[dot] KDE Rocks FOSDEM 2008

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1204168154/

From: Jos Poortvliet and Niels van Mourik <>
Dept: because-we-always-do
Date: Wednesday27/Feb/2008, @19:09

KDE Rocks FOSDEM 2008
=====================

   The combined KDE/Amarok booth and developer room at the annual Free
and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM)
[http://www.fosdem.org/2008/] in Brusssels was a great experience (as
usual!). Many people showed up from the KDE and Amarok communities, and
we had a hard time fitting all our cool hardware and people in the
booth. Luckily, the talks drew quite a crowd, and the booth became less
busy as the day progressed. Read on for an overview of FOSDEM 2008 from
the KDE perspective.

     FOSDEM started out with a large group of KDE and Amarok people
working like crazy to get the booth set up. We had all kinds of weird
(and more standard) hardware, from a KDE-branded SUN-based thin client
and a small VIA box, to large and small monitors connected to laptops -
and all of it running KDE, in some cases the bleeding edge of
development (destined to become KDE 4.1). Meanwhile, the Amarok people
showed off their latest work on Amarok, with an appearance of their
Mascot, Mike, who came in from the woods to 'Rok with the crowd.



Amarok
     After our group photo and a short welcome by Bart Coppens, Nikolaj
Hald Nielsen gave a talk about Amarok [http://amarok.kde.org/] 2.0 - the
new way to "rediscover your music". Nikolaj also introduced a new
friend, the Amarok Wolf Mike.
 [http://www.google.com/search?q=amarok+mike&btnG=Search&hl=en]

 [http://static.kdenews.org/dannya/fosdem2008-3.jpg]
     Nikolaj then gave an outline of the history of Amarok, mentioning
Free Software and the new trend which is going on besides the Free
Software movement itself, the Free Culture movement - think Creative
Commons [http://creativecommons.org/] or the rise of more open music
sites such as Magnatune [http://magnatune.com/]. Nikolaj is employed by
Magnatune now, and he discussed some details of their contributions. It
is great to see a company who really gets Free Culture and Free
Software! In the future, thanks to the support from Magnatune, Amarok
will support a variety of different music stores.

KOffice
     In the next talk, Bart Coppens started to show us some cool and
less cool things about KOffice 2 [http://www.koffice.org/]. Starting
with the bad, he told us how, due to the developers having less time to
work on KOffice, the current state of several applications was
disappointing. The developers therefore recently decided to restrict
their release goals, focusing on the applications they can make stable
for KOffice 2.0. Those applications will most likely be KPresenter,
KChart, KSpread and Karbon. Yes, KWord and Krita both might not make it
for the first KOffice 2.0 release! This is an very unfortunate state of
events for the one of the most innovative office suites, and there has
been talk of hiring someone to get KWord into a usable state for the
release. Meanwhile, Krita is very complete in terms of architecture and
features, but those features aren't reflected in the interface yet - and
that may not change any time soon either.

     Now, on to the good stuff: the target of the big refactoring of the
KOffice codebase, getting a tighter, lighter and more integrated KOffice
is finally starting to bear fruit. Two technologies were presented by
Bart to illustrate his points. To explain the idea behind Flake
[http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Flake], imagine rough terrain
which is flattened out and made more consistent by snow flakes. With
Flake as the backend technology for KOffice 2, the similarities between
many different components are put into a common core. This makes the
components much more lightweight, more flexible, and easier to write.
Another technology is Pigment
[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Pigment], the color management
system which now allows all KOffice applications to have proper color
management - something very interesting for people working with graphics
professionally.

     Bart showed elements from Karbon and KWord, and he talked a few
minutes about KPresenter and the plans for that application. Apparently,
Aaron Seigo has promised to work on it to ensure it works nicely with
Xinerama and generally does what he needs it to do while giving talks
all over the world. Unfortunately, earlier experiments with sound &
video in KPresenter failed, mostly due to Phonon not being ready for
Flake shape integration.

Nepomuk
     After Bart, Sebastian Trueg [http://behindkde.org/people/trueg/]
entered the stage. He told us he was going to talk about the Nepomuk
project [http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/]. Nepomuk is a research
project with more than 20 organisations from across the European Union.
Sebastian is mainly tasked with integrating the results of the research
into KDE. The target of the Nepomuk project is to create a Social
Semantic Desktop. Explaining, Sebastian gave the example of a file you
once received from someone by mail and then saved somewhere. It can be
difficult to find the file with current technologies, as that specific
piece of information is lost when you save the file. Semantics are about
relationships - and this file had a relation with the email. Nepomuk
integration in KDE will allow you to find the file when looking for
files related to the person you received the mail from. The Semantic
Desktop will try to gather this kind of information automatically, or
allow you to easily augment it so it can help you find your data or
accomplish tasks easier.

