KDE on Cygwin: 3.1.1 Beta 1 Release Available

Friday, 25 April 2003  |  Binner

The KDE on Cygwin project, the project to port Qt and KDE to MS Windows, has announced the first beta release of KDE 3.1.1 for Cygwin and Cygwin/XFree86. Currently, both kdelibs and kdebase are ported (screenshot), but of further interest is this in combination with the Cygwin/XFree86 Test Series. The latter combination allows better integration into a Windows desktop with either the rootless (no root window, KWin as window manager, no taskbar entries) or multi-window (no root window, MS Windows as window manager, taskbar entries) modes.

Comments:

wow - Navindra Umanee - 2003-04-24

Wow, thanks for the great screenshots, Steve! It's quite scary how Konqueror looks like any Windows app...

Re: wow - Anonymous - 2003-04-25

With another icon set and a more darker color scheme they would look more alike.

I thought - Alex - 2003-04-24

Qt was already multiplatform and the same toolkit would work on OS X, Windows, and Linux, sow hy is there a need to port it?

Re: I thought - ian reinhart geiser - 2003-04-24

Because this uses Qt-x11 on cygwin. So you don't need a Trolltech license to use it. There is a group porting KDE libs to native win32 though, and from what I hear they are pretty far. The advantage here is that the apps look and behave like real windows apps. The goal not being to do silly things like run konqi on win32 but to allow companies to write native win32 apps that can easily be run on Unix and MacOS X. Really you need quite a beefy machine to make the cygwin stuff load, but it still looks very much out of place. Short synopsys is, neat for about 20 minutes until you need to get back to work. Its not fun to wait 45seconds to wait for konqi to appear and show my home directory :P Maby the native port will be faster? Maby I should not test on an AMD k6 333 ;) Just my own 2c -ian reinhart geiser

Re: I thought - Tom Matelich - 2003-04-24

Do you have a link to this project? I didn't see it in the first few google results I tried.

Re: I thought - Anonymous - 2003-04-24

Same site: http://kde-cygwin.sourceforge.net/qt2-win32/

Re: I thought - Tom Matelich - 2003-04-24

oh, I am a Qt-Windows licensee. I was hoping for native windows porting of KDE libraries. Much of KDE is portable, but a lot of it uses unix-y stuff.

Re: I thought - Peter Simonsson - 2003-04-24

http://www.iidea.pl/~js/qkw/

Re: I thought - Tom Matelich - 2003-04-24

Thanks!

Re: I thought - Scott Wheeler - 2003-04-25

Without a GPL'ed (or compatible) Qt on Windows this isn't possible to distribute. i.e. You can't distribute binaries of kdebase linked to Qt for Windows for licensing reasons.

Re: I thought - ian reinhart geiser - 2003-04-25

Why not? Is it also illegal to ship a binary of GNU Electric on win32? (links to ms libs) Is it also illegal to ship cygwin (yes virginia this too links to ms libraries)? Is this just a religious thing so we don't get RMS after us again? On that rationale it would be illegal to ship any GPL app on windows. There are actually quite a few open source projects that ship linked to Qt commercial on win32. Should we be "Cracking Down"? http://psi.affinix.com/?page=Download (ships with a qt-mt305.dll) http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtella (uses qtnc.dll so prolly okay) Then again this is all a moot point, since this is more so geared for closed source companies to write software on win32 and then have it available on Unix. We are basicly in the same boat on MacOS X. Has anyone seriously tried Konqi as a web browser on cygwin? I did a side by side and I would recommend not drinking coffee while using it, if you know that I mean. KDevelop was nice, but slow as dirt. I did not try KMail, yet, but im going to go out on a limb and assume it wont be a speed demon either. From what I was told by the cygwin guys over the years, "If you make a POSIX call, expect it to be slow. If you call fork(), expect it to be REALLY slow." Granted this may change with mingwin, but Im not sure if that is ready enough for prime time. Just my 2c from the few who have tried this ;) -ian reinhart geiser

Re: I thought - Ralf Habacker - 2003-05-12

While preparing the KDE3 release I've done some test on recent pc hardware with enough ram (512MB) and recognized, that many kde applications are quit usable. There are of course things to optimize, like the loading time and some improvements in the basic libraries like cygwin. After releasing KDE 3 I have got feedback, that KDE3 runs much faster than KDE2 with same hardware, os and cygwin release, which shows me, that there were some efforts to speedup KDE internal. Kdevelop was explicity released as alpha state, because we expects performance issues. KMail is really usefull. I and other have used is on a daily basis. Regards Ralf

New Koffice - MandrakeUser - 2003-04-24

Hey All How about posting a story on the newest koffice beta ? http://www.koffice.org/announcements/announce-1.3-beta1.phtml Cheers !

