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| KDE at the 2005 Ohio Linux Fest |
 Posted by Aaron J. Seigo on Monday 03/Oct/2005, @15:24
from the the-midwest-rocks dept.
With over 700 attendees and a speaking track packed full of goodies, the one-day Ohio Linux Fest held this past Saturday in the city of Columbus was an unqualified success. KDE had a booth at the event which was kept exceedingly busy the entire day. Most of the people who visited the booth mentioned that they use KDE and several asked that we pass on their appreciation to the entire KDE team for all the work that they have put into it over the years.
KDE booth staff from left to right: Ryan Nickel, Jaison Lee and Steve Miller
The booth itself was manned by SuperKaramba hacker Ryan Nickel, KJots hacker Jaison Lee, KDE user extraordinaire Steve Miller and Aaron Seigo. Laptops showcased both KDE 3.4 and the upcoming 3.5 for the unending stream of booth visitors who kept the KDE team on their toes throughout the day. The enthusiasm and excitement was palpable behind the table and those that visited fed off that energy.
KDE highlights of the show included Aaron's talk "KDE: Every Day Use and Hidden Gems" which packed the conference room with upwards of 350 people, a guest spot featuring Kubuntu in Jorge Castro's talk on Ubuntu and the numerous fans and fans-to-be that came by the KDE booth with questions and comments galore.
SuperKaramba, the Kiosk desktop management framework, KStars, amaroK and many of the usual suspects such as Konqueror's amazing array of capabilities were hits with booth visitors. Among the visitors was a system administrator with the NOAA who is overseeing the roll out of KDE desktops in their Columbus office, a class from DeVry who were researching KDE as well as a pair of people from the local university and library who maintain KDE systems for the staffers there.
To top it off, the after-party was a blast and everyone seemed to have a great time at the DJ'd event. You can read more about the LinuxFest at Aaron's and Ryan's blogs as well as on the Ohio LinuxFest website itself. We look forward to next year's Ohio LinuxFest and talking with even more people at the KDE booth in 2006!
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Kiosk
by p0z3r on Monday 03/Oct/2005, @15:50
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I don't know who is maintaining the Kiosk code for KDE, but I had a few people asking me about how they could lock down terminals. I pointed them to kiosk of course, but maybe we should push it more or make it more well known?
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Re: Kiosk
by Aaron J. Seigo on Monday 03/Oct/2005, @17:55
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yes, we certainly need to promo kiosk more as it's extremely important to people doing larger roll outs. i've actually been talking with novell and they have started the process of getting till adams and myself involved with the engineering process for the next version of their zenworks product to support kiosk, which is excellent news of course.
for kde4, i'd actually like to see kiosk renamed to something that is more easily and obviously connected to desktop configuration management, definition and lockdown.
it's a terrific tool (which isn't to say it couldn't be improved and extended to be even better), we just need to tell (more of) the world about it!
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Re: Kiosk
by Evan "JabberWokky" E. on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @02:42
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How about Lock Down? ;)
Seriously, if it were integrated into the Control Center or otherwise placed so people tripped across it, parents could also use it for their kids.
For administrators, there's room for a list of existing features in the press release for each KDE release -- the capabilities of kiosk should be listed. I don't mean the "Highlights at a glance" section; that lists the new features. I mean an "About KDE" type section.
Didn't there used to be two press releases with each release? A "New Release" and "About KDE" one? I don't seem to see but one for the 3.4 release.
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Re: Kiosk
by ben on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @06:17
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how about "konfine", "konstrict" or "restriKt(or)"?
Could someone please start a poll whether people like the K in kde-names?
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Re: K in name (was Kiosk)
by Thomas Zander on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @08:30
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I don't need a poll to figure out people do not like unimaginative names starting with a K. Just read slashdot to drive that point very painfully home.
Oh, the painful part might be because its slashdot, but you still get the picture :)
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Re: K in name (was Kiosk)
by madpenguin8 on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @13:04
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Yeah, I always go to slashdot for all my advice. </sarcasm>
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Re: Kiosk
by Segedunum on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @07:33
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"i've actually been talking with novell and they have started the process of getting till adams and myself involved with the engineering process for the next version of their zenworks product to support kiosk, which is excellent news of course."
That's quite interesting. For Novell's desktop Linux roll-out I would assume something like that would be pretty essential for Zenworks to actually be useful. Also, tell Novell and others about Klik. Perhaps talk to them about supporting Klik (well done Kurt) in Zenworks (Klik installation of Zenworks?) as well and looking at what further work needs to be done. I believe that software installation really does need to be coupled with something like Klik or Autopackage, and I cannot for the life of me understand why the vast majority of distros aren't interested. Yes, they want people to make specific packages for their distro, but it isn't helping anyone or themselves.
"for kde4, i'd actually like to see kiosk renamed to something that is more easily and obviously connected to desktop configuration management, definition and lockdown."
Group Policy?! *Ducks* Don't know, but something that identifies it as a way to manage KDE desktops.
