KDE Blogs 

It's been quite a while since I've blogged. You know, life gets in the way... But this is a good time as any to say it: Happy Birthday KDE. May the next 10 years be more groundbreaking and memorable than the last 10. Read More

It's party time. Today we celebrate the tenth birthday of KDE. It all started with the famous post by Matthias Ettrich on October 14th 1996 calling for programmers to create a piece of free software he called KDE. The mission: "The idea is to create a GUI for an ENDUSER. Somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux, write some letters and play some nice games." Ten years later we have grown an amazing community of hundreds of developers and millions of users which made big parts of Matthias' original vision become reality. Read More

Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix distribution^wfame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software. Jono Bacon, Canonical's community manager of Ubuntu / Kubuntu, congratulated KDE with his own presentation about Kubuntu and KDE. Jan Mühlig from Relevantive and Daniel Molkentin, KDE e.V. talked about Usability and KDE 4. In the afternoon the audience of the presentation track met for a group photo and celebrated the event with sparkling wine and a big birthday cake. Even the dragon mascot of the project was present - this time made of marzipan, right on the top of the birthday cake. Right after the afternoon break the presentation track continued with a speech from Heinz-M. Gräsing from the city of Treuchtlingen who gave some insights about the successful migration of Treuchtlingen to KDE. The presentation part of the anniversary was concluded by Knut Yrvin, community manager at Trolltech, who surveyed the KDE 10 Years raffle together with Eva Brucherseifer. As prizes Trolltech offered a Qtopia Greenphone and Open Source Press offered Daniel Molkentin's new book about Qt4 programming. Further KDE people arrived at the TAE in the evening when people met in the cottage for a delicious big "italian" dinner. People clinked glasses later at midnight when the party started to last into the actual anniversary. The KDE project would like to thank the speakers of the presentation track, the Technische Akademie Esslingen, Trolltech and Open Source Press for their support of the whole event. A special "thank you" goes to the confectioner who created that awesome marzipan dragon for the cake ;-) And of course we would like to thank all the people who were not able to attend the event and who sent their nice wishes to the KDE Project.

Today ten years ago the KDE project was founded. It certainly influenced the life of many people including mine. :-) The party at the 10 Years KDE event to celebrate this anniversary started yesterday and ended today. At the end I was continously awake around 23 hours as I didn't want to miss any part of the event and had to arrive to Stuttgart in the morning first. Tackat wrote a nice report about the whole day. Trolltech congratulated giving every attendee a t-shirt with the imprint "KDE - Defining the Linux Desktop for Ten Years!" increasing my geek t-shirt collection (how many do you have?). Also nice to meet some early involved people who are not actively contributing to KDE today anymore like Matthias Hölzer-Klüpfel and Jono Bacon and to recognize how many people from KDE's first weeks are still active and have now their own or are leading employees of companies earning their money with Qt/KDE related development.

I was interested to read this article on how Sun have set up a pavilion in Second Life, and are using it for virtual meetings: Tuesday, Sun became the first Fortune 500 company to hold an 'in-world' press conference to show off its new pavilion in Second Life, the popular 3D online world. Sun said it plans to invest in the Sun Pavilion as a place for developers to try out code, share ideas and receive training. Read More

Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix distribution^wfame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software. Jono Bacon, Canonical's community manager of Ubuntu / Kubuntu, congratulated KDE with his own presentation about Kubuntu and KDE. Jan Mühlig from Relevantive and Daniel Molkentin, KDE e.V. talked about Usability and KDE 4. In the afternoon the audience of the presentation track met for a group photo and celebrated the event with sparkling wine and a big birthday cake. Even the dragon mascot of the project was present - this time made of marzipan, right on the top of the birthday cake. Right after the afternoon break the presentation track continued with a speech from Heinz-M. Gräsing from the city of Treuchtlingen who gave some insights about the successful migration of Treuchtlingen to KDE. The presentation part of the anniversary was concluded by Knut Yrvin, community manager at Trolltech, who surveyed the KDE 10 Years raffle together with Eva Brucherseifer. As prizes Trolltech offered a Qtopia Greenphone and Open Source Press offered Daniel Molkentin's new book about Qt4 programming. Further KDE people arrived at the TAE in the evening when people met in the cottage for a delicious big "italian" dinner. People clinked glasses later at midnight when the party started to last into the actual anniversary. The KDE project would like to thank the speakers of the presentation track, the Technische Akademie Esslingen, Trolltech and Open Source Press for their support of the whole event. A special "thank you" goes to the confectioner who created that awesome marzipan dragon for the cake ;-) And of course we would like to thank all the people who were not able to attend the event and who sent their nice wishes to the KDE Project.

Last weekend I was at Gnome Live, Boston to attend the Text Layout Summit. The Text Layout Summit is a meeting intended to further all of Free software text rendering, both to screen and for print. Read More

This summer was a good summer for syncing. A couple of days ago the OpenSync project released their version 0.19 which now finally is able to sync the KDE desktop data also when using the KDE frontend KitchenSync. Previously this wasn't possible because the event loops of the KDE plugin and the frontend got in conflict, when running in the same process. With a new architecture which allows to run plugins in separate processes communicating with the sync engine via an IPC protocol, OpenSync solves this problem. This work was started at the OpenSync meeting in Amsterdam earlier this year and now finally completed and released. Congratulations! Read More

Near the end of Akademy, when it was finally short enough on talks, BoFs and whatnots to leave some time for serious hacking, after staring at the source of glcompmgr, I finally decided that this OpenGL compositing thingie cannot be that hard. And, 24 hours (with some sleep in the middle :) ) later, after staring at the glcompmgr code more, using code from it and searching in the OpenGL Redbook, I had this: Read More

.. but this scripting thread that keeps going and going on kde-core-devel is pathetic. Bah! Currently I am no longer reading the thread and simply deleting every email with scripting in the subject. He who codes decides and as soon as an application is working properly in any scripting language (therefore the bindings are working fine) it should be shipped inside a module. Period. If it creates an extra dependency then so be it. I assume cmake will be made smart enough to make sure that when the bindings are not there the application will not be built and cmake will not bail out with a "requires these and these bindings" error. If you feel that you have to have the same app in C++ then code it yourself. Again he who codes decides. You need it in C++ and you make it better than the scripting version, fine we ship both versions as long as they are properly maintained. That goes for any software we put inside the modules like it has always been done. Read More