KDE at LinuxTag 2008, Day 2 – Taking over the World

The second day at LinuxTag is over. It showed how KDE is steadily taking over the world.

Today a group of CIOs did a guided tour through the exhibition halls, and of course the icing cake was the KDE booth. There the main question was: how can KDE be interesting for such people, for companies.

And the answer was never easier than with KDE 4: through portability. The KDE 4 libs are amazing, and additionally the already existing apps on top of it are excellent programs. The key point for such people is however Kontact (which was also presented in a talk today which I unfortunately missed). Kontact provides an easy to manager group ware client compatible with a lot of different servers out there – and now it is also available on all three big platforms. This makes it possible for business people to have one central place for the configuration for all platforms while the client itself is fully integrated with the native platform look&feel.

And the most important thing is: this is not theory, it exists already. In fact, the booth of the BSI, the German Federal Office for Information Security, shows Kontact running natively on Windows and on Mac OS X. Here are three screenshots for comparison (thanks to the BSI for the Mac OS X and Windows screenshots):

Kontact on Linux.

Kontact on Mac OS X.

Kontact on Windows XP.

The versions displayed are based on the current in development KDE 4.1 libraries. But they are already working, and it is just a question of time until this becomes stable enough to use it in daily business life. This ports would not have been possible without the help of the BSI – which does support and promote Kontact and help with the development of security plugins – and also Kolab who do an amazing job in the world of group ware.

So, at the moment there is only one serious group ware client out there which runs on all three major platforms. And it does not only run there, it is natively integrated, users will immediately feel at home in them. The importance of these two facts can not be underestimated, and in the mid term more and more companies will consider Kontact – and therefore KDE – as a possible solution for their often mixed setups. And with Kontact other useful apps like Konqueror, Dolphin, Okular and others – which could again be configured at one single central point – are in reach as well.

KDE at LinuxTag 2008, Day 1 – The Beginning

These days LinuxTag 2008 is taking place in Berlin. KDE is there to show off the coolest and newest like development versions of KDE 4.1 as well as visions of the desktop/web integration. And I’m there as well, helping out and enjoying my first Linux conference.

At the LinuxTag

The LinuxTag 2008 is taking place place from May 28 till May 30 31 at the conference center in Berlin. In the past I thought about visiting the conference several times but lost track of it. However, some days ago red alert (which I know from Fedora) asked if I would like to get a community ticket (thanks, I owe you something!). Of course I said yes and immediately checked which project was in need of a helping hand. At first I thought I could help at the Fedora booth (given that I am a Fedora packager), but since they already got 24 (!) people signed up for help I decided to check the KDE page. And indeed, the KDE team welcomed a helping hand and I joined the team and helped at the booth today.

So I arrived in Berlin on Tuesday evening/night and went to the conference center in the morning next day. The KDE booth was already set up, but the booth computer wasn’t running properly. We tried to fix it, but finally gave up (via chrome graphics card, no 3D there…) and fell back to the private laptops of the others (mine doesn’t have KDE 4.x yet). Most of them were running KDE 4.1dev which gave us the opportunity to show off some of the new cool features.
And indeed there were many interested people. We’ve got questions from beginners (“What is the difference between Gnome and KDE, and how can I decide which one is better?”) up to discussion with experts for example about general possibilities of semantic cooperation between web and desktop. During the discussions I also faced a problem: how can you show off how cool KDE’s libraries are? Libraries are “invisible” and it really takes some effort to give a proper and interesting explanation to people who can hardly imagine what a computer library is.
Anyway, it was really exciting. The only sad thing was that the booth was missing a big eye-catcher like a large KDE flag or something. On the other hand, due to a lucky incident – I’ve won a drawing – we now have a giant Tux. Maybe we should try to paint it green and make it look like Konqi?

