KDE on Unix and other platforms

KDE 4 is now also available for FreeBSD starting with the marvelous KDE 4.1. The original commit from the FreeBSD/KDE team says 'The KDE FreeBSD team is proud to announce the release of KDE 4.1.0 for FreeBSD'. KDE 4 will be installed into a custom prefix ${LOCALBASE}/kde4 so KDE 4 and KDE 3 can co-exist. For sound to work, it is necessary to have dbus and hal enabled
in your system. Please see the respective documentation on how

A VMware Player image of KDE 3.5.4 with KOffice 1.5.2 running on SUSE Linux 10.1 is now available. The image is fully functional and can be upgraded and tweaked as needed.

InQub Ltd offers personal remote KDE desktops on Kubuntu using NoMachine's NX technology for bandwidth savings and connection encryption for a small monthly charge. Each account is comes with 1 GB of home directory storage and is customisable by the respective user.

Stephan Binner has released a VMware Player image of KDE 3.5 with KOffice running on SUSE Linux 10. The image is fully functional and can be upgraded and tweaked as needed. The version of VMware necessary to run it can be downloaded for free.

Turkish distribution Pardus, one of the first GNU/Linux distributions to feature KDE 3.5 as its desktop, has announced its first stable release. All Pardus specific desktop applications, including the installer and package manager are developed using the powerful KDE and Qt libraries. KDE was chosen to be the default desktop environment for its extendability and close integration of applications.

DesktopBSD is a custom FreeBSD-based desktop focussed on stability, usability and simplicity. In developing an easy to use desktop operating system, DesktopBSD has chosen to use KDE. Screenshots showing the desktop tools in action are available.

Their website FAQ further explains the choice of KDE:

KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled, packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris platform. The work has been mainly done by our friend Stefan Teleman. While KDE is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot of patches.

Two distinct efforts with the goal of making KDE applications run on MS Windows are progressing: The Qt 3/Windows Free Edition project announced a binary release of their native Win32 port of the GPL'ed Qt 3.3.4/X11 sources.

Following the heels of the successful Kubuntu effort, PC-BSD was created to offer both home and business desktop users a solid alternative to other systems available. PC-BSD aims to be user-friendly, especially in the area of software installation and management. Of course PC-BSD comes with a nice graphical installer which can also be used by other Free-BSD users to install the OS in a modern fashion.

Available for memory sticks on Windows or Linux, the new release KDE-PIM/Platform independent lets you carry around your favourite KDE applications and your personal data in the palm of your hand. This device independent software can import your data directly from Outlook and sync it with KDE-PIM running on other computers.