[dot] Report: KDE at The Italian Linux Day 2007 in Rome

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1194921052/

From: Giovanni Venturi <giovanni at kde-it.org>
Dept: itsa-me-a-konqi
Date: Monday 12/Nov/2007, @18:30

Report: KDE at The Italian Linux Day 2007 in Rome
=================================================

   On October 27th, KDE Italia [http://www.kde-it.org/] attended the
Italian Linux Day 2007 [http://www.linuxdayroma.org/] in Rome at the Tor
Vergata University. Other cities had their Linux Day throughout Italy at
the same time. For the people that have never attended to these kind of
events, it is important to remember that the Italian Linux Day is a day
dedicated to spreading Free and Open Source Software and specially the
GNU/Linux Operating System and its software components such as KDE. The
talks for the day were at different levels of difficulty and you could
find widely accessible talks or talks for an expert audience with more
technical and specific topics.

     Giovanni Venturi of KDE Italia represented KDE with 2 different
talks, one for potential new Linux users and another for C/C++ experts.
The slides are freely downloadable from the KDE Italia website
[http://www.kde-it.org/] (in the download section of course). The two
talks were titled:

 Alla scoperta di KDE 3.5 e KDE 4 (Discovering KDE 3.5 and KDE 4)
Programmare Qt (Programming Qt)
     The first talk started with a very brief introduction to the basic
elements of a computer, including the purpose of an Operating System
with reference to Linus Torvalds, the Linux creator.  This was followed
up by talking directly about KDE, briefly remcalling its story: when and
why the project was born and the Trolltech role. After these first
minutes, the talk showed some screenshots of KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 beta
4 pointing out many of the features of KDE and the difference between
the 3.5 series and the 4.0 beta.

     The new Linux users (about 60/70 people) asked about how it is
possible that KDE 4 was released also for Windows and Mac. [ed: This is
due to Qt4's new GPL licences for these platforms, plus the ease of
using CMake to compile for alternative platforms.] They liked the fact
that with KMPlayer you can record streamings and that you can get the
audio files from a CD Audio in very simple way with Konqueror, K3b and
KAudioCreator.

     The second talk was more technical: it was created for people that
know C/C++ programming. In this speech was given an introduction to Qt
programming with the Trolltech Qt toolkit
[http://trolltech.com/products/qt/] explaining why people should use
this kind of multiplatform framework for the Free Unix as GNU/Linux and
FreeBSD and for platform as Mac and Microsoft Windows. Qt designer and
the Qt assistent was demonstrated during the talk complete with Qt
examples compiled in real time. About 40/50 people attended this talk.
At the end of the talk people were invited to give their contribution to
KDE through development or alternately helping KDE Italia, the KDE
Italian translation team, documentation, the KDE promo team, and more.
This talk's slides are available with two files: the presentation in ODF
and the Qt example ZIP file.

     The event was carried out at the same time of the Game Developer
Day, an initiative in its first edition. This other event presents a
videogame creation theme, explained through a series of presentations
and useful examples. In one of the rooms, there was the install fest
featuring the real time installation of GNU/Linux (Kubuntu - Ubuntu)
distributions on the users laptop and desktop computers for those people
that wanted become part of the GNU/Linux world.

     We hope to help grow the KDE Italian community by the active
involvement of new end users. For this event, we want to specifically
thank Tor Vergata Linux Users' Group [http://www.torlug.org/] and La
Sapienza Linux Users' Group [http://www.ls-lug.org/], two groups with
which we're been collaborating with over the last year. In fact, we also
collaborated last year with these Linux Users' Groups during the Italian
Linux Day 2006. We invite all people that want to join our community to
contact us using the website, via email at wewantyou __AT__ kde-it
__DOT__ org or the KDE Italia mailing list.
 [https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-italia]
     Thanks all of you.