KDE at FrOSCon 2006

About two weeks ago, several KDE developers gathered at FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source conference in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany. Hosted by the Computer Science department of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, the
conference also provided rooms for free software projects. One was seized by the KDE project for discussion and hacking. Additionally, representatives of the KDE project gave two talks at the official conference programs, as well as two other talks that directly related to KDE. Read on for the full report.

On Saturday, Sebastian Kügler gave a talk on KDE Marketing (subtitled: Roadmap to World Domination). The conference organisers were nice enough to postpone the talk until after the football match. Despite the late time, quite a lot people listened to Sebastian when he spoke about the recent successes of KDE in terms of marketing and what the Marketing Working Group in cooperation with KDE-Promo is heading for.

Earlier, Adrian Schröter from the openSUSE project had given an insight on the openSUSE build service which helps building packages for a lot of distributions. This might make building packages for your KDE application a breeze in the future, no matter what target distribution your users have installed.

On Sunday, KDE's Cornelius Schumacher presented a GPL'ed feature tracking tool developed by SUSE, which provides a native KDE client.

Finally, I had the honour of giving a talk on the Future of the GNU/Linux Desktop (slides, in German) which was received very well.

In the developer room, Stephan Hermann from the Kubuntu team and Volker Krause of KDE-PIM fame were busy hacking. While Volker ported KDE-PIM to D-BUS, Stephan and I discussed how to ease KDE 4 development on Kubuntu. Hold your breath, development packages will soon be available for Dapper.

On Sunday and during the social event on Saturday, I had the chance to discuss a lot of issues with Egbert Eich and Luc Verhaegen from X.org and learn about planned features in X.org 7.2 and beyond. FrOSCon was a really nice conference. The KDE team will certainly return for FrOSCon 2007 with an even larger team. Pictures of the conference can be found on their wiki.

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Comments

by Wade Olson (not verified)

And great job to those in attendance!

by Olaf Jan Schmidt (not verified)

The link to Cornelius' talk should be: http://programm.froscon.de/events/52.en.html

by Olaf Jan Schmidt (not verified)

And the link to Daniel's is empty.

by Daniel Molkentin (not verified)

Thanks, both fixed.

by jum (not verified)

What options are there to produce self-running presentations, screen videos under Linux. We don't have a mature Flash tool but I feel that these presentations are quite useful, the future of screenshots so to speak and very good for online tutorials.

More stuff like http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/2075

by Corbin (not verified)

Theres ScreenKast (which records in some video format, I'm not sure which): http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=41938

Theres also KDExecutor (doesn't make a 'video' per se, but can be used to record then layer play back event in an application): http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=14018

Theres also others like XVidCap and vnc2flash (I think thats the name of it).

by Bram Biesbrouck (not verified)

Funny you mention those tutorials, this is exactly what I'm aiming at with ScreenKast and captorials.com.
Have a look: http://captorials.com

by Carsten Niehaus (not verified)

I guess that means DBus 0.62 (ar better), CMake 2.4.2 and something like qt-copy (or a patched Qt 4.2tp) as binaries? That would be really cool because keeping all of them uptodate takes *ages* on my 5 years old hardware. Perhaps sh/ will even build a regular kdelibs4_snapshot.deb?

by Tagesschau (not verified)

openSUSE has a KDE 4 toolchain for SUSE Linux and other other distros since some time ...

http://software.opensuse.org/download/KDE:/KDE4/

Last time I tried to build SVN on kubuntu I ran into conflicts with $PATH. IIRC, it was because the kubuntu kde binaries were placed into /usr/bin and even if I built svn with --prefix /some/other/path, made sure $KDEDIRS, $QTDIR, and friends were correct, some conflicts persisted. I guess, I'll have to give it another try now. :)

by Itchy (not verified)

The openSuse build server, I would like to know more about it. What does it mean: "distributions", SuSE only or other plattforms as well??

by Elijah Lofgren (not verified)

Looking at http://de.opensuse.org/Build_Service it looks like it is currenlty for the following distros:
* Debian Etch
* Fedora Core 4 & 5
* Mandriva 2006
* SUSE Linux 10.0 & 10.1 Factory