Speaking about booth setups: kudos to the Fedora project! Their booth (which is cater-cornered to KDE’s) is probably one of the most impressive community project booths at the entire LinuxTag. Some photos can be seen here. And the fact that they also show off a Fedora 9 running KDE 4 at a prominent place is also a bonus

However, of course KDE is not only represented in the form of the booth where we showed the future of tomorrow (KDE 4.1), but also in the form of presentations to show the future of next week (well, and a bit more). Aaron Seigo held today’s keynote (!) and was talking about the desktop in a Web 2.0 world. The next days there will also be talks about Kontact, PIM in general, multimedia, Nepomuk, usability, KOffice, KDE on WIndows, Amarok and so forth. Additionally, there is also not only the KDE booth, but also the Amarok booth: they show what Amarok 2 is becoming, and how it will change the way users experience music. And it will change!

Me in Berlin with KDE people: social and technical things

Besides this exhibition part there was of course a social component: I’ve met a whole bunch of new people and must admit that they are really great. It makes fun to be at the booth, to help out, to talk, to sit around, to organize together and also to go to an Indian restaurant in the evening.
Also I am now able to put names to faces and vice versa. That is very important for the social aspect of the community – and it simply makes more fun to communicate afterwards if you really know someone behind a nick name in person.

Additionally, the conference of course provides news about future technical development. Aaron for example was asked during his presentation today how KDE 4 will deal with security in case of Plasma widgets, and it turned out that there will be a gpg-sign system in a future Plasma version (maybe 4.2) with several trust levels. To give a rough idea: some Plasma widgets will be signed by KDE (highest trust), some will be by signed by third party developers you trust, some will not be signed at all. Since you can manage the gpg keys and their trust on your machine by yourself the level of security and trust also depends on yourself.

I’m looking forward to the talks of the next days. A last word, though: in case you wonder where all the cool pictures went: I had no camera and have to ask the others tomorrow if I can have some cool pictures…

Arora, a WebKit browser in Qt

The release of Qt 4.4 came along with the WebKit browser engine which could be tested with an included demo browser. This demo browser is now developed independent under the name Arora and is already, while in early development a cross platform Qt browser.

WebKit is a browser engine which was originally forked from KHTML and is now developed further by Apple, Nokia, Adobe, Trolltech and others. Up to a certain point there is also cooperation going on between KHTML and WebKit.

With Qt 4.4 WebKit is officially part of Qt, and therefore every Qt app can take advantage of WebKit (this is also true for every KDE app, but they can use KHTML for quite some time now anyway). The demo browser of Qt 4.4 was shipped with the release to show what the engine is actually capable off. Since it was already a (basically) working browser its own code repository under the name Arora. The WebKit code used is the one of Qt which is directly developd in the WebKit trunk.

The browser is currently under heavy development and is still in an early phase, so it can hardly be compared against the “old” ones like Firefox or Konqueror/KHTML. However, the browser already has a nicely working Rich Text Editor support which for example works with WordPress blogs:

Also, there special private browsing mode which makes it possible to deactivate the history and cookies just for a short time:

Besides, recently the support for flash plugins was included, and Arora can restore closed tabs. Currently planned features include the support for password store mechanisms in the form of plugins which will make it possible to connect Arora to kwalletmanager and therefore integrate it seamless with KDE – or to connect it with the Gnome keyring and integrate it with Gnome.

But it can also be seen that Arora is still in development: in the version tested on this machine there were some issues with the scroll bar and also with the line-edit field and the buttons on the Google home page:

Additionally, there are some things missing: especially web shortcuts which I really got used to should be added at some point in the future. Also, the preferences dialog does not list options which are normal for other browsers (always display tabs, always open in a new tab, etc.).

However, given that the development continues at the current speed these features should be available soon. In the long term Arora could become a real competitor to Firefox: while it is also cross platform like Firefox it could actually adapt the native design of each platform thanks to Qt. Additionally, with intelligent chosen plugins it should be easy to integrate it into the platform (password storage, favourites, desktop search, etc.). Last but not least thanks to its origins it features a much smaller memory foot print and is simply faster than Firefox.

