FreeDesktop.org

Berlin, 6th October, 2010 - The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in Berlin at the Humboldt University in Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events.

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Robert Lefkowitz's Keynote
Today the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has started, bringing KDE and Gnome developers together in the biggest conference of its type. It is situated on the beautiful Atlantic island of Gran Canaria and housed in the spectacular Albert Kraus Auditorium which dominates the skyline of Las Palmas, capital of Gran Canaria. The conference was opened by a series of talks from various people in the Canaries local government and the organisation. After that the keynotes started with star speakers and impressive announcements including an Open PC developed by the community. Read on for an impression of the GCDS!

The FreeDesktop.org Text Layout Summit 2007 took place in July in Glasgow. With funding from The Linux Foundation they brought together people from Pango, Qt, IBM ICU (Intl. Components for Unicode), SIL Graphite, Unifont.org, m17n, W3C and DejaVu. Getting the various widget sets to have the same high quality support for all scripts is a problem the summit hoped to solve. Dot News covers what was discussed and what the future is likely to be for text layout in the free desktops.

The Akademy team is pleased to announce that we will be hosting the Text Layout Summit 2007 during our week in Glasgow at the start of July. This is the second Text Layout Summit following the success of the event at Gnome's Boston Summit last year. Experts from the free software world's top text rendering apps and libraries are expected including Qt, Pango and the cross platform effort of HarfBuzz. Register before the end of Monday if you want us to book your accommodation.

The Open Source Developer Labs is previewing work that attempts to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE, the two competing graphical interfaces most widely used with Linux.

The effort, called Project Portland, began showing its first software tools on Tuesday in conjunction with this week's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in Boston. Using them, a software company can write a single software package that works using either of the prevailing graphical interfaces.

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Today we are happy to release a Kororaa Live CD showcasing Xgl technology. If you would like to find out what it's all about, then download the CD and boot up your pc! The Live CD comes with Xorg 7, Gnome 2.12.2, 3D support and of course Xgl ;)

The Kororaa project is a way of installing Gentoo* Linux* easily and quickly, similar to Gentoo's “Stage3 with GRP packages” install.

Open Source Development Labs Inc. this weekend called together architects from over two dozen key desktop-oriented Linux projects to work out their differences and to find common cause in their efforts to create the best possible Linux desktop.

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Seth Nickell has posted a few videos showing the Luminocity window manager doing some super Open GL hardware acceleration tricks. While Luminocity is not intended for serious use, it does an excellent job at demonstrating the possibilies of things to come. Seth also shows some screenshots of GTK+ themes rendering with Cairo enhancements.

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Update: Seth has posted a follow-up: How Luminocity Relates to Other Stuff

Introducing gcompmgr, a gui tool for tweaking shadows/fades etc... I wrote gcompmgr after finally getting composite working well this weekend. Its a very early erm, quick and dirty hack, but it works well. Offers for anyone to contribute are open ;)

Dr. Janne Mor�n is explaining the problem of the .dot files and the solution found through GConf and the gconf-tools.

The X Developer's Meeting is now underway at the Cambridge Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Federico Mena-Quintero has put a nice write-up online of the first day of talks, the write-up is available here

Normally, when you copy something in an X application and you close it, the content of the clipboard is lost. This is probably one of the biggest reasons why people keep saying that copy & paste in Linux "doesn't work".

GNOME Clipboard Daemon is a program that keeps the content of your X clipboard in memory, so the clipboard won' get lost even after you close the application you copied from. It's a daemon - it has no GUI. You start it and it'll run in the background and Just Work(tm).Click here for mor

In a press conference held today at LinuxWorld 2004 in New York, members of the old X consortium, some members of the disbanded Xfree86 core developer group, and Havoc Pennington of freedesktop.org announced that X.org and xFree86 have essentially merged, and that the reformed group is working together to bring "not just more eye candy but new functionality" to the X Window Manager for Linux and Unix. Another change is a new eagerness to work with -- and give credit to -- individual contributors rather than continue to view X development primarily as a corporate activity.

Mathew Allum has written a very useful utility for looking
at the resource usage of applications using the X server,
using the Xres extension written by Mark Vojkovich.

We have just started a new project at FreeDesktop.org for evangelizing and documenting proper Unicode support in free software. It�s called Project UTF-8. Discussions happen on #unicode at irc.gimp.org.