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And some sort of marketing strategy. Especially finished FOSS.
KDE was matured, by just about all metrics. Konqueror was one of the most brilliant pieces of software, unmatched in utility and power, both as a filemanager and as a browser. They had to fiddle with it and take 5 steps back with dolphin.

Same goes for quite a few other components. Instead of constantly rehawling everything, they should iterate and replace dated but working components only when the new thing is truly finished and a worthy replacement. Branding and marketing is also all over the place. There's this new shiny flat design with plasma and Kubuntu and simular project, but the logos, icons and websites of some appstacks and toolkits go back to the year 2000.

Just compare these four websites to see what I mean. In my opinion that says everthing about the state of KDE and quite a few other software projects. Look at the Gnome disaster a few years back. A little marketing and brand management and all would have loved the new strategy. Gnome did a half-assed thing - at least that was the perception and perception is everything - and all hell broke lose and the Gnome project fragmented beyond repair. Mate, Cinamon, Evolution, Whatnot. ... That's a shame.

People are fed up of fussing about with new totally redone software packages that break existing workflows and intoduce new ones that are only half finished. Especially the FOSS experts.

KDE isn't dead, but if they are interested in gaining traction, they need to offer a compelling system and present it consistently. That doesn't even mean they need to develop much - a brand strategy and a working consistent and complete distro and the will to keep it easy to install and up and running would be enough. KDE is good enough to take it from there.

Bottom line: It's like I've said before - "It's called marketing." FOSS projects need to learn the neccessity of that, or else they will die of lack of attention, users and finally maintainers.

My 2 cents.

OK. I haven't really used it. But I always plan to have a look. http://www.kexi-project.org/

While kexi is not currently available for Windows (though apparently it does build on Windows), in the meantime you could run it in a Ubuntu vm inside Virtualbox, until it is available again in Windows. When it is, you can download it from http://www.kogmbh.com/download...

do they include any database like Access?

Yes: http://kexi-project.org/

Kexi didn't make sense - why not re-use the term dBase

Because dBase is still used and trademarked: http://www.dbase.com/

But Krita and Karbon both need to be renamed

Karbon was just renamed -- from Karbon14. Any other renames won't happen.

Is Kexi the equivalent of Access?

Are you capable of reading the Kexi website? http://kexi-project.org/

if Calligra sits on top of KDE, why does it need different versions for Linux and BSD?

You must confuse KDE with some sort of VM like Java -- which KDE never was and probably never will be.

Speaking of which, while they currently offer it as a tarball, I'd like them to at some point offer it in .deb, .pbi, .ports, .rpm and other popular package managers.

Why? The Linux distributor should just ship the latest Calligra release in its repos.

Well, MS Access is clearly the most dangerous Weapon of Mass Data corruption in corporate IT. And no, I don't mean the JET engine that has year long data corruption bugs, I'm thinking more about the application layer data corruption that happens when people (not all, but MS Access has certainly the highest percentage of users that fit) that have no idea about databases start manipulate data, create db schemas without even rudimentary understanding of relational databases, ...

OTOH, as the joke about the lawyer goes ("son, the mandate you solved today, has paid for your law degree and that of your elder brothers"), databases done by end users, when they gain popularity usually end up needing cleaning up from somebody who knows databases a little bit better, hence usually causing some freelancing contracts. :)

But if you really want to give WMDs to endusers:

http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.php@KexiFAQ.html

There is this:
http://www.kexi-project.org/

It's based on Qt/KDE, can use SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL as the back end, and can be scripted in python or ruby. Runs on Linux, MacOS, Windows.

I don't either, but he might take a look at kexi http://www.kexi-project.org/...

How about Kexi? It is not clear that you want database for programming, so something like MS Access might help. http://www.kexi-project.org/

There are quite a few of the usual ideas listed here (Spreadsheet, Buzhug, get a better Editor, etc.). However I second those that suggestes Kexi, as it also has a flatfile DB built in (I just checked). You can build your own forms with it and have your own, custom single table Database App up and running in minutes.

Kexi is the way to go, and you'll even know your way around a neat DB frontend when you need to connect to some SQL persistance later some time.

Try Kexi (http://kexi-project.org) it has features like strong CSV support, MS Access import, and SQLite is the default engine. It's LGPL, no Java and started long before OO Base.

Kexi should be able to hande that pretty easily, and can even create a nice form for the data entry:
http://www.kexi-project.org/

Check out KDE's Kexi

Kexi is a Free/Libre and Open-Source integrated data management application, a long awaited Open Source competitor for products like Microsoft Access. Kexi can be used for creating database schemas, inserting data, performing queries, and processing data. Forms can be created to provide a custom interface to your data. All database objects - tables, queries and forms - are stored in the relational database, making it easy to share data and design.

