freedesktop.org

Type of site	Software development management system
Available in	English
Created by	Havoc Pennington
Website	www.freedesktop.org
Alexa rank	27,110 (as of November 2016)[1]
Commercial	No
Launched	March 2000 (2000-03)
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's servers are hosted by Portland State University, which in turn are sponsored by HP, Intel and Google.^[2]

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.^[3] However, freedesktop.org is a "collaboration zone" for standards and specifications where users can freely discuss ideas, and not a formal standards organization.^[4]

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.^[5][6] These include:

Windowing system and graphics

Software related to windowing systems and graphics in general

• Cairo, a vector graphics library with cross-device output support.
• Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI), Linux API to access the graphics hardware, used by X11, Wayland compositors, Mesa 3D, etc.
• Glamor,^[7] 2D graphics common driver for X server, it supports a variety of graphics chipsets which have supports for OpenGL/EGL/GBM APIs
• Mesa 3D, an implementation of OpenGL.
• Pixman,^[8] is a low-level software library for pixel manipulation, providing features such as image compositing and trapezoid rasterization. Important users of pixman are the cairo graphics library and the X.Org Server
• Poppler, a PDF rendering library.
• Video Acceleration API
• Wayland, protocