T H E K D E S K T O P E N V I R O N M E N T
http://www.kde.org
Release 1.0
July 12, 1998
An integrated Desktop Environment for the Unix Operating System
We are pleased to announce the availability of release 1.0 of the K
Desktop Environment.
KDE is a network transparent, contemporary desktop environment for
UNIX workstations. KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use
desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments
found under the MacOS or Window95/NT. We believe that the UNIX
operating system is the best operating system available today. In
fact UNIX has been the undisputed choice of the information tech-
nology professional for many years. When it comes to stability,
scalability and openness there is no competition to UNIX. However,
the lack of an easy to use contemporary desktop environment for
UNIX has prevented UNIX from finding its way onto the desktops of
the typical computer user in offices and homes.
With KDE there is now an easy to use, contemporary desktop environ-
ment available for UNIX. Together with a free implementation of
UNIX such as Linux, UNIX/KDE constitutes a completely free and open
computing platform available to anyone free of charge including its
source code for anyone to modify. While there will always be room
for improvement we believe to have delivered a viable alternative
to some of the more commonly found and commercial operating sys-
tems/desktops combinations available today. It is our hope that the
combination UNIX/KDE will finally bring open, reliable, stable and
monopoly free computing to the average computer. Please visit:
http://www.kde.org
for more information about the KDE Project.
KDE The Application Development Framework
Authoring applications under UNIX/X11 used to be an extremely
tedious and laborsome process. KDE recognizes the fact that a com-
puting platform is only as good as the number of first class appli-
cations available to the users of that particular platform. In view
of these circumstances the KDE Project has developed a first rate
compound document application framework, implementing the latest
advances in framework technology and thus positioning itself in
direct competition to such popular development frameworks as for
example Mircrosoft's MFC/COM/ActiveX technology. KDE's KOM/Open-
Parts compound document technology enables developers to quickly
create first rate applications implementing cutting edge technol-
ogy. KDE's KOM/OpenParts technology is build upon the open industry
standards such as the object request broker standard CORBA 2.0.
KDE The Office Application Suite
Leveraging the KDE application development framework a great number
of applications have been built for the K Desktop Environment. A
selection of those applications is contained in the KDE base dis-
tribution. At this moment KDE is developing an office application
suite based on KDE's KOM/OpenParts technology consisting of a
spread-sheet, a presentation applications, an organizer, an email
and news client and more. While some of those components are still
in alpha developement others are approaching release status
rapidly. KPresenter, KDE's presentation application was success-
fully used at the 5th international Linux congress in Cologne, Ger-
many to deliver a KDE presentation. A preview of KOffice has been
made available at
http://www.kde.org/koffice/index.html
For more information on KDE, its components and architecture as
well as KDE development, please visit:
http://www.kde.org/whatiskde/index.html
Screen-shots:
Screen-shots of a typical K desktop and some of its core
components can be found at
http://www.kde.org/kscreenshots.html
Screen-shots of KOffice, KDE's office application suite can
be found at
http://www.kde.org/koffice/index.html
Where to get KDE:
Please visit
http://www.kde.org/install.html
for a list of ftp sites holding release 1.0 of KDE.
Caldera, Delix, SuSE as well as FreeBSD have precompiled
and customized version of KDE available for their particu-
lar distributions. For more information on these precom-
piled version, please visit the above mentioned URL.
Supported platforms:
KDE was primarily developed under the Linux variant of the
Unix operating system. However it is known to compile with-
out, or with very few, problems on most Unix variants.
At the moment we explicitely support Linux (Intel , Alpha,
Sparc) and FreeBSD. We have success reports for IRIX, OSF,
SunOS, HP-UX. and others.
Licensing:
The KDE libraries are licensed under the LGPL, to allow for
the development of commercial applications for KDE. KDE
applications are licensed under the GPL.
Bug Reports:
Please submit your bug reports at http://buglist.kde.org .
Consider subscribing to our mailing lists in order to stay
in contact with the latest developments.
Mailing Lists:
kde-announce (announcements)
kde (general discussion)
kde-devel (development issues)
kde-look (look and feel issues)
kde-licensing (licensing issues)
kde-user (end user discussion)
kde-patches (daily patches)
To subscribe (unsubscribe), send mail to
[list]-request@kde.org
with:
subscribe (unsubscribe) [your-email-address]
in the Subject: line of the message. A mailing list archive
is provided at:
http://lists.kde.org
Thanks:
We would like to thank Troll Tech AS http://www.troll.no
for creating Qt and our sponsors for making KDE ONE
http://www.kde.org/kde-one.html in Arnsberg, Germany possi-
ble.
Epilogue:
We sincerely believe that we have initiated a new era for
the Unix operating system and hope you will share our
excitement. We hope that KDE will allow you to get your
work done faster and more efficiently than ever. Please
consider joining and supporting the project.
http://www.kde.org/support.html
The KDE Core Team (In alphabetic order):
Roberto Alsina
Kalle Dalheimer
Mark Donohoe
Christian Esken
Matthias Ettrich
Steffen Hansen
Matthias Hoelzer
Martin Jones
Sirtaj Singh Kang
Martin Konold
Stephan Kulow
Richard Moore
Sven Radej
Reginald Stadlbauer
Stefan Taferner
Uwe Thiem
Mario Weilguni
Torben Weis
Robert David Williams
Bernd Wuebben
Markus Wuebben
APPENDIX:
FTP Mirrors:
As during previous beta releases, expect ftp.kde.org to be
rather busy. Please take note of the list of official mir-
rors of ftp.kde.org available here:
http://www.kde.org/mirrors.html