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Deep Inside the K Desktop Environment
Lemmingue writes "Ars Technica published a very good article about the KDE architecture. It's a essential read for anyone wondering how Konqueror can open documents in the same window or just understand the license issues regarding the Qt use.
The article describes most of the technologies behind the KDE (Qt, KParts) and how the project is organized.
The article is full of links, screenshots and diagrams."
And it makes to to slashdot only four months late! Unless Ars made a stealth update I'm not aware of?
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky
The freeversion of Qt is under two licenses: the GPL and the QPL. While most people have a rough idea about the GPL most people don't know about the QPL, Like you for example.
100% Crunchier
The idea is to have software the integrates and takes advantage of everything the kde environment has to offer. There are two ways of doing this. 1. Pull your hair out trying to cajole existing applications originally created off of an entirely different framework, to take some, limited advantage of what kde has to offer. 2. Start from scratch with an environment that makes fast development very easy and very quick, without massive quantities of hair left in your hands.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
Slashdot posted it when it came out.
I'm convinced--the editors absolutely do not read Slashdot. The last straw was last week when Michael duped a story from three hours earlier that was still on the front page.
Actually Konqueror/KHTML and Kontact are not really reinventing the wheel.
;) ), and second, everybody is reinventing the wheel all the time anyway, so what?
The work on KDE's filemanager and HTML engine dates back to the days when the only usable *cough* browser was Netscape4.x and Mozilla seemed only like a great failure.
Kontact is basically an aggregation of long time existing KDE applications like KMail, KNode, KNotes etc., pre-dating e.g. Evolution.
That said, this question about reinventing the wheel is stupid anyway. First, there are many things about KDE that KDE has had first (like, the first usable Linux GUI
How does 'kopete' relate to 'chat' or 'instant messaging'? How does 'Konqueror' relate to 'browsing the web'? How does 'Apollon' apply to p2p?
I suppose one way of figuring this out would be that the default menu entries for these apps clearly state what they do.
Kopete is found under taskmenu--internet--Instant Messaging (Kopete). Konqueror is lister as "Web Browser (Konqueror)"... etc.
I can't say that I ever had troubles finding the right apps in KDE, even when I was a total noob.
"Qt is GPLed, and as such, prevents FOSS developers from using any OSS licenses that are not compatible with the GPL. Ironically enough, XFree86's license is not compatible with the GPL, and hence XFree86 could not include a Qt configuration utility."
Your first statement is wrong. Should I bother reading the rest?
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/license_gp l.html#q19
http://www.trolltech.com/developer/faqs/license_gp l.html#q114
Believe it or not, our article web pages are statically served. It may be low-tech, but it's cheap, scalable (for our volume of output), and the server can take a licking and keep on ticking. So the server doesn't even bat an eye at the Slashdot crowd. Now when a major Mac article comes out and the entire online Mac community is trying to load the page at the same time... well, that's the one time when we're maybe thankful for Apple's small market share :0)
The news on the front page, on the other hand, is served dynamically by a CMS.
Senior CPU Editor | Ars Technica | http://arstechnica.com/
IMHO, the best theme for KDE is plastic but almost all themes are "low-impact". Only a few used to use fancy ways to render their widgets, I don't know if any survive.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
For easy eye-candy setting, run kpersonalizer (Alt+F2 and type kpersonalizer, hit enter) and turn everything off, though you can perhaps leave font anti aliasing on.
.NET-style (which is the fastest).
Style-wise, if turning off the eye-candy doesn't suffice, choose either one of the "Light styles" or the
Version-wise, if Mandrake 10 doesn't include it. upgrade to the latest KDE 3.2. KDE has experienced continual speed improvements since the release of 3.0.
Last but not least, RAM is the key. I had KDE running with on a rather slow box, too (P3-450) and found that more RAM works wonders. For KDE and KDE-based apps, 128MB should suffice - but be aware the Mozilla and OpenOffice have a rather big memory-footprint, so if you plan to use those regularly alongside KDE, go 256. No amount of style/eye-candy tweaking will help you if your PC doesn't have enough main memory.
Wrong. KDE libs are LGPL, only apps are GPL.