Infotaxis Blog

I’ve been waiting a copy of KDE for my gaming box for a long time, and finally that wait is coming to an end. If you don’t know what KDE is, do some reading up first. Before going into the new solution, let me explain why this is such a big deal…

In the past, there were two ways to run KDE on Windows, both of which were terrible. One of which was to install a native X server on Windows, and then tell a *nix box to send it’s applications to that server instead of localhost. This will put Linux applications like KDE on your Windows box, but they will still be running under Linux on another machine. As well, there was no integration: if you browse the file system you see the Linux box. If you decide to mess with win32 xservers, I recommend Xming, because it’s free and fast.

Another of the ways was to install “Cygwin”, which is an implementation of a Unix subsystem for Windows. This allows you to run and compile *nix applications in a pseudo-native way, which was a bit slow. I never tried anything like a full KDE installation, but it can be done. Cygwin/X is the version with the xserver included. You can check out their page here (or here for the regular Cygwin). None of this is necessary now, however.

KDE is being ported to Windows properly. As of the date I write this, it is already possible to run Konqueror natively, as well as numerous other apps like Amarok, etc. You can pick up a copy of the official port here. Their main page is at windows.kde.org. I’ve tested this myself, and it works perfectly. The programs are still in alpha state, so there are a few oddities and some features work differently or strangely than the Linux version. Specifically I noted that you can’t run *.exe files from Konqueror by clicking on them, and I couldn’t find a way to run them with file associations either (I suppose I could install Wine, lol!). Everything that is there works great, though. Once this is all ironed out we’ll have a flawlessly quick KDE on Windows. Kudos to the team at kde.org!

Oh, and here, take a look:

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under articles, free, linux, windows. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.