[dot] KDE 3.4.1 First Desktop From OpenSolaris Community

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1121719390/

From: Kurt Pfeifle and Jonathan Riddell <pfeifle at kde.org>
Dept: even-sun-engineers-congratulate-us
Date: Monday18/Jul/2005, @15:43

KDE 3.4.1 First Desktop From OpenSolaris Community
==================================================

   KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled,
packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris
[http://www.opensolaris.org/] platform. The work has been mainly done by
our friend Stefan Teleman
[http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=4385]. While KDE
is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun
ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot
of patches. A list of georgeous screenshots
[http://impliedvolatility.blogspot.com/] is probably what makes lots of
people think "KDE seems to be ahead of the game already"
[http://blogs.gnome.org/view/calum/2005/07/18/0]. Read on for an
interview with KDE on Solaris lead Stefan Teleman.

     In the discussions on the OpenSolaris forum it is quite interesting
to see how delighted long-time CDE users react to their KDE initiation,
and an inspiration to see many of the fulltime Sun engineers
congratulate the KDE developer community
[http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=1151&tstart=15] as
well as Stefan for this significant achievement. This release is only
the beginning of a long-term cooperation
[http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=1227&tstart=15]
with various developer groups working for a stable desktop offering in
OpenSolaris, that includes KDE on Solaris [http://solaris.kde.org] as a
first-class ingredient.

     To find out more about the KDE on Solaris project KDE Dot News
spoke to Stefan Teleman about how he got started, why he loves Solaris
and the new OpenSolaris Desktop project.
   Stefan Teleman, KDE on Solaris Leader
     A lot has happened since KDE first compiled on Solaris
[http://dot.kde.org/1064340634/].

     Sun liked my work on getting KDE compiling with Solaris, so at the
end of January of this year I was invited by them to join the
OpenSolaris Pilot program. This then became the main site for
OpenSolaris, the Free Software version of Solaris.

     As a member of the OpenSolaris Pilot, I have been building KDE for
both SPARC and Intel/AMD. KDE is enormously popular amongst Solaris
users, so there have been a lot of expectations (as well as pressure and
nervousness on my part) for the KDE Solaris (SunStudio compiler/native)
ports, from both inside and outside Sun.

     This has the potential of becoming something very big for KDE.
There is an established expectation at OpenSolaris that i will provide
the KDE Solaris builds for both Sparc and Intel, with Sun Studio. Sun
gave me free licenses for SunStudio specifically to build and maintain
KDE, and serveral engineers at Sun from the kernel and compiler teams
have helped me a lot with my Solaris ports. So it is truly a joint
effort at this point, and Sun deserves a lot of credit for how open and
helpful they have been.

     I do all this in my free time, because my real day job doesn't
involve open source or KDE at all.  I live and work in New York City
where I write software for trading and valuing.  So, given the rather
dry and stressful nature of my daily endeavours, I need some creative
counterbalance to all this. This is where KDE comes into play. It's fun
to work on, and it runs on Solaris, which is my favorite UNIX. It's also
quite difficult to port, because KDE is not originally written for the
Sun's compilers.

     Why do I like Solaris? First and foremost it's the best UNIX out
there. Says me. Second, I've been writing code on Solaris for about 10
years now, and before that SunOS. So part of it is habit and part of it
is really rather biased: when you get used to working in a certain
environment for 10+ years, every day...  and this feels like the best
possible fit ... how easy would it be to let go of it? There's a link in
Solaris to a not so distant past when software, hardware and everything
around them were different. I was a small part of those times. And part
of it is because i like Sun as a company. They easily get a bad
reputation, and people tend to forget how much they have done for
computing and software engineering, and still do.

     Why I like KDE? Because it looks beautiful, it's easy to use and
because it's written in C++. Plus I have fun hacking on it.

     There's something really interesting happening at OpenSolaris and
KDE is part of it. So, i want to invite you to our discussion list
[http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/category.jspa?categoryID=29], drop by
and say hi and maybe sign up and join. We want to build the coolest
desktop for OpenSolaris.