Will Portland Mashup the KDE and Gnome Interfaces?

Published: October 17, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After more than a year of work by members of the freedesktop.org standards group, which steers the X Window System Windowing system that underlies the KDE and Gnome graphical user interfaces for Linux, and Open Source Development Labs, the place where Linus Torvalds gets his paycheck and where big players in the Linux community steer the development of software related to Linux, announced last week that Portland 1.0, a set of common interfaces underlying X Window and therefore KDE and Gnome, is available.

Both KDE and Gnome are extensions to the X Window System, and they organize how applications are graphically displayed on a Linux system. KDE and Gnome are sets of libraries and standards that programs use so they can present a consistent look and feel within the X Window System. The problem is, KDE and Gnome have slightly different ways of doing this, which means big headaches for independent software developers that want to port their applications to Linux. The Portland code is a set of common interfaces that can hook into both KDE and Gnome, which means ISVs can write to Portland and let Portland cope with interfacing with KDE and Gnome.

What Portland is not, by the way, is a unified graphical user interface for Linux that somehow merges KDE and Gnome. While it would be useful to have a single GUI for Linux, KDE, and Gnome each have millions of users, and getting anyone to switch to the other is asking a lot--in fact, it is asking too much.

The freedesktop.org group was created in March 2004 to get the people who make GUIs based on the X Window System to cooperate a little more than they had in the past, and to also bring more community involvement into the evolution of the X Window System itself. While freedesktop.org has been helpful, it did not have the political clout that OSDL has in getting interested parties to deal with the KDE and Gnome incompatibility issues. So the Portland Project, which created the Portland 1.0 code, was born in the aftermath of the OSDL's desktop architects meeting in December 2005. Working very quickly, the Portland Project (which is named after the Oregon city that is closest to the Beaverton headquarters of OSDL) put out a preview of the interfaces in April 2006 and released beta code throughout the summer.

The Portland 1.0 code has already been integrated in Debian, OpenSUSE, and Fedora Core, the latter two being development implementations that are previews of future commercial releases of Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. Red Flag Linux, the dominant Linux supplier in China, and Xandros, which is trying to take on Red Hat and Novell in North America and Europe using a variant of Debian Linux that has been tweaked to look more like Microsoft Windows, have also promised to put Portland 1.0 support into their upcoming releases. Trolltech, which creates the Qt 4.2 development environment that is the primary tool for creating graphical front ends for KDE applications, is also going to use Portland to offer users of its Qt tools a means of supporting Gnome desktops with their applications.

You can download the Portland code from the freedesktop.org site, and you can find out more technical details in this article on the OSDL site.