KDE Report: LinuxWorld Conference and Expo 2001

The KDE Project used the occasion of the LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco to show off the most recent release of the K Desktop Environment, KDE 2.2. The Expo was also the perfect place to announce and demonstrate the new KOffice 1.1, the KDE office and productivity suite.

KDE was represented by Bay Area locals Jim Blomo, Jason Katz-Brown and Charles Samuels as well as Bohemians Waldo Bastian, Kurt Granroth, Rob Kaper, Andreas Pour and Chris Schläger. Also present at the KDE booth with the best of intentions were Paul Campbell, Bill Huey and Eunice Kim.

One of the highlights of the event was the announcement that KDE had won the LWE Excellence Award for Best Open Source Project. After receiving the award, it was proudly displayed at the booth by the developers present, who felt it was great to see appreciation for the combined efforts of the entire KDE community.

Over the three days that the exhibition was open, many visitors were seen at the KDE booth. Most of them were impressed by the demonstrations given. Most popular were Konqueror, Noatun-plugin Madness, the Internet keyword architecture, renewed text editor Kate and especially the KIO slave architecture.

Demonstrating the kio_audiocd plugin with the flair of a magician ("see, this is a regular CD") to rip and encode audio tracks to MP3 and Ogg Vorbis almost caused some visitors to leave the exhibition so they could install KDE on their computers immediately. Also met with great interest was the mention of the kio_freenet and kio_sftp slaves for respectively the Freenet distributed file network and secure file transfers using SSH.

Interest from the media was also intense. Andreas was forced to purchase lozenges to protect himself after the large number of interviews the KDE League's PR firm arranged for him (thanks Eunice!). Earlier in the week Andreas took part in a live interview and another recorded interview for TechTV, an international technology cable channel.

One of the most frequently asked questions at the booth was the difference between KDE and GNOME, the two most popular open source desktops. Most users did not realize that both projects share the same goals (improving UNIX usability) while approaching them from a different technical point-of-view. Despite popular belief, the KDE developers and GNOME developers did not engage in WWIII but instead met under friendly conditions. Andreas also met with Nat Friedman from Ximian in an effort to improve relations and to discuss ways that KDE and GNOME can work together to make Open Source more attractive to computer users. The meeting went very well and concrete actions to improve KDE/GNOME interoperability were discussed. Some of these ideas were already planned in a KDE/GNOME hackfest to be held at the XFree Technical Conference this November under the umbrella of Keith Packard of the XFree86 Project.

Some other frequently heard requests were for CD's with KDE installed and whether MieTerra's big stuffed Konqi could be given away. For various reasons the KDE team could not comply, but were able to point to a page on the KDE website with third part CD-ROM resellers and KDE merchandise. It should also be mentioned that most Linux distributions ship with KDE, many of which have it as the preferred or default desktop environment. We would like to specifically mention both SuSE and Mandrake and thank them for the hardware they contributed for the KDE booth. Another thank you goes to the KDE League for providing food for the developers in attendance.

A photo impression of the event and the KDE booth made by Rob Kaper is available here.

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