I also like the (commercial) Maestro tools

OLE2 filez:
OOO - http://www.openoffice.org/ - OSS Office
POI - http://poi.apache.org/ - Java API To Access Microsoft Format Files

MS Access:
Jackcess - http://jackcess.sourceforge.net/changes-report.html#a1.1.11- Jackcess is a pure Java library for reading from and writing to MS Access databases.
http://www.kexi-project.org/

There are other alternatives and you can vote with your pocket
and use them

you can migrate mdb to firebird or sqlite or postgres and then send them the feedback
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=openoffice%20firebird&
http://www.firebirdsql.org/manual/migration-mssql.html
http://kexi-project.org/about.html

opensource projects accept the security patches that are created

Kexi: http://www.kexi-project.org/

http://kexi-project.org/

"Kexi is considered as a long awaited Open Source competitor for Microsoft Access, FileMaker and Oracle Forms. Its development is motivated by the lack of Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools for database systems that are sufficiently powerful, inexpensive, open standards driven and portable across many operating systems and hardware platforms."

Kexi reads Microsoft Access databases.

See more at http://www.kexi-project.org/wiki/wikiview/index.ph p?MDBDriver

OpenOffice.org Base reads Access too:
http://dba.openoffice.org/ (MDB tools for Linux)

Oh, and so does Knoda::
http://www.knoda.org/

I'm sure that there are more apps that can read Access files. I think the Access functionality is done by mdbtools.

I've also used MS Access 2000 on Wine, and it worked quite well. I have to disagree with you about emulation: If you want to run GNU/Linux, and need one or few Win32 applications running on it, why not run them on Wine?

So not a big issue IMHO :)

Eleknader

Kexi can already work under Windows. http://www.kexi-project.org/about.html Give it time...

http://www.kexi-project.org/screenshots.html/ Kexi is free and it runs on both linux and windows. It also works great with sqlite and mysql. There's also something called rekall but I'm not sure it's free on windows and isn't as actively developed as Kexi is.

Rekall is a very mature replacement for MS Access. It was commercial software once but has been since been open sourced. I am not sure whether it can import Access files yet - OTOH the data itself would be easy to import.

And then there is also Kexi, which looks very promising and will be part of the next KOffice release.

The way policies are displayed and edited is terrible - it's just one step up from the the registry. I know because I use them at work, and I get frustrated every time I have to go in there and find some setting.

I agree, Linux could do with some more GUI management tools. These are the sorts of things I believe you'll see coming out of Novell and others within the next year or so. However, "the masses" are not interested in these management tools - as long as they can change a few settings on their own home/office desktop, and they can find things in there easily, then they'll be happy. It's the administrators who need these tools.

Database frontend: for KDE, it's coming, and it's called Kexi. It looks pretty good so far. For groupware, there's Kontact.

For `typical' users this may look like vaporware indeed, so we've added the info in the announcement:

Kexi Beta 2 is a Preview Release, mostly for developers, to show that there is active development.

--
regards & see you later on /.

Jaroslaw Staniek
Kexi Team

It is an open source program similar to Microsoft Access. It works with MySQL too. It even runs on Windows.

This is an absolute killer app. I haven't used this or kexi but comparing the 2 superficially:

Kexi runs on win32 also, and designed to eventually use sql lite so it will fit on PDAs. Its screenshots look a bit more polished, but apparently uses c++ as scripting language.

Rekall (beta) has macros, easier scripting, also a beta windows version (free?).

Is one project more advanced than the other? more features?

Its a killer app because you can design many apps quicker. Optionally focusing just on a general core, but let the user extend it easily with custom features or special info requirements. Small business consulting obviously too. All without runtime fees, or MS tax per user. With PDA's already hitting late 90s processing power, giving them 90s computing model apps is a big deal.

Rekall is *NOT* a database. Also, it *IS* something we need (and didn't have previously). At least, it's something *I* need (and have wanted for a long time).

If you've ever used FileMaker Pro on the Mac or Windows you know we're missing something like this in Linux. Rekall seems to be the answer (since KOffice's Kexi Project is still getting off the ground). Only it's a far superior solution since you can pick & choose which back-end database(s) you want to use (and it's free now!).

Hell, there's even a version of Rekall for embedded Linux!

What Rekall provides that your typical PHP/MySQL solution doesn't, is real-time scripting of events. Sure, you can write some badass javascript that does server-side lookups of info, but that takes a lot of time and isn't very easy to change. With Rekall you can, for instance, create a database of customers. When you type in "Bob Smith" it can auto-fill in the rest of Bob's info (like phone number, address, etc). I know from first hand experience that this is a very difficult thing to do with a web-based form.

Also, an open-source Rekall has the potential to replace things like Remedy, Vantive, Peoplesoft, and other big-name ECRM systems.

Not to mention the fact that Rekall is completely cross-platform.