Report: KDE at Linux Bangalore 2003

Last week I represented our illustrious desktop environment project at
the big Linux Bangalore
conference in, well, Bangalore. This pleasant city is located in India's
southern state of Karnataka and hosts -- perhaps as a side-effect of it
being the computing capital of the nation -- the largest and most active
free software community in the country.

I flew to Bangalore from Delhi on the morning of the first with the clever
and amiable Naba Kumar, whose only major failing is that he's a GNOME guy
(developer of Anjuta; I professed a plan to get him to hack on KDevelop
instead but that has not yet reached fruition). By the evening of that
day I had set up the larger-than-expected KDE booth (I was expecting
more like a KDE stall) with two provided computers and my laptop running
a post-Rudi CVS of KDE and KOffice.

The conference began on the second, during which I did my first talk
(on KDE 3.2) and spent the rest of the day at the booth talking
about KDE and answering questions. Since I had last attended the first LB in 2001, two
changes were immediately apparent - the conference had grown immensely,
and the composition of attendees had diversified from interested tech
students to IT professionals and government agencies actually using
free software in their daily operations. A lot of people dropped by the
booth and had a chat or played around with KDE, and their knowledge of
KDE was highly varied.

One thing I've noticed is that in India, Linux is synonymous with Red
Hat simply because they seem to be the only distribution to have put
serious effort into this market so far. Almost all the demo machines
at the conf were running it, and most people's KDE experiences seem to
be from Red Hat too. Not such a great thing, especially as downloading
software off the net is hard due to the low availability of broadband. I
hadn't really anticipated this, so at the conf itself I spent quite a bit
of time burning and giving away CDs with whatever KDE sources happened
to be on my laptop at the time. It's going to be very important to get
good KDE packages onto the next few Fedora releases, as its quite hard
to even find other distributions for sale.

I must admit my KDE 3.2 talk was not particularly inspired, I blame the
flu and some unrehearsed demos. There were a lot of good questions though
so at least they were listening. My Rapid Applications with KDE talk
on the second day went a lot better (I got a bit more sleep and swallowed
a lot of pills that have likely nullified my stomach lining). It became
Rapidly Clear through a show of hands that most people there weren't
much aware of how KDE works, so most of the talk was spent explaining
KDE internals, DCOP, Qt Designer etc.

The folks representing the IndLinux
project were at a booth close by and were demonstrating their l10n efforts
for Indian languages. Qt only added decent support for Indian scripts in
2.3, so while these guys had some translation work already done for KDE
in Hindi, it took a day or so for them to get it set up. By the second day
of the conf they had some cool Hindi and Kannada demos at their booth and
helped set it up on one of our machines too. They had been waiting for the
3.2 string freeze, so translation work should pick up serious steam soon.

Overall, an eye-opener of a trip for me personally, and a fairly useful
one for KDE. It was really great to meet so many free software folks and
there was definitely a spark in the community that wasn't there two years
ago. Mark my words -- there is going to be a sudden and large influx of
Indian names in free software development within the next six months.

I returned to Delhi a few days after the conf ended, fitting in a bit of
wandering around Bangalore and a day trip to Mysore with the inspiring
Harald Welte.

I'll end with a note of thanks: my brother Giriraj for preparation and
printing of booth artwork, the handful of volunteers who helped out at
the booth totally off the cuff, the IndLinux and Mahiti folks for cool
demos and the offer of machines, and the conf organisers for their good
humour and help beyond the call of reasonable duty -- I hope to be back
next year.