Interviews

Dirk Hohndel

Dirk Hohndel will be the opening keynote speaker at this summer's Desktop Summit in Berlin, 6th - 12th August.

As a hacker-turned-businessman, Hohndel brings a business perspective of free software to the Desktop Summit. Currently Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel, Hohndel will talk about the role that large companies play in open source, and how the open source community can work effectively with them.

Hohndel has been an active developer and contributor in the Linux space since its earliest days, and has worked professionally in the SuSE and XFree86 projects. Still an active contributor in many open source projects and organizations, Hohndel joined Intel in 2001.

William Carlson talked with Dirk about his background and what he's currently working on. Read the full interview on the Desktop Summit website.

Claire Rowland

Claire Rowland, user experience guru, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer's Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.

Claire is Head of Research for Fjord London, an international digital service design agency and has worked extensively in user experience research and design. Recently her focus has been on a shift in user experience from the desktop toward services delivered through multiple platforms of widely differing form factors and the cloud. Her research and recommendations relate to what this shift means for what users expect from their devices, and what effective design, across platforms and the cloud, looks like. She also addresses what users increasingly care about the most, and what this might mean for Operating System design.

William Carlson talked with Claire to find out more about her and her work. Read the full interview on the Desktop Summit website.

Thomas Thwaite, designer and technologist, will be a featured keynote speaker at this summer's Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin.

Thomas is perhaps best known through his Toaster Project. The Toaster Project was an attempt to build a toaster from raw, self-mined materials. The project exposed the complexity of seemingly simple and everyday technology. It leaves us to wonder how technology will change our lives in the future, and shows how we all need others to get even simple products.

William Carlson contacted Thomas to ask him about his projects, his views on technology and what makes him tick. Read the full interview on the Desktop Summit website.

Many scientists use the LaTeX typesetting system as the preferred way to write publications. Among the various widely used add-ons, one special mention is the TikZ language, a powerful extension which is used to create publication-quality figures. Of course, like LaTeX, it takes its time to learn. The good news is that, like with LaTeX there is KDE software to fill in this gap: KTikZ, a graphical front-end to TikZ.

As part of the KDE Science series, Luca Beltrame interviewed KtikZ's developers: Florian Hackenberger and Glad Deschrijver.

After investigating the work being done on KBibTeX a few months ago, we turn our attention to Kile, KDE's LaTeX and TeX editor. LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system built on top of the typesetting system TeX. It is frequently used for scientific publications as an alternative to word processors.

There is no stable Platform 4 version of Kile yet, but beta releases are already available and a stable release is not far away. Alexander van Loon took the opportunity to ask Michel Ludwig how the next version of Kile is shaping up. At this moment, Michel is the sole developer working on Kile.

Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro has done an interview for People Behind KDE. He discusses his work on KDE Platform 4.5 and how he organises (or not) his busy week, "At the end of the week I don't know what I did on Monday". He reveals where his inspiration for artwork comes from, how to become an artist and the secret to design success, "First and most important is imagination".

Back in June, KDE e.V. launched its individual supporting membership program, asking everyone to Join the Game.

There are many good reasons to support KDE with a regular financial contribution - it enables KDE e.V. to have a predictable and stable income. That can be used to plan support for contributors and events that help speed up development of KDE software, enhance our promotion efforts and help grow our community. However, our contributors and users are scattered throughout the world and have many different backgrounds and their reasons for contributing are likely to be just as diverse. We caught up with our 125th supporting member, Paul Eggleton to ask him why he Joined the Game.

Antonis Tsiapaliokas

In late 2009, Antonis Tsiapaliokas had his first contact with Linux. At that time, he had just started learning the C programming language and he was mostly unfamiliar with KDE software. Less than two years later, he just made his first code contributions to KDE software.

Seasoned KDE developer Tomaz Canabrava, who helped Antonis develop his programming skills, asked him why he chose to contribute to KDE. Read on to find out more on how Antonis became a KDE developer.

Ever wondered who is behind anonsvn.kde.org? Want to know what drives a person to provide that service to KDE for years and years? Martin Eisenhardt will tell you in a Behind KDE interview this week. Even now he is setting up one of the first anongit.kde.org mirrors, which will be live later this week! Read the interview at Behind KDE.

While they are not busy doing (crazy) research, most scientists do a lot of technical writing: papers, presentations, posters, reports. Such writing is usually accompanied by large number of references; managing them by hand can be tedious and long. That is why scientists use bibliography managers. In the FOSS world, a popular choice is BibTeX, a complement to the LaTeX typesetting system. Along with BibTeX, front-ends are used to simplify addition, modification and removal of bibliography.

One of the best known KDE BibTeX frontends is KBibTeX, developed by Thomas Fischer. KBibTeX sports many interesting features, including handy integration with Kile, an integrated editor for LaTeX built on the KDE Platform. KBibTeX is built on KDE 3.5; a port to KDE Platform 4 is in progress.

Luca Beltrame took the opportunity to ask Thomas about KBibTeX, the KDE Platform, science and KDE. Read on for his thoughts and to find out what the KDE Science team can do for you.