[dot] KDE at FOSDEM 2005 Report

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1109807746/

From: Jonathan Riddell <>
Dept: free-beer-free-software
Date: Thursday 03/Mar/2005, @00:55

KDE at FOSDEM 2005 Report
=========================

   FOSDEM [http://www.fosdem.org] is Europe's biggest meeting of Free
Software developers and KDE turned out in force at it last weekend. As
well as talks in the main track on KDE and KDevelop, the KDE Developers'
room hosted a series of other talks. We also ran a stall and still found
time for some hacking.

     FOSDEM is a spectacular event. In the capital of Europe over two
thousand geeks come together for a weekend of talks, hacking and
socialising. One contingent of KDE developers came on a road trip from
the Netherlands and spent much of Friday evening spiraling Brussels
until we came to the pre-FOSDEM party in Grand Place where we were
greeted by the welcome sight of as many litre glasses of Hoegaarden as
we could drink. The great and the good of Free Software were there
including Alan Cox
[http://jriddell.org/photos/2005-02-26-fosdem/2005-02-28-fosdem-daf-alan-jonathan.jpg],
future Debian Project Leader Matthew Garrett [http://www.angrydpl.com/]
and our own founder Matthias Ettrich.

     On the Saturday we set up our stall selling a fine range of KDE
t-shirts and badges sporting the new official KDE logo
[http://www.kde.org/stuff/clipart.php]. The first KDE talk was on
KDevelop by Harald Fernengel
[http://www.kde.me.uk/index.php?page=fosdem-2005-kdevelop-talk] who ran
us through the many features of KDE's IDE. We then retreated to our own
KDE Developers room for a talk on KOffice
[http://www.kde.me.uk/index.php?page=fosdem-2005-koffice-talk]
discussing the up-coming 1.4 release and how to make plugins for KOffice
using KParts.

     That evening we went to a centre which trains women to use
computers. In return for talking about Free Software and KDE we got
internet access and a space to hack for the evening. It was great to see
that many of the women were already running GNU/Linux. They mentioned
that they would really like Ubuntu if only it came with KDE, which made
Jonathan and Andreas smile.

     Sunday opened with Matthias's talk on KDE
[http://www.kde.me.uk/index.php?page=fosdem-2005-kde-talk] showing how
much the Unix desktop has changed since 1996. We are, he says, at a very
exciting time in desktop development with challenges and opportunities
including Qt4, desktop search, D-BUS and more.

     Later in the day our developer's room was busy for the KDE
Development Using Python Talk
[http://www.kde.me.uk/index.php?page=fosdem-2005-kdepython-talk].
Programming in Python will slow down your applications by only a second
or two but speed up your development time by a factor of 2 or more
because the language is so much easier to use than C++.  Issues about
KDevelop's less than optimal Python support were raised, then swiftly
brought crashing down when at the end of the talk Alexander Dymo
announced that during the talk he had added Python support for
KDevelop's Qt Designer. This earned him a round of spontaneous applause
- obviously Python development is moving fast.

     Our final talk was an update from Scott Wheeler about his ideas for
a searchable web of context
[http://www.kde.me.uk/index.php?page=fosdem-2005-search-talk] on the
desktop. He has found existing search tools such as Google desktop and
Beagle lacking because, unlike Google on the web, the desktop has no
links, if we can add links to desktop entities then search will become a
lot more powerful.

     Other talks we went to included Alan Cox explaining how he manages
to make a stable branch of Linux releases based on all the fixes Linus
doesn't use; Hanna Wallach promoted the Debian Woman project ("not here
to provide girlfriends to lonely geeks") which has managed to double the
number of women involved with Debian, also RMS presented the Free
Software Foundation's award to OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt.

     If you ever get the opportunity to go to FOSDEM do not turn it
down.

     Photos from Jonathan
[http://jriddell.org/photos/2005-02-26-fosdem/], Sebastian
[http://vizzzion.org/?id=gallery&gcat=Fosdem2005] and Raphiel.
 [http://jriddell.org/photos/2005-02-26-fosdem/raphiel/]