Re: New Koffice - Michael - 2003-04-24

Yes. I'm missing that, too! Where should we post our opinions on KOffice??? Please have mercy with us and create an article. ;-) BTW, I've installed it and I really like it. It still crashes and has missing functions but it is the first beta so that's perfectly OK. Especially the word import filter is pretty cool. I often get doc files via email and it's much faster to run kword than OpenOffice. Karbon14 has improved A LOT! The changelog really doesn't do it justice. The text function doesn't work at all for me right now, but it's nice to get a glimpse of what will be contained in the final version. Kexi does not work properly either. I cannot create fields in a table. So there's lots of work to do, anybody who hasn't installed it yet: Do not expect too much. It's definitvely a very early beta but nevertheless an amazing product.

Re: New Koffice - Norbert - 2003-04-25

> Kexi does not work properly either. I cannot create fields in a table. Works for me with an mySQL database, and it also works with an embedded one, but you need to use pure SQL (and maybe a more recent version:-)

Re: New Koffice - uga - 2003-04-25

>Works for me with an mySQL database, and it also works with an embedded one, >but you need to use pure SQL (and maybe a more recent version:-) Err....I have the same problem here. It's a CVS from 10 days ago (it's quite tough to rebuild koffice every week). I don't think it's an sql problem. It's just the interface that doesn't work. I find no way to add a new field in a table. Unless one needs to press the 6th button in the mouse to open a hidden menu ;-) What do you mean that one needs to use pure SQL? I have mysql here, and works with every program I made using qsql...

Re: New Koffice - Navindra Umanee - 2003-04-24

Nobody has submitted an article. I didn't even know it was released! Why do you post here instead of contributing an article? I don't have time to write one right now unfortunately... so someone please submit a good write-up.

IT was on the main kde.org site for a while - Alex - 2003-04-25

As well as on the Koffice site and its even on the dot now.

Re: New Koffice - Michael - 2003-04-25

Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't know we could contribute articles and whom I should inform. I'm just following these news articles directly from kde.org. And to make things clear: I did not expect a complete article, I just thought a short note: "Koffice 1.3 released" would have been nice, because on kde.org there was a discrepancy between the release section "Koffice 1.3 released" and the most recent news article (this one) so I posted on this one. I did not want to offend someone. ;-)

Re: New Koffice - Anonymous - 2003-04-26

> I didn't know we could contribute articles and whom I should inform. On dot.kde.org click on "contribute". I would like e.g. to read an introduction for and about differences between Karamba and SuperKaramba. Both were not mentionened on dot.kde.org yet.

Re: New Koffice - Datschge - 2003-04-27

I plan to do it sometime if nobody else is quicker.

http://khtml-win32.sourceforge.net/ - bobbob - 2003-04-25

This port doesn't seem to be going anywhere :(

Re: http://khtml-win32.sourceforge.net/ - Anonymous - 2003-04-26

Don't complain, help it!

shell - uber - 2003-04-26

Is it possible to use this as a shell for windows; similair to that of litestep, etc.?

Re: shell - Ralf Habacker - 2003-04-27

Yes, you can use the fullscreen mode of the KDE-cygwin desktop for doing like this. See the kde-cygwin mailing list archive for further informations how to replace explorer with the KDE-cygwin desktop.

KDE 3.1 for Cygwin Apps - Jimbo - 2003-04-29

I downloaded KDE 3.1 for Cygwin and it looks great! But I can't find any applications. I can't even find a terminal. Am I missing something, or are the apps coming out later? Thanks, Jimbo

Re: KDE 3.1 for Cygwin Apps - Ralf Habacker - 2003-05-06

There are all application located in the original kdelibs and kdebase package like konqueror (with ssl support), kwrite, kate, kcontrol, kdesktop, khelpcenter, kicker and more. Ralf