should ready itself for that kind of
technology?

     I think that there is a general understanding within the KDE
developer community that DBUS is the right way to go. Not for KDE3 but
probably for KDE4.

     Currently we have developers, translators and documentation writers
as part of the KDE development process. How do you think other
disciplines like accessibility and usability should participate in the
development process?

     I think they should participate and the KDE project should adapt
their structures to integrate those groups as well. It is important to
have their work integrated but that is something you should ask the KDE
release coordinator to see how we can fit these people into the process.
But for example, who could have imagined that we would have more then 50
languages into KDE? Surely this will also happen to other areas like
accessibility and usability as there is some good work going on to get
these people involved.

     Where would you like to see the future of KDE go, and what new
features would you like to see in future releases?

     KDE has made tremendous progress overtime. I joined the project
when it only had a few dozen people and now it is 700 people strong and
is constantly  growing and the enthusiasm of the project hasn't
decreased at all. It is now not only working on the core part but also
working on parts like accessibility, translation to many languages,
documentation work, artwork and other areas which are not directly
linked to the core codehacking. I'm glad this is going on and we need
more of this in the future. We need more applications in the future and
good accessibility support, OpenOffice.org integration and the browser
problem the most practical feature I like to see in the next release.

     How will the relationship between Novell and KDE evolve?

     I'm sure that we are going to sponsor KDE development in the
future. We have (I think) sponsored every major KDE event like we did
with aKademy this year. So why should we stop now?! Novell is very  much
committed to KDE!