[dot] KDE at LinuxWorld London Report

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1097741967/

From: Jonathan Riddell <>
Dept: whae's-like-us?
Date: Thursday 14/Oct/2004, @10:19

KDE at LinuxWorld London Report
===============================

   Last week saw the first LinuxWorld Conference & Expo
[http://www.linuxworldexpo.co.uk/] franchise in London. Representing the
KDE project were Jonathan Riddell (Umbrello), Jeff Snyder (Kompare),
Richard Smith (Kopete), George Wright (KLatin), Martijn Dekkers, Ben
Lamb and David Pashley (on the Debian stand).

     We ran a joint stall with the GNOMEs which gave us one of the
biggest spaces in the .org village and was used to jointly promote
freedesktop.org [http://www.freedesktop.org/] and X.org
[http://www.x.org/]. Only one GNOME turned up so we spread ourselves,
and the excellent collection of machines that had been lent to us, along
the stall.

     The most popular demonstration of KDE 3.3 was Kontact
[http://www.kontact.org/]. A lot of people were interested in how well
it could talk to Exchange. X.org 6.8 impressed everyone with its
composite extension featuring transparent windows and nice shadows.
XComposite runs slowly but the FreeNX demonstration showing a remote X
desktop was as fast as it could be, even connecting to a server in
Germany over a busy wifi link. The FreeNX server is likely to become a
freedesktop.org project soon; the knx client is in kdenonbeta but badly
needs developers to work on it and integrating it with KDE's existing
remote desktop application. We also demonstrated KOffice and were
pleased to meet a number of satisfied users and many more interested in
the database frontend Kexi.

     We were proud to demonstrate Scribus DTP
[http://www.scribus.org.uk/]. The Scribus developers say they have
considered making Scribus a part of KDE but some of their users did not
want the depencies so it remains pure Qt.

     There were a number of people interested in KDE's lockdown
framework Kiosk [http://www.kde.org/areas/sysadmin/]. We discussed a
large KDE deployment taking place this week which makes heavy use of it,
demonstrating the power and flexibility of KDE & Kiosk in the enterprise
environment.

     Several people asked how to start developing for KDE, we pointed
them towards the KDE Quality teams [http://quality.kde.org/] and the
Junior Jobs in Bugzilla.
[http://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&short_desc=JJ%3A&bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED]

     One of the highlights of the expo was the presence of KDE founder
Matthias Ettrich who attended as a speaker to give a talk on "Qt: the
engine for professional desktop applications on Linux and beyond".
Matthias thinks that KDE should have positions elected to give
developers official titles (this should mean he has fewer requests to do
talks). He is also concerned about the clutter in KDE, especially in
Konqueror.

     The killer feature in attracting punters to our stand was the new
animation from Basse Konqi And The Magical Rope Of Curiosity
[http://www.kimppu.org/basse/kde/] which looks excellent on a 20" dual
screen monitor.

     This was an excellent show not least because of the number of happy
KDE users. Our thanks go to drochaid for printing the flyers, Ben and
Martijn for lending us computers and Brian for organising the .org
village.

     Photos from Michael [http://orion.x3n.me.uk/photo/linux/expo2004/],
thos [http://www.thos.me.uk/Photos/Linux%20Expo%20-%20October%202004/],
George [http://www.gwright.org.uk/images/?dir=pictures/KDE/LWCE-2004],
David [http://www.davidpashley.com/linuxworld2004/] and Jonathan.
 [http://muse.19inch.net/~jr/tmp/linuxworld-photos/?pindex=1]