/[http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE+Community+World+Summit|aKademy] / [http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Talks+@+aKademy|Talks] / Enterprise Desktop Talk

-=From FVWM2 to Enterprise Desktop=-

Matthias Ettrich welcomes everyone and congratulates them on getting up so early.  We won't know until afterwards whether this is the best KDE conference yet but it's defiantly the longest, if we look tired it is because we've been at this for the last week.  Thanks to the Academy for the facilities and to our conference staff.  Thanks to the Blue Angel staff, hopefully their other customers will return in the future.  One of their staff said "you guys are even more up-tight that the artists from the academy", I think that was a complement.  Thanks to Eva for doing so much work for this conference.  Thanks to HP for money and laptops, IBM for money and food.  Also Linux Magazine, SuSE and Trolltech (Matthias puts hards in the air in self congratulation).

Who is not a KDE developer here?  About half the audience put there hands up.  "Great potential."

Today is Software Freedom day, this means there are lots of celebrations everywhere and tonight is a party at 7pm, we'll have food and a band, hopefully everyone will come.  Celebrations start at 5pm with a talk from Bernard from FSF Europe.  Everyone should go to an FSF talk because there are important reasons why we are doing this besides the fun of hacking.

Chris is an old KDE guy with us from almost the start.  You know him from SuSE and has promoted KDE within SuSE, making KDE the preferred, default (and hopefully one and only) desktop.

!!!Chris Schlaeger, Vice President of Research and Development at SuSE

With this talk he started with one of their standard presentations and removed all the marketing slides.  Then had to start from scratch.

When he got involved the world looked like this - screenshot of clunky FVWM window.  The real geeks used TWM or no window manager at all, many used the text console over this graphical stuff.  At the time he was general manager (and sysadmin) or a small 10 person startup.  He ran Solaris machines which had CDE, they did simulation programmes but whenever someone ran CDE there was no memory left.  In 1996 he saw the great e-mail from Matthais and a year later tried the CVS and liked it not least because it didn't use all the memory on the machines.

Here we see the FVWM equivalent to KControl, the vi editor.  You can also use emacs.  Finding things is about as easy as with KControl.  Xeyes embedded in the panel increases the coolness factor.  The clock can not be embedded so runs outside the panel.  SuSE continued to develop FVWM2 for some time, it was a lot nicer than FVWM3.

People around when he got started may remember his commit which broke the toolbar handling.  He met many developers after that.

Then there was the KDE 2 meeting.  He was asked to join SuSE, he decided to agree when they mentioned there would be a new version of Yast based on Qt which made him think that company had a future.  He joined and took over the job of director of development.  Now the desktop has been improved to look like this - screenshot of SuSE 9.1 default setup with Konqueror and shineyness.  Now Linux, including on the desktop, is becoming mainstream.

Graph of users with skills verses number of users, lots of users have average skills with a smaller number at either end having no or lots of skills.  SuSE professional is aimed at the smallish number of highly skilled users, developers and administrators.  They have also looked at the low skill users who just want to browse the web, check e-mail and use office tools, SuSE Personal is aimed at that.  Now they want to expand into the centre where most users are.  The biggest hurdle is that these people have lots of software (more than many can afford to buy) and not all of it runs on Linux.  In a business however you can find out the applications used and find equivalents.  Novell Desktop product will be aimed at this.  

Challenges are interoperability (it has to play with existing setups), usability, applications, administration especially in the enterprise market.

Zero configuration helps with this, SuSE has that for devices plugged in, automatic IP assignment, they are looking at ways of scanning the network for services such as shared files.  Dynamic resource access rights management, if you put in a CD with your photos on it you don't want other users to be able to log in and see your photos.

Screenshot of SLP which can advertise services and pick them up.  Screenshot of Kopete with a conversation with Will Stephenson saying he's already completed the groupwise protocol (he hasn't but is working on this now thanks to SuSE).  Kontact part KOrganiser has been extended to talk to Groupwise.  Also SuSE Linux Open Exchange server.

Challenges of interoperability are NTFS writing support, proprietary file formats (Samba and OpenOffice) and integrated OS and desktop.

Usability means offering an easy learning curve from Windows and MacOS.  It must look at feel similar to these two but does not mean we have to copy it but we should look at how they do things, only if we consider it a bad solution should we change that.  One example is the application menu.  These used to be made by an m4 macro script by SuSE, that was painful.  If you only have one e-mail client installed it will be directly in the Internet menu, if you have more than one application there will be an E-mail submenu with both applications giving both their names.  The standard menus means m4 macro scripts have dropped out of service.

Every application should support the password manager KWallet.  KDE is well ahead here.  SuSE are trying to integrate this into the network with passwords stored on the network.

Challenges, KDE needs a style guide, we need less toolkits so don't use Motif or Java toolkits.  More common infrastructure needs to be worked on, especially with Gnome who aren't going away.  Accessibility is needed, this will be done with Qt4.  Complexity needs to be reduced but without reducing functionality.

Applications mean finding equivalents.  OpenOffice.org replaces MS Office for most people, parts are still missing, Sun and also Novell and others are working on that.  List of applications, MS Office->OpenOffice, Outlook ->Kontact, Messengers->Kopete, MS Studio->KDevelop, IE->Konqeror & Mozilla, Photoshop->Gimp until you talk to people who do professional image work, Palm Desktop->KPilot.  Then he gave up but there are many on the Windows side and much less on the other.

Replacement applications is the best.  Emulation is possible too. VMWare (expensive, needs underlying Windows), Wine (amazing and sometimes actually works), CrossOver Office (polishes Wine).  Web applications are good but less usable then they want the browser people to give them the same functionality as on the desktop, there's stuff like XForms and XUL or the non-cross-platform ActiveX but it's not the way to go.

Application porting strategies are Java, .net/Mono (we'll see how that delivers) but Qt is the answer.

Independent software developers need support.  We need more standardised parts of the operating system, Linux Standard Base were trying that but still struggling e.g. with C++ standard.  Standard browser for web applications, Konqueror doesn't work in places, offering two browsers and saying use whichever one works isn't good.  We need to be friendly to proprietary application developers because some applications will never be available as Free Software, we don't need to like them but at least be friendly.  We need to prepare for Longhorn, X development needs to speed up (and is doing so).

Administration, intuitive tools for administrators needed.  They are the ones who decide to switch and they will only do so if their job becomes easier.  Yast type tools are expected and needed.  We need remote mass installation and administration tools.  They are now adding Yast with a network API.  

General praise for Kiosk mode, well done Waldo.  Now Zenworks will let you do this for all machines on a network.

Challenges for administration are admin APIs, directory integration, security (Windows admins spend 50% of their time on security), long maintenance periods, backwards compatibility.

Will KDE conquer the corporate desktop?  He doesn't know but there are good reasons why it should.  Linux is more innovative, lower costs (get the facts MS), more secure (because of Open Source although that doesn't guarantee it it does mean you can check up on it), open.  KDE has made tremendous progress and offers the most functionality on the desktop.  9 out of 10 SuSE customers use KDE.  KDE is an independent and healthy project, this needs to be kept.

Is there KDE/Gnome integration going on at Novell or are they just taking two approaches?  There is so for example Novell Desktop product will feature both desktops with a choice during installation.  He believes freedesktop.org is heading in the right direction and want to see more of that going on.