Making DesktopBSD ready for KDE 4

KDE 4 has been around for some time now and, while many still feel it has not matured enough, it will undoubtedly be the future of the K Desktop Environment. Therefore, it is important to adapt DesktopBSD, which currently uses KDE 3 as its desktop environment, to this new major release. This is rather difficult because of some of the technological changes in KDE 4, in particular that KDE 4 now uses the Qt 4 development framework instead of its predecessor Qt 3 used in KDE 3 and the DesktopBSD Tools. Since Qt 4 is not backwards-comptabile, the DesktopBSD Tools would have to be ported to Qt 4 first in order to be able to utilize KDE 4 functionality, a process involving a lot of effort and very few gains.

As an alternative, the decision was made to stick with Qt 3 as framework for now and replace all of the KDE functionality in DesktopBSD code so it still works fine under KDE 4 without requiring users to have KDE 3 installed, in particular:

I have already found a replacement for KSystemTray in the Psi messenger’s code base, writing own code for passive popups and the icon loading shouldn’t be too hard and I’ll likely use DBUS as a replacement for DCOP. As for the control center integration, providing glue code for both KDE 3 and KDE 4 shouldn’t be too hard, I’m thinking about having to choose (or even auto-detecting) which to build when installing from the ports collection.

However, I haven’t been able to find a replacement for the Konsole KPart and I really do not want to port or even code a terminal emulator myself. Any suggestions for a Qt 3 terminal widget? Otherwise, I guess I’ll have a look at the Konsole code…

Forums software upgraded to phpBB 3.0.2

After deleting lots of spam posts in the forums yesterday, I decided to spend a little time to prevent this from happening again in the future. As a first step, I upgraded the board software from the now rather outdated phpBB 2 to phpBB 3.0.2, which was released only a few ...


Crossover Games for FreeBSD

I am happy to announce that we are now making available 'cutting edge' builds of CrossOver. To start, we are providing experimental builds of CrossOver Games for Linux, Mac OS X, and now BSD systems. codeweavers So you can test the experimental build of Crossover Games on every FreeBSD 6 or ...


news from the KDE4 front

Right now I have some free time to update KDE4. Today i’ve committed the 5 Basic Ports (kdelibs4/base4/pimlib/runtime/workspace) with the implementation of bsd.kde4.mk. This allows further use of USE_KDE4 (actually, kdelibs, kdebase and pimlibs) for KDE4-related builds. Now I have to work on the implementation of all other related ports. /usr/home/miwi As ...


DesktopBSD artwork

Vermaden created some nice and stylish artwork for DesktopBSD, purely KISS. :) vermadens' resources


FreeBSD: Google Summer of Code 2008

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to participate as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code 2008. This program funds students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break. We have had over 50 successful students working on FreeBSD as part of this program in 2005, ...