"it's a terrific tool (which isn't to say it couldn't be improved and extended to be even better), we just need to tell (more of) the world about it!"
It certainly is. However, what it needs is some good graphical tools that are integrated properly into KDE - something integrated properly in the new KDE 4 Control Centre perhaps with management tools in one place. I use Group Policy and AD with Windows all the time unfortunately, and many people harp on about how great they all are, but usability-wise for an administrator the management tools are a real pain. There's a lot of different graphical tools spread in different places and they're obviously all produced by different people.
Also, it's really clear how a networked infrastructure like Kiosk is so related to things like LDAP, distributed authentication etc. and all the other things, unfortunately, people are using Active Directory for with Windows today. If desktops like KDE can be supported by that back-end server infrastructure (which open source software has proven itself to be good at) then the outlook for open source desktop will be much brighter. Get rid of Exchange for Kolab and replace AD with LDAP and a KDE Kiosk framework - eliminate the infrastructure that keeps people locked in. Use that excellent open source, server-based infrastructure, build the management infrastructure around it with KDE and you've got everything you need to support an open source desktop. Rinse, repeat, profit, world domination!
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Re: Kiosk
by David on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @08:28
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Best comment I've read for a long time!
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What a Great Phrase
by Segedunum on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @03:30
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"The enthusiasm and excitement was palpable behind the table and those that visited fed off that energy."
I'll have to remember that one.
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Gnome Office beats KOffice
by Bernd on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @06:27
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http://www.abiword.com/release-notes/2.4.0.phtml
Yesterday Abiword 2.4 was released. It even supports one-the fly grammar check. I do not think KOffice Writer will beat Abiword or OpenOffice.
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"Gnome Office"?
by Corbin on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @06:46
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Since when has there been a "Gnome Office"? I thought there was just a bunch of office applications that used GTK that had nothing to do with each other?
Did Abiword make their own grammar checking engine, or did they use a separate library for it? If it is a third party library then KWord could easy add support for it. Also does it work at all well, or is the engine so simple that if the sentence isn't in an incredibly simple structure it will be considered incorrect?
IMHO Grammar check is an important feature (since my grammar sucks), but most checkers are even stupider than me. Also I don't think 1 feature makes Abiword better than KWord.
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Grammar checker
by Morty on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @09:27
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Not only are most grammar checkers stupid, they are usually not usable or extendable to other languages. How good is the i10n of this checker, is it possible to make usable for other languages?
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Re: Gnome Office beats KOffice
by punisher on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @07:14
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Especially that there is no app like "KOffice Writer" in this universe. Looks like you're living in parallel one :P
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Re: Gnome Office beats KOffice
by Jason Keirstead on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @07:23
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Yes, and according to that page it also just now added support for sometihng all KOffice apps have had for years (the aility to embed other application's charts and data).
Both KOffice and GNOME-Office have their strong and weak points. KWords import and export for MS Office files is extremely lacking. And they also are lacking a grammar checker. BUt they are way ahead in the ability to embed other file formats, like SVG and spreadsheets and charts, into documents. They are also ahead when it comes to layout and presentation capabilities, mainly due to their framemaker-like approach to documents rather than the MS Word-like approach of abiword.
In conclusion, both have a way to go. And both are still playing catch-up with OpenOffice. But both are getting better all the time, and competition is always a good thing, especially with all collaberating on things like OASIS where appropriate.
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Re: Gnome Office beats KOffice
by ac on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @07:49
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> ... especially with all collaberating on things like OASIS
Except that AbiWord will not switch to that format, unfortunately:
http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword/FaqOASISSupport
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Re: Gnome Office beats KOffice
by bla on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @09:20
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Since it's a Gnome app it would probably require a total rewrite.
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Actually ...
by Tony Freeman on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @15:18
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... I'm a National Weather Service Information Technology Officer out of the Louisville, Kentucky office. I was just telling Aaron that the NWS will be using KDE as the default desktop very soon ... no exceptions. I'm more of a GNOME guy, but after Aaron's presentation I decided that KDE may have a lot more to offer than I had previously realized. Anyway ... I'm looking forward to the switch over and would really appreciate a copy of your presentation.
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Re: Actually ...
by Aaron J. Seigo on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @15:37
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oops! it was your noaa email that confused me =)
still, great news about the NWS. i'll have audio and perhaps even video soon though and i'll be posting that when i get it. having just the slides wouldn't be of much use as they were, except for 2 of the slides, just icons =)
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Re: Actually ...
by Rick Montgomery on Tuesday 04/Oct/2005, @16:13
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Aaron,
I would love to have a copy of your presentation as well. We are a total MS shop on the cusp of transistion to Linux (SuSe). I have been showing the Board of Directors the possibilities and doing cost comparisons for them. Looking at OpenMFG and SugarCRM as replacement for our current ERP and CRM apps. Talking to Sun rep for site license for Star Office 8. While we can not shake Windows 100% since some of the propritary apps we use currently do not have a cross over; but we will seriously drop one heck of a hammer on the server and desktop usage.
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