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KDE launches Version 4.0
RELEASE IS THE FIRST STEP IN AN AGGRESSIVE ROAD MAP FOR THE LINUX ENVIRONMENT
By Darryl K. Taft IN MOUNTAIN VIE W, CALIF.
For aaron seigo, 2008 already
has been a busy year. And the
next 11 months look like they’ll
move at the same fast pace.
Seigo, vice president of
KDE e.V., the governing body for
the KDE Linux desktop platform,
said the team around the technology
is setting an ambitious road map for
future releases.
Developers already made news
with Release 4 of KDE—also known
Aaron Seigo, second from left, says KDE developers are gearing up for a year of monthly
as the K Desktop Environment— releases. Others shown include Jesse Zbikowski, far left, and Troy Unrau, second from right.
which was officially announced
Jan. 11. 3. 5 because we have a lot of users software to all of those individu-
The developers of the free soft- with large installations and they als,” Seigo said. “In one sense,
ware environment said support for don’t change their installations very Windows and Mac had been sort of
Windows and deep support for Mac often,” he said. “[KDE 3. 5. 9] will a free software ghetto, so with KDE
OS X are on the horizon, with some come with an enterprise version of 4 we worked on ports to Windows
pieces ready for evaluation now and Kontact,” the KDE PIM (personal and Mac.”
others to be available by the sum- information manager). On Jan. 22, the KDE community
mer. With the move to cross-platform released KDE mirror infrastructure
At the KDE 4.0 launch event here KDE with Windows and Mac OS X to deliver KDE Windows packages
at Google’s headquarters Jan. 18, support, Seigo said it is “potentially to developers.
Seigo and others outlined plans one of the game changers” for the The new KDE binaries for Win-to release KDE 4.0.1 by the end of technology and for open-source soft- dows are early components repre-January, “and we’ll be doing a minor ware in general. sentative of additional KDE libraries
release every month.” Developers “came to the real- and applications KDE plans to port
At the same time, Seigo said the ization that for every one of us to Windows as part of the KDE Win-
KDE team will not leave its 3. 5 users programming on the free operat- dows Project.
in the lurch, delivering an upgrade ing systems, there were hundreds “Traditionally, we have done
to that release, known as KDE 3. 5. 9, [of programmers] on Windows really well with Linux and the BSDs
this month. and Macs, and we were losing an [Berkeley Software Distributions],”
“We haven’t forgotten about [KDE] opportunity here of bringing free S e i g o s a i d . [CON TINUED ON PAGE D6]