     Sebastian provided examples, explaining the benefits of these
technologies and then continued to talk about the current state of
Nepomuk in KDE. Currently, we have basic tagging, rating and commenting
in Dolphin, and a basic search interface with a nice syntax. It allows
you to search for rather specific things, but is not very easy to use
yet. A final thing we will see soon is the ability to browse through the
tags as if they were folders in Dolphin.

     Similar functionality is planned for KDE-PIM [http://pim.kde.org/],
which Sebastian Kuegler now turns to. During a recent meeting, the
KDE-PIM people decided they would love virtual folders (or live
searches) within KMail. Such folders can show, for example, emails from
a certain person or about certain subjects - and are updated live when
new emails arrive or become tagged. Better search is generally something
the PIM hackers want, and doing so by tightly integrating Nepomuk sounds
like a smart move. All in all, the compelling vision behind Nepomuk left
us impressed again.

Free software in Telecommunications focusing on Qtopia
     Knut Yrvin works as community manager at Trolltech's
[http://trolltech.com/] office in Oslo. He started his talk by telling
the crowd inside the developer room about the history of both Qt and
KDE. Then, Knut started to explain the concepts behind Qtopia,
Trolltech's extention framework which has its focus on developing
applications for mobile and embedded systems. Qtopia allows developers
to deploy quite advanced applications everywhere. The ease of porting
desktop applications to Qtopia, especially with Qt 4.x is really
amazing! We can only agree: as at the KDE booth Marijn Kruisselbrink
[http://behindkde.org/people/soc2007-four/] (of KOffice fame) was
showing KStars [http://edu.kde.org/kstars/] on a NEO1973 phone
[http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo1973] - and according to him, he only
had to recompile it!

     After the technical description of Qtopia, Knut went over the
actual implementation of Qtopia running on hardware. Knut started
showing off the Trolltech Greenphone (A developer tool which has been
discontinued) and explained its advantages and disadvantages. Trolltech
decided that they are actually not a hardware company and therefore
shouldn't be really providing hardware but instead software that runs
perfectly on it.

     After the Greenphone went through the rooms and the usual "ooh" and
"aaah" responses were expressed, Knut started talking about the next
generation Open Source mobile appliances. The next phone running Qtopia
is going to be the NEO1973, manufactured by a partner vendor with quite
a few differences in comparison with the Greenphone. For example, the
NEO is being developed very closely with the community. Another nice
thing Knut mentioned was that Trolltech is also sponsoring the
OpenEmbedded project.

KDE on Windows
     Later, Holger Schröder
[http://www.fosdem.org/2008/schedule/speakers/holger+schroeder] gave a
talk about KDE on Windows [http://windows.kde.org/], starting with its
history and progressing to the current status. Holger gave a demo to the
crowd and showed off KDE applications running on Windows and
interactively asked the public to ask him to show their favorite KDE
program of choice. After the demo, he discussed the technical
difficulties the team had to face when getting kdelibs ported to the
(non-POSIX) Windows platform and explained the distribution system they
had to set up for getting all KDE software distributed in a centralized
way.

KDE Games
     On Sunday, the KDE Devroom turned into a shared room with GNOME and
other projects as it became the "Cross-Desktop" room. Unfortunately, we
were unable to cover all talks going on, but we do have a short overview
for you. After another warm welcome by Bart Coppens and Christophe
Fergeau, Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter gave us an overview of the current
status of KLIK [http://klik.atekon.de/] on KDE and GNOME.

     And during these talks, our booth received many interested visitors
asking about KDE 4.x and the upcoming stuff, or looking at Amarok. Some
were even working on code or hunting bugs - or blogging about the event.
And, of course, discussing important issues like beer or things of less
importance like code. We saw a few cool new things, like Marijn
Kruisselbrink demonstrating Plasma running on Mac OS X and many
different checkouts that each looked totally different... And don't
forget about the neat Sun-provided thin client running Solaris and KDE.
Or the fact we ran out of merchandise again ;-)


 [http://static.kdenews.org/dannya/fosdem2008-4.jpg]
     And of course, both days ended with lots of beer, fun and good food
in Brussels! Until next year...