aKademy Interview: Developers From Kalyxo Project

At aKademy a talk about Kalyxo was given by Kévin Ottens and Peter Rockai. Curious what this effort is all about we got in touch with the Kévin and Peter and they explained it all.

Please introduce yourself and what's your role in KDE project

Kévin Ottens: My name is Kévin Ottens (known as ervin on IRC). I'm working mostly around the ioslaves in KDE (lately the new trash:/ and filesystems:/ ioslaves). I also made some bugfixing and improvements to Konqueror and worked on fuse-kio which is now hosted on freedesktop.org.

Peter Rockai: My name is Peter Rockai (known as mornfall on IRC). I work on Kapture which is an APT fronted for KDE. I have lightly touched kwin in the past (and plan to revisit it soon). Other KDE related activities are fixing bugs from time to time or implement small features here and there as I see fit.

At aKademy you guys did a talk about a project called Kalyxo. What is this project all about?

Kévin Ottens: The primary focus is on creating and bringing innovative technology to the desktop user. [To make the desktop experience smooth for the user, we are working on integration projects as an important part of our mission.] We focus on several areas, from desktop integration (among various toolkits and environments like GTK and Qt) to system integration, where KDE integrates seamlessly with hardware and other lower level features of the system.

How do you envision this system and desktop integration?

Peter Rockai: In the ideal case, the user would not need to worry about having GTK and Qt applications on his desktop. The big part of this is the KIO-fuse bridge, which enables usage KDE network-transparency in non-KDE applications. If implemented properly within the system (we are working on it), it should be possible to edit images with Gimp over ftp without any hurdles (just like you can edit text with Kate now). Same for OpenOffice.org and other 3rd party applications.

Kévin Ottens: We're working on the common look and feel too, and that's why we package the qt-gtk-engine for the Debian users. But the real challenge is in the system integration, so that things work seamlessly from the user point of view.

<p>The future filesystems:/ ioslave is a part of this plan it will replace the old 
devices:/ ioslave and go even further. We will introduce a way to do more guessing for 
devices on supported platforms. This way KDE will still be portable which is a big plus of the project.
But we can provide extra functionality on specific platforms like Linux.</p>

<p>Since we will package some specific hotplug scripts for Kalyxo, we'll ensure that this 
integration will work even better for Debian. </p>

Peter Rockai: On another front of system integration, we are trying to close the gap between the underlying system and its UNIX-inherited configuration system and the modern user interface KDE provides. This part of effort is really specific to Debian based systems, as we need intimate knowledge of the underlying system to be able to fullfill all the criteria users expect in such software.

So Kalyxo is sort of subproject and not another distribution?

Peter Rockai: Well, there are several aspects to Kalyxo. Currently, we are mostly focusing on the augmentation of the existing system, yes. But for the future, we plan to spin off a new platform project, which should be tightly based on current, preexisting Debian technology and infrastructure.

Kévin Ottens: I would say it comes from two facts. First we're KDE developers so we contribute to it. Second the structure of the Debian project itself. As soon as you work with Debian, you're like a subpart of the project. But that does not mean we won't provides CD of course.

Is there any software or packages for people to try?

Peter Rockai: Yes, currently Kalyxo team is maintaining several KDE applications, some of them already in Debian Unstable, rest in Kalyxo archive. You can find details on the archive location on our homepage http://www.kalyxo.org. As for examples, there is aKregator, the RSS feed agregator, maintained by Pierre Habouzit in Debian Unstable.

<p>Any Debian user can already start to use <A href="http://www.kalyxo.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/KDebConf">KDebconf</A> (the KDE Debconf frontend) 
which has been developed by Kalyxo and is now provided by official Debian packages.
Mario Bensi is currently working on improving its user interface and visual appeal 
so we expect to have a new release of it ready for integrating into Debian soon. </p>

<p>Then, there is amaroK, the new media player 
you may have heard about, which is currently in unstable branch of the Kalyxo archive.</p> 

<p>Another technology you hear about much lately is NX and Kalyxo did not miss this either, 
we now provide the <A href="http://www.kalyxo.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/NoMachineNX">FreeNX</A> server in our repository. </p>

<p>Recently Pedro Jurado Maqueda joined us and maintaining Kiosktool and KGeography.
He is very interested by educational packages recently, which is a good thing for 
sharing with a project like <A href="http://www.skolelinux.org/portal/index_html">Skolelinux</A>. 
We're looking forward to cooperate with the 
Skolelinux crew in the future.</p>
 
<p>Finally we also have some more experimental packages for inhouse projects like <A href="http://www.kalyxo.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/Kapture">Kapture</A>.</p>

Are you paid to work on Kalyxo?

