KDE @ LinuxTag 2004: A Great Success Bodes Well for aKademy
"The tenth annual LinuxTag proved to be a very successful event for the forty-plus KDE developers who presented their award-winning desktop environment to more than 16,000 enthusiastic visitors at 'Europe's largest OpenSource Event'." So begins Torsten Rahn's excellent report on KDE's presence at LinuxTag 2004.
KDE @ LinuxTag 2004: A Great Success Bodes Well for aKademy
June 30. 2004 (Karlsruhe, Germany). The tenth annual LinuxTag proved to be a very successful event for the forty-plus KDE developers who presented their award-winning desktop environment to more than 16,000 enthusiastic visitors at "Europe's largest OpenSource Event". As expected, the upcoming KDE Community World Summit 2004 ("aKademy"), which will be held between 21-29 August, 2004 in Ludwigsburg (Stuttgart Region), Germany, strongly influenced many of the talks and presentations by the KDE team.
As usual, the KDE booth in the exhibition area was crowded. Six to eight demopoints were available for LinuxTag visitors to learn about the current KDE 3.2 release, accessibility, the KDE FreeNX project, personal information management (KDE PIM), the award-winning KDevelop IDE as well as the future of KDE. Many users also took the opportunity to personally provide developers with valuable feedback and suggestions. KDE developers used the hacking area to work on KDE FreeNX, jointly develop new ideas and generally hack on KDE. Of course LinuxTag also offers the opportunity to meet some KDE developers from outside Germany. As special guests, David Faure (KDE France) and Fabrice Mous (KDE-NL) attended the fair.
Some related software projects, who had been invited to the KDE booth to enhance cooperation, took advantage of the opportunity. Members of the QtForum.org project helped to spur interest in KDE and Qt development. Oliver Fels from the Opie team demonstrated syncing the PDA / handheld GUI environment with KDE. And in a joint effort with the Skolelinux project, the KDE Team demonstrated the rapid development progress of free educational software. LinuxTag's Social Event on Friday was another good opportunity to meet and talk (and have a beer!) with members of other projects or companies. And just like last year, on Thursday night KDE, SkoleLinux, QtForum.org, Gnome and Debian team members dined together.
Dozens of KDE related talks took place at the conference area. Kurt Pfeifle and Fabian Franz made numerous presentations and speeches which covered Knoppix and the NX-Technology, which generated a lot of buzz. In their speeches, Ralf Nolden, Klas Kalass and Daniel Molkentin presented the Enterprise Desktop KDE and provided an overview of new features in KDE 3.2. Bo Thorsen gave a talk on Kolab which was very well received. In their presentation "KOffice - The Road Ahead", David Faure, Ariya Hidayat and Lucijan Busch provided interesting details about the state and future of the KDE Office Suite. And Eva Brucherseifer demonstrated the ease of migration to the Qt multiplattform framework in her speech.
The KDE Project would like to thank Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu Siemens and Transtec for providing the booth with hardware, and Novell / SuSE, Credativ, basysKom, Froglogic, Trolltech and KDE e.V. for their support. Last but not least we'd like to congratulate the dedicated LinuxTag Organization Team on a successful event. We all look forward to meet you at LinuxTag 2005!
Photos, photos, photos: