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Project: Linux In conversation with Martin Konold
By Mayank Sarup <Mayank@freeos.com>
How did you get started on KDE? It was quite simple actually. I was completing my thesis and was wondering what I could next. That's when I met Matthais Etterich, who showed me QT. It was at 0.97, I think. We instantly liked what we saw. At that time we also felt that Linux required a good desktop environment. There was CDE, but that was commercial and it was also based on Motif. I think Red Hat released a commercial version that included CDE, but I wasn't able to see it. We thought we could do better and so we decided to start on KDE. Did the fact that QT was not GPL ever stop you? Never. We saw QT and we knew how good it was. We just put out KDE. We're not forcing anyone to use it. We just put it out there. If you don't want to use it, that's ok. How many people were part of the original team? When we decided to the start the project, Matthais put out an announcement on comp.os.linux.announce and the LyX mailing list. I setup a mailing list. We got about 10 people to subscribe in the first week. Most of them were just watchers and not actual developers. Mark Donaghue, who ported Xdvi to Linux, was one of the firsts. There was even an Indian who joined us very early on, Khalid Mohamed, and he's still there with us. How is the relationship between Gnome and KDE developers? Very good. There is quite a lot of exchange between the developers. It felt very good to meet and talk to Michael Meeks (of Ximian GNOME) here, at Bang!inux. Generally, the users of these desktop environments are more vocal. Are you worried about GNOME? No. We're way ahead of them. When GTK 2.0 is released sometime this year, they'll reach where we were, at version 1.4. QT 3 is going to come out later this year and that will take us even further. The GNOME developers are working on a native port of Open Office. Why aren't the KDE guys doing the same? We could do that but we don't want to. We have among the KDE developers, Khalid Mohamed, who has worked extensively on StarOffice. He was the one who ported StarOffice to Linux. According to him, StarOffice comes with a lot of excess baggage. There is a huge amount of legacy code in there, some even going back to the DOS days. Essentially, the code is just too big and unwieldy to be worked on. So, we're concentrating on the KOffice suite of applications, which are looking quite good. KDE has suddenly moved into a very aggressive release schedule. 2 came out in October. 2.01 in January and 2.1 just came out. Comment. Well, 2 took a long time in coming because there was a lot that was new in the 2.0 release. But now that 2.0 has been released, we've moved on to squashing bugs. Since there aren't that many bugs, you will soon see us getting a lot faster. Our idea was to first work on the desktop, give people a good desktop environment and then look at the applications. Now that the new release is out and relatively bug free, you're going to see us get a lot more of the applications. So, expect to see faster releases from KDE. Did the release of QT as GPL help get more developers into KDE? Not really. What really helped us, was the release of KDE 2.0 after which, there has been a tremendous amount of interest in programming for KDE. Also, people telling us on the mailing lists that QT was bad because it was not GPL, has decreased. But we never listened to them anyway. We're not big fans of desktop environments because they tend to be slow. We just prefer to use Windowmaker because it loads so fast. You start it and it's on screen. What have you to say? Windowmaker is just a window manager, whereas KDE is a desktop environment. A desktop environment offers you a lot more than a Windowmanager would. A desktop environment will address a lot more issues -- drag-drop, a clipboard and supporting applications. What's good about KDE? KDE/embedded. Right now KDE has been developed to the level that we don't require X anymore. This was demonstrated at LinuxWorld. But, X has some nice features like remote displays that make it very useful. The next release 2.1.1 will bring anti-aliased fonts. We've got very good support for Internationalization. We now have bi-directional text support. Say you are writing in Arabic, which is written from right to left, you can in between switch to another language, which is written from left to right. Audio support has been improved. We've got this new sound daemon, which adds network transparency. With X you can just export displays. This sound daemon allows you to export the sound too. If you find that the sound from an application is breaking up, you can run it with real-time priority. The GUI looks much better. You can now even use GTK themes instead of the KDE themes. Keyboard navigation has been improved and is quite effective too. There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts around. Konqueror is really good. It supports Netscape plugins. Java is supported too. It's extremely standards compliant. When we started out with Konqueror, people questioned our decision. They questioned that Mozilla would be out soon why then, were we building our own browser. Well, it's been two years and look where Mozilla is. A few days after the above interview, Martin Konold visited the FreeOS office for an informal talk with some developers, the local LUG and members of the FreeOS team. Following are few interesting quotes from the conversation. "Always document your code. At KDE, we have a very strict rule about this. We don't care how good your code is. If you don't document the code, your code will not get in" "Write your code to be fast and optimized right now. Don't wait for processor speeds to increase. Look at java. Everyone predicted that Java performance would be much faster as processor speed increase. But, in spite of the processor speeds, java code still runs slowly" "Developers, please take care of your hands. I have one suggestion for you. Any time your hands start hurting, move away, take a pen and paper and spend some time conceptualizing your code." "We believe that when you are working with objects, the best way to go about it is object-oriented programming. That is why we have chosen c++." "Borrowing ideas. We always keep a look out at other environments and grab what we like. We say, "hey! that looks good, let's put it in."
Other articles by Mayank Sarup
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Number of Times Rated: [ 466 ]
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