Report: KDE at LinuxTag 2002

June, 9th (Karlsruhe, Germany). This year's LinuxTag was once again a successful gathering for over sixty KDE developers from all over Europe who presented their award-winning desktop environment to more than 13,000 interested visitors at "Europe's largest OpenSource Event". As a special guest, David Faure (of Konqueror and KOffice fame) attended the fair to share opinions with other KDE developers.

On six dedicated demopoints, the LinuxTag visitors were invited to learn about the current KDE 3.0.1 release, Personal Information Management (KDE Pim), the KDE Edutainment project, the award-winning KDevelop IDE as well the future of KDE. The Opie Team showed their impressive achievements on syncing KDE with their amazing handheld environment.

In addition to the demopoints, the booth provided a hacking area where KDE Developers fixed bugs and implemented new features suggested by the visitors. Powered by an ad-hoc Teambuilder farm, the developers could easily recompile even larger chunks of code in almost no time.

In direct neighbourhood of our booth, KDE's Kurt Pfeifle was among the staff of the Linux Printing booth. He presented KDEPrint using an Apple Powerbook running KDE on top of MacOS X. By employing CUPS and the Internet Printing Protocol, Kurt showed the ease of Linux printing to an astonished crowd.

At the booth of the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI), the KMail developers Marc Mutz and Ingo Klöcker and the employees of Klarälvdalens Datakonsult, Intevation and g10 code showed the latest version of KMail with S/MIME support and the overall improved encryption features. On that occasion, Marc Mutz initiated a key-signing session where members of almost all present open source projects took the opportunity to extend the web of trust.

Among the interested vistors was Brigitte Zypries, secretary of state who was especially interested in the KDE EDU Project. As a surprise, a team from the german TV station 3Sat came to portrait the Opie Project. It will be aired on Monday, Juni 17th in the TV show "Neues".

In the free conference, Ralf Nolden's talk about "the enterprise desktop for the home user", Kurt Pfeifle's speech about "modern printing for a KEnterprise Desktop Environment" and Karl-Heinz Zimmer's talk about the Aegypten Project earned a vast amount of interest. Developers had the opportunity to attend the speeches of Jesper Pedersen about Qt Designer and Ralf Nolden who presented "Developing with KDevelop" in 3 different flavors: "beginner", "advanced" and "embedded". Martin Konold's speech "Escaping from the Outlook trap" contained some very interesting plans for the future of personal information management with Linux/KDE targeting both server and client side.

A large amount of photos have been taken by various developers:

• 72 photos by Stephan Binner (mirror)
• 90 photos by Carsten Niehaus
• 156 photos by Rob Kaper
• Even more photos by Maximilian Reiß

Last but not least, the KDE LinuxTag team would like to thank the following companies for their support:

• Danka Deutschland for the TFT, several useful equipment and for printing the business cards
• Hewlett-Packard and Sharp for equipping the Opie team with their handhelds
• KDE e.V. and its donators, for the budget we've been given to finance the fair
• KernelConcepts for producing wonderful KDE Pins (soon available online) and donating parts of the profit to the KDE project.
• Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB for sponsoring 10 tickets for the social event
• Linux New Media for donating 30 DELUG CDs containing KDE 3.0 packages to sell as merchandising material.
• Markt + Technik for sponsoring 1 social event ticket.
• SuSE for 2 Demopoints, TFT Displays and 2 social event tickets
• SUN Microsystems for making available an UltraSparc 60 running Solaris and sponsoring 5 tickets for the social event
• Trolltech for the TeamBuilder copy used in the Hacking Area

The KDE Team is looking forward to LinuxTag 2003 hoping it will be as successful and nice as all LinuxTag events have been up to now. Thanks again to all the sponsors and visitors. See you in 2003!

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