Kévin Ottens: As far as I know, nobody is currently paid to work on this project.

It is said that you guys are a reaction to UserLinux, the effort which Bruce Perens started. Is this true and if so can you tell me why?

Kévin Ottens: Yes, UserLinux is part of our history. We're the children of the early KDE-Debian effort (hence the name of our mailing list). With UserLinux we expected to be able to work on a well integrated platform. Unfortunately Bruce Perens chose to support only Gnome. Since then some people left this effort very disappointed.

<p>It was the dark age of the Kalyxo project and now we have this new cute name
and new plans!</p>

Peter Rockai: I have to agree with Kevin on this. The exclusion of KDE from UserLinux was pretty unfortunate event, at first. But then, we think it led to rise of Kalyxo, which we deem a good end to the whole UserLinux and KDE story.

If the Kalyxo project tries to be Debian compatible then why not join the Debian project?

Kévin Ottens: In some way we're already joining the Debian project. As I said when you work with the Debian project you're a subpart of it. But not fully joining it allows us to be a bridge between the KDE and the Debian projects hence our slogan "linking the worlds".

Peter Rockai: Another good point in refraining from being fully absorbed by Debian is the very high entry barrier for new contributors. It often takes months before your first contribution gets accepted into Debian and then usually even longer to become an official Debian Developer.

<p>We are trying to raise a more friendly and more open community in Kalyxo, to help
newbies contribute more efficiently and with more satisfactory results. By effectively
"holding their hands" while they create first packages, we let them learn by example,
instead of forcing them to read loads of technical documentation upfront. Our packaging
team will then check and upload the packages into Debian. We do not require that all
our contributors are Debian Developers, but we still encourage everyone to become one.</p>

It is rumored there is a some kind of LiveCD. If so where is this available?

Peter Rockai: At one point, yes, there was a Kalyxo LiveCD, based on credativ's distribution, made by Andreas Mueller. The iso images are currently not available though, because of intermittent server problems and server migration. We will make them available again at some point, but they are currently outdated and need more work.

What have you guys been working on at aKademy? Anything cooking?

Kévin Ottens: KDebconf got really more attention during aKademy thanks to Mario Bensi, he really made a great job on it.

<p>For me, aKademy has been a great opportunity to discuss the system integration
area with people here. Since some of them work on other distributions than Debian
it's interesting to improve the current situation and keeping the portability as
well. In most case, that mean that our design will be flexible enough to evolve
and support new technologies. Who knows which facilities the Linux kernel will
offer us in this area in a year?</p>

Peter Rockai: Yes, we met lots of people from different projects, made new acquaintances and of course had lots of fun hacking and talking with other developers. We also gave a talk about Kalyxo at the user conference. We got some positive feedback on this and a very interesting offer from a Spanish Debian-based distribution called Tuxum, with which we hope to establish close cooperation soon. During the hacking week, we spoke with few Skolelinux developers, and they support our goals and are open for cooperation. We hope to utilize much of these new contacts to good of all the involved projects.

What does the Kalyxo project need most now?

Kévin Ottens: Just like most free software projects - contributors! We want you! =) Since we work on several areas we have three kind of tasks to offer :

<ol>

 <li>Packaging new KDE related software for Debian unstable, since we
want that all the packages made by the Kalyxo project will enter Sid.
It's a strong point of our policy, and we'll try to give advice and
train you if necessary.</li>

<li>Developing the missing KDE tools for Debian. We already mentioned
KDebconf and Kapture, which would need more contributors of course.
We're planning to work on system configuration tools too, we've some
plans and early design discussed. But this is a task that will
require more developers. System configuration means parsing, which
means lot of work. </li>

<li>And soon, we expect to work on our Kalyxo platform and CD. We'll
snapshot a subset of Debian to provide it on a time based release
schedule. But those snapshots will need to be maintained for bugfixes
and security, we'll surely need help for this.</li>

</ol>