[dot] KDE at FrOSCon 2006

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1152117752/

From: Daniel Molkentin <molkentin at kde.org>
Dept: shiny-weather-with-beer-and-football
Date: Wednesday 05/Jul/2006, @09:42

KDE at FrOSCon 2006
===================

   About two weeks ago, several KDE developers gathered at FrOSCon
[http://www.froscon.org], the Free and Open Source conference in St.
Augustin near Bonn, Germany. Hosted by the Computer Science department
[http://www.inf.fh-brs.de] of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied
Sciences [http://www.fh-brs.de], the conference also provided rooms for
free software projects. One was seized by the KDE project for discussion
and hacking. Additionally, representatives of the KDE project gave two
[http://programm.froscon.de/events/76.en.html] talks
[http://programm.froscon.de/events/64.en.html] at the official
conference [http://programm.froscon.de/] programs, as well as two other
talks that directly related to KDE. Read on for the full report.

     On Saturday, Sebastian Kügler gave a talk on KDE Marketing
(subtitled: The Road to World Domination)
[http://programm.froscon.de/events/76.en.html]. The conference
organisers were nice enough to postpone the talk until after the
football match. Despite the late time, quite a lot people listened to
Sebastian when he spoke about the recent successes of KDE in terms of
marketing and what the Marketing Working Group in cooperation with
KDE-Promo is heading for.

     Later, Adrian Schröter from the openSUSE project gave an insight
[http://programm.froscon.de/events/50.en.html] on the openSUSE build
service [http://de.opensuse.org/Build_Service] which helps building
packages for a lot of distributions. This might make building packages
for your KDE application a breeze in the future, no matter what target
distribution your users have installed.

     On Sunday, KDE's Cornelius Schumacher presented a GPL'ed feature
tracking tool [http://programm.froscon.de/events/76.en.html] developed
by SUSE, which provides a native KDE client.

     Finally, I had the honour of giving a talk on the Future of the
GNU/Linux Desktop [] (slides
[http://programm.froscon.de/attachments/31-LinuxDesktopFuture_Oxygen.pdf],
in German) which was received very well.

     In the developer room, Stephan Hermann from the Kubuntu team
[http://www.kubuntu.org] and Volker Krause of KDE-PIM fame were busy
hacking. While Volker ported KDE-PIM to DBUS, Stephan and I discussed
how to ease KDE 4 development on Kubuntu. Hold your breath, development
packages will soon be available for Dapper.

     On Sunday and during the social event on Saturday, I had the chance
to discuss a lot of issues with Egbert Eich and Luc Verhaegen from X.org
[http://www.x.org] and learn about planned features in X.org 7.2 and
beyond.  FrOScon was a really nice conference. The KDE team will
certainly return for FrOSCon 2007 with an even larger team. Pictures of
the conference can be found here.
 [http://wiki.froscon.de/index.php/Pictures]