COMMUNITY 2006

The aKademy 2006 KDE developer conference in Dublin THE ROAD TO KDE 4 Some 200 members of the KDE project met at Trinity College in Dublin at the end of September for the week- long aKademy conference. BY MATHIAS HUBER AND MARCEL HILZINGER

he KDE community turned out in running on these devices, KDE sign text with just a few lines of code. Dublin for the annual aKademy components need to be leaner and re- Rob describes more application scenar- Tconference [1]. The venue for the quire fewer dependencies. He pointed to at http:// opendocument. xml. org/ event was Dublin’s historic Trinity Col- Apple’s KHTML derivative Webkit as a node/ 154. lege. During the eight-day meeting, de- successful example. Also, KDE on the PC velopers networked, formulated goals should be capable of integrating mobile KDE 4 Underway for the coming year, and drafted the devices. The talk by John Cherry from The focus of many talks was the next technological roadmap for version 4 of the OSDL Desktop Linux Initiative major release of KDE. Now that the basic the KDE desktop environment. warned that Linux has to be more attrac- functions of the KDE libraries have been tive for the “Ipod generation”. ported to 4, the applications are due Speeches and Sessions The programming sessions over the to follow. Matthias Kretz and Kevin Ot- One of the invited speakers for this KDE next few days focused on Open Docu- tens presented the [2] multime- meeting was John Palmieri of the Gnome ment Format (ODF). The XML-based dia system and the new Solid [3] hard- project. He referred to the relationship document format is not far from final ap- ware framework. Talks by Tobias König between the two desktop environments proval as an ISO standard. Applications and Tobias Hunger on the KDE4 PIM and as “competition and cooperation,” call- such as OpenOffice and KDE’s own KOf- communication frameworks [4] ing for KDE developers to stop compet- fice already implement it, although the and Decibel [5] were well attended. ing with Gnome for the current 5 percent implementations are neither complete Aaron Seigo devoted a 30-minute talk to share of the market, and, instead, extend nor standardized, as Lotzi Bölöni from the new KDE desktop, Plasma [6]. the free desktop user base by cooperat- the University of Central Florida pointed David Faure demonstrated the most ing on Freedesktop.org. out. Bölöni used an ODF test suite efficient way for developers to set up a Jens Herdens spoke on KDE in Cam- http:// netmoc. cpe. ucf. edu/ Projects/ build environment that let’s the user bodia. Other presentations on KDE in OpenDocument/ to demonstrate his work on both KDE 3 and KDE 4. Lubos Asia showed how free software can sup- point. Lunak gave programmers tips on speed- port countries that don’t receive localiza- Rob Weir from IBM suggested creating ing up application launches. The KDE tion attention from proprietary compa- an OpenDocument developer kit to give developers went on to implement several nies. Holger Freyther focused on con- developers the ability to process the for- of these suggestions in the ensuing hack- sumer electronics and mobile devices. mat outside of office applications. A suit- ing marathon. For Holger, the typical computer today is able API would let developers automati- a cellphone or an MP3 player. To get cally reformat, convert, and digitally Conclusion After spending a week in the Irish capi- tal, the KDE community will be looking to implement its roadmap for KDE 4. Kudos to the members of the local orga- nizational team for making sure that the conference days – and the evenings spent talking shop in the local pubs – went off so smoothly. ■

INFO [1] aKademy 2006: http:// akademy2006. . org [2] Phonon: http:// phonon. kde. org [3] Solid: http:// solid. kde. org [4] Akonadi: http:// pim. kde. org/ akonadi/ [5] Decibel: http:// decibel. kde. org [6] Plasma: http:// plasma. kde. org Figure 1: The venerable walls of Trinity College were the venue for some 200 KDE contributors.

90 ISSUE 73 DECEMBER 2006 WWW.LINUX - MAGAZINE.COM