[KPhotoAlbum] KPA and Windows

[Shawn Willden]

On Friday 27 April 2007 08:28:19 am Neil Paisnel wrote:
> That is a shame.  Would like to use linux, have been wanting to go over to
> it for a few years now.  but it is just not usable enough yet. 

:-) 

You do realize you're speaking to a bunch of people who use it as a desktop 
platform, and most of whom have done so for years, right?  Linux is quite 
usable and has been for a long time.  Whether or not its what you want to use 
is a separate question, of course, and you're certainly welcome to use what 
you like.

> I have just 
> started to play around with it, with a spare machine, but to spend more
> than a week, every day, just to get things like printer, screen, network,
> internet, keyboard etc etc to work, is just not worth it.

That sounds like Linux from 10 years ago.  What distro are you using?  Most 
modern distros make all of that stuff work, out of the box, with less effort 
that is required for Windows (which often requires you to install drivers 
that are "just there" in Linux).

> And even now have 
> still not found answers to most of the problems.  It is still very geeky.
> Windows may have faults, but at least it generally just works

For a suitable definition of "works"  ;-)  Many of us don't use Windows 
because we *don't* think it works.

> I want to use the machine and have my girlfriend be able to use it.  I do
> not want to spend all my time making it and software work by trawling the
> net, forums etc etc.  Looks like I’ll have to try MAC or stick with windows
> at least it is usable out of the box

If you want to try a Mac, KPA also runs reasonably well on OS X.  My wife has 
an iBook and I found it pretty easy to build KPA using the Fink toolset.  I 
was not able to get all of the plugins to work, but the basic application for 
tagging and searching your photo database works quite well.

To Baptiste's point about Qt4 making a native Windows port possible in the 
future, I personally wouldn't hold my breath.  Qt4/Win32 being GPL-licensed 
makes such things possible without using an X server, but it's been shown 
that you can run KPA on Windows now using the Cygwin tools and X server.  The 
problem with getting it running on Windows isn't a technology issue, it's a 
resource issue:  There doesn't appear to be anyone around with the skills and 
interest in packaging KPA nicely for Windows.  I'm not sure why this would 
change just because we can remove the X server from the equation.  Maybe 
there'll be a general move to port everything in KDE to Windows and KPA will 
be swept along with the flow, but I wouldn't count on it.

In any case, I wish you luck.  If you'd like to try getting KPA running on 
Windows, you're welcome to ask specific questions, and I'm sure you'll get 
answers.  Most of us don't have a Windows machine to try this on, but we can 
understand error messages and suggest ways to address them.

All the best,

	Shawn.