freedesktop.org

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"XDG" redirects here. For the game development division External Development Group, see THQ.

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Freedesktop-logo.svg
The logo of freedesktop.org
Web address www.freedesktop.org
Commercial? no
Type of site
 Software development management system
Available in English
Created by Havoc Pennington
Launched March 2000; 24 years ago (2000-03)
Alexa rank
 33,277 (April 2014)[1]
Current status Online

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 project is hosted by Software in the Public Interest, the non-profit organization created by the Debian Project.

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.

Widely used open-source X desktop projects—such as GNOME, KDE, and Xfce—are collaborating with the freedesktop.org project. In 2006, the project released Portland 1.0 (xdg-utils), a set of common interfaces for desktop environments.[2]

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

Hosted projects

freedesktop.org provides hosting for a number of relevant projects.[3][4] These include:

Windowing system and graphics

Software related to windowing systems and graphics in general

Other

  • D-Bus, a message bus akin to DCOP (KDE 3) and Bonobo (GNOME 2)
  • Elektra, a library for reading and writing configuration
  • fontconfig is a library for font discovery, name substitution, etc.
  • fprint, a library for the consumer fingerprint reader devices
  • GStreamer is a cross-platform multimedia framework.
  • GTK-Qt engine, a GTK+ 2 engine which uses Qt to draw the graphical control elements, providing the same look and feel of KDE applications to GTK+2 applications.
  • HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) is a consistent cross-operating system layer; it has been deprecated and replaced by udev.
  • kmscon, userspace virtual console to replace Linux console, uses KMS driver and supports Unicode
  • luit, a tool used by terminal emulators
  • libinput,[7] a library to handle input devices in Wayland compositors and to provide a generic X.Org input driver. It provides device detection, device handling, input device event processing and abstraction so minimize the amount of custom input code compositors need to provide the common set of functionality that users expect
  • PulseAudio is a sound server frontend meant to provide software mixing, network audio, and per application volume control.
  • systemd is a comprehensive init framework to start and manage services and sessions meant to replace older init models.
  • Xft, anti-aliased fonts using the FreeType library, rather than the old X core fonts.

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

Stated aims

The project aims to catch interoperability issues much earlier in the process. It is not for legislating formal standards.

  1. Collect existing specifications, standards and documents related to X desktop interoperability and make them available in a central location;
  2. Promote the development of new specifications and standards to be shared among multiple X desktops;
  3. Integrate desktop-specific standards into broader standards efforts, such as Linux Standard Base and the ICCCM;
  4. Work on the implementation of these standards in specific X desktops;
  5. Serve as a neutral forum for sharing ideas about X desktop technology;
  6. Implement technologies that further X desktop interoperability and free X desktops in general;
  7. Promote X desktops and X desktop standards to application authors, both commercial and volunteer;
  8. 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;
  9. Provide source repositories (git),[8] and CVS[9] web hosting, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and other resources to free software projects that work toward the above goals.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Portland points desktop Linux at $10 billion market, DesktopLinux.com, 11 October 2006
  3. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
Notes

External links

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