For KDE users it could be an interesting alternative to Konqueror to have a look at WebKit and simply as a stand alone browser inside KDE.

In case you want to give Arora a first test the easiest is to run Ubuntu (probably in a virtual machine) and install the precompiled binary. Since Arora does require quite recent Qt packages it can’t be compiled in Fedora 8, and even Fedora 9 might not be sufficient at the moment.

Microsoft: good guy here, bad guy there

Recently a Microsoft director mentioned that MS Office 2007 will get native ODF support with the next Service Pack. Additionally, future versions of Office will also support ODF. While this is exciting news, at the same time Microsoft acts just like it was used to do in Romania.

Microsoft’s director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, mentioned in a recent interview with BetaNews that ODF support will be included with the next Service Pack for Microsoft Office 2007. Additionally, future versions of Microsoft Office will be shipped with ODF support right from the beginning. The support will be that strong that ODF can even be used as the standard format within Microsoft Office. The same is true for PDF support, btw.. Previous to that announcement Microsoft provided ODF support only in form of a 3rd party plugin which had to be installed manually.

While this is very good news for the ODF supporters and might give the formal a real boost in the near future, the question is how honest this announcement is. The European Union is one of the most important and most pressing factors behind many of Microsoft recent decisions to become more open. They do have quite a lot of experience with Microsoft regarding such statements – and they are usually very reserved regarding such announcements. With this announcement the EU just stated that they are generally welcome any effort towards any further interoperability, and that they will test if it really leads there.

While Microsoft tries to be more open regarding Office software formats there are again signs of the old Microsoft. A recent example is an educational software presentation event held in Cluj (Romania). According to a blog post Microsoft used its market force and the fact that they are a co-sponsor to prohibit a presentation about Free Software because it would be “unfair”.

Unfortunately the university seems to boil down to the pressure – although the university is the main sponsor of the event, which is generally about educational software and not only about Microsoft’s software. And the fact that Microsoft now says others are unfair somehow turns the world upside down, given that Microsoft in the past much too often used illegal methods for which they were sentenced several times.

There are many people out there hoping that Microsoft indeed turns into a “good” player (which means nothing more or less than using only legal tricks), but even if that is true the process will take quite some time – and that parts of the old Microsoft will stay active until the entire corporation has finished the transformation.

KDE4Daily – testing KDE 4.1 with daily updates

KDE4Daily, a virtual machine image of KDE 4 with daily updates was released for KDE 4.1. This gives anyone the opportunity to test the newest KDE 4.1 sanely inside a virtual machine.

KDE4Daily had its debut in November 2007 when SSJ announced a virtual machine image with daily updates for the still in development KDE 4. Today it was announced that once again the KDE4Daily project will provide a daily snapshot of the current KDE development in form of a virtual machine image.

The image itself is a some 660 MB large qemu image. It can be run directly within qemu, but it is also possible to transform the image into for example a VirtualBox image.

Once launched the Ubuntu based Linux starts up and simply works. It can be used to have a look at the new features of the upcoming KDE 4.1. But it can also be used to find bugs. However, in case you find a bug always state that the bug was found inside KDE4Daily – it could also be that a bug is specific to this special environment.

In any way, KDE4Daily already shows that KDE 4.1 will indeed be an appealing Desktop Environment. The following image gallery is just a random set of images I shot having a look at the virtual machine.

Logging in, starting up…

New things from the Plasma world: a new runner and a panel configuration tool.

Konqueror now offers session management and support for closed tabs.

This shows the file selector in Dolphin to select several files without the keyboard. Next to it the Gwenview diashow mode can be seen.

KDE 4.1 ships the first KDE 4 version of KDE-PIM apps. They are still not based on Akonadi, but they are at least ported to KDE 4. In other news, the KInfocenter was also ported and got a face lift.

Among the new games is Kubrick – the image speaks for itself. Marble of course got a new projection: Mercator.