Freedesktop.org

freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software desktop environments for the X Window System (X11) on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington from Red Hat in March 2000.

The organisation focuses on the user. There are many development frameworks for X, and this is unlikely to change. The organisation seeks to ensure that differences in development frameworks are not user-visible.

The most widely used free software X desktops, GNOME, KDE and Xfce, are working closely with the project. The project recently released Portland 1.0 (xdg-utils), a set of common interfaces for desktop environments. [ [http://desktoplinux.com/news/NS7435528984.html Portland points desktop Linux at $10 billion market] , "DesktopLinux.com", 11 October 2006]

freedesktop.org was formerly known as the X Desktop Group, and the acronym "XDG" remains common in their work.

Hosted projects

fd.o provides hosting for a number of relevant projects. [ [http://freedesktop.org/wiki/FreedesktopProjects freedesktop.org - FreedesktopProjects ] ] [ [http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software freedesktop.org - Software ] ] These include:

* "X.Org Server": the official reference implementation of X11. The current version is a fork of XFree86 before the latter changed its license.
* D-Bus, a message bus akin to KDEs DCOP or GNOME's Bonobo.
* "Drag-and-drop": X drag and drop still does not work consistently.
* HAL, (hardware abstraction layer) is a consistent cross-operating system layer.
* fontconfig is a library for font discovery, name substitution, etc.
* "Xft", anti-aliased fonts using the FreeType library, rather than the old X core fonts.
* Cairo, a vector graphics library with cross-device output support.
* Direct Rendering Infrastructure, or DRI, is an interface used in the X Window System to securely allow user applications to access the video hardware without requiring data to be passed through the X Server.
* GStreamer, is a cross-platform multimedia framework.
* Mesa 3D, an implementation of OpenGL.
* XCB, an Xlib replacement.
* GTK-Qt engine, a GTK+ 2 engine which uses Qt to draw the widgets, providing the same look and feel of KDE apps to GTK+2 apps.
* Poppler, a PDF rendering library.

Also, Avahi (a free Zeroconf implementation) started as a fd.o project but has now moved elsewhere.

Stated aims

The aim of the project is not to legislate formal standards. Rather, it aims to catch interoperability issues much earlier in the process.

# Collect existing specifications, standards and documents related to X desktop interoperability and make them available in a central location;
# Promote the development of new specifications and standards to be shared among multiple X desktops;
# Integrate desktop-specific standards into broader standards efforts, such as Linux Standard Base and the ICCCM;
# Work on the implementation of these standards in specific X desktops;
# Serve as a neutral forum for sharing ideas about X desktop technology;
# Implement technologies that further X desktop interoperability and free X desktops in general;
# Promote X desktops and X desktop standards to application authors, both commercial and volunteer;
# Communicate with the developers of free operating system kernels, the X Window System itself, free OS distributions, and so on to address desktop-related problems;
# Provide source repositories (git [ [http://gitweb.freedesktop.org/ freedesktop.org git ] ] and CVS [ [http://webcvs.freedesktop.org/ ViewVC Repository Listing ] ] ), web hosting, Bugzilla, mailing lists and other resources to free software projects that work toward the above goals.

See also

* Maemo

References

* [http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5215 The Big freedesktop.org Interview] (Rayiner Hashem & Eugenia Loli-Queru, OSNews, 24 November 2003)

External links

* [http://freedesktop.org/ Project home page (wiki-based)]