Freedesktop.org
 The logo of freedesktop.org | |
| Web address | www.freedesktop.org |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | no |
| Type of site | Software development management system |
| Available language(s) | English |
| Created by | Havoc Pennington |
| Launched | March 2000 |
| Alexa rank |
 36,633 (February 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.
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 acronym "XDG", remains common in their work.
Hosted projects
freedesktop.org provides hosting for a number of relevant projects.[3][4] These include:
- Cairo, a vector graphics library with cross-device output support.
- D-Bus, a message bus akin to KDEs DCOP or GNOME's Bonobo.
- 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.
- fontconfig is a library for font discovery, name substitution, etc.
- GStreamer is a cross-platform multimedia framework.
- Glamor, http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/Glamor/, 2D graphics common driver for X server, it supports a variety of graphics chipsets which have supports for OpenGL/EGL/GBM APIs
- GTK-Qt engine, a GTK+ 2 engine which uses Qt to draw the widgets, 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.
- luit, a tool used by terminal emulators
- Mesa 3D, an implementation of OpenGL.
- Poppler, a PDF rendering library.
- 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.
- Video Acceleration API
- Wayland, a lightweight display server which intends to provide perfect GUI experiences (user can never see tearing, lag, redrawing and flicker) for the Unix desktop.
- X.Org Server: the official reference implementation of X11. The current version is a fork of XFree86 before the latter changed its license.
- XCB, an Xlib replacement.
- Xephyr is a display server
- 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 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),[5] and CVS[6] web hosting, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and other resources to free software projects that work toward the above goals.
See also
- Comparison of open source software hosting facilities
- Linux on the desktop
References
- ↑ "Freedesktop.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-02-02.
- ↑ Portland points desktop Linux at $10 billion market, DesktopLinux.com, 11 October 2006
- ↑ "FreedesktopProjects". freedesktop.org. Retrieved 2013-09-22.
- ↑ "Software". freedesktop.org. Retrieved 2013-09-22.
- ↑ "freedesktop.org git". Gitweb.freedesktop.org. Retrieved 2013-09-22.
- ↑ "ViewVC Repository Listing". Webcvs.freedesktop.org. Retrieved 2013-09-22.
- Notes
- The Big freedesktop.org Interview (Rayiner Hashem & Eugenia Loli-Queru, OSNews, 24 November 2003)
External links
- freedesktop.org (wiki-based)
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