KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment and development platform built with Trolltech's Qt toolkit. It runs on most Unix and Unix-like systems, such as Linux, BSD and Solaris. There are also ports to Mac OS X using its X11 layer and Microsoft Windows using Cygwin. It is developed in conjunction with KDevelop, a software development suite, and KOffice, a suite of office software.The "K" originally stood for "Kool" ("C" as in "cool" was already given away to the Common Desktop EnvironmentThe Common Desktop Environment CDE is a proprietary desktop environment for UNIX, based on the Motif widget toolkit. It is also the standard desktop environment on HP OpenVMS. CDE was jointly developed by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Novell and Sun Microsystems), but was changed soon after to stand simply for "K", which is "The first letter before 'L' (which stands for Linux) in the Latin alphabet."
The project's mascotFor the suburb of Sydney, Australia, see Mascot, New South Wales . For the American city, see Mascot, Tennessee . A mascot is some thing, typically an animal or human character used to represent a group with a common identity, such as a school, profession is a green dragonThe term dragon according to context, may be referring to: European dragon, mythical creature Middle-earth dragons, from the books by J. Tolkien Swamp dragon, a fictional reptile species from Terry Pratchett's Discworld Pernese dragons, from the books by named KonqiKonqi is the name of the mascot for the KDE project, a small cheerful green dragon. The name "Konqi" was chosen after Konqueror, the web browser of the KDE project. Its creator is Stefan Spatz. See also List of mascots External links Mascots.. Konqi can be found in various applications, including when the user logs out and in the "About KDE" screen.
A typical KDE 3.1 session: the main menu (left), KMailKmail is the email client in KDE. It supports folders, filtering, viewing HTML mail, and international character sets. It can send mail to any program or to an arbitrary port (normally 25) of a mail server. External links Free software Email clients. (background), KonquerorIn computing, Konqueror is part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), primarily developed for the Linux platform, but also available for some other platforms (including BSD and, recently, Microsoft Windows, although Windows support is very limited). It func (center/right), and NoatunIn Norse mythology, Noatun ("enclosure of ships") was the sea-side abode of Niord. Noatun is also one of two main media players of the K Desktop Environment, a popular Linux desktop environment. It supports various formats, including Ogg Vorbis and Wav., a multimedia player (top right).
1 Early history
KDE was founded in 1996 by Matthias Ettrich, who was then a student at the University of Tuebingen. He found a number of things wrong with the UNIX desktop at that time. Among his qualms, outlined in a now-famous newsgroup post, were that none of the applications looked, felt, or worked alike to each other. He proposed the formation of not only a set of applications, but rather a desktop environment, in which users could expect things to look, feel, and work consistently. He also wanted to make this desktop easy to use. One of his complaints with desktop applications of the time was that his girlfriend could not use them. That post spurred a lot of interest, and the KDE project was born.
Matthias chose to use the Qt toolkit as the toolkit of choice of the KDE project. Other programmers quickly started developing KDE/Qt applications, and by early 1997, large and complex applications were being released. In mid-1997, the GNU project had concerns about the licensing of Qt, leading to their founding the GNOME Desktop project and Harmony, a now-abandoned project to clone Qt. Qt was later relicensed to provide the GNU General Public License as an option, which has mitigated these concerns. Both KDE and GNOME now participate in Freedesktop.org, an effort to standardise Unix desktop interoperability, although there is still some friendly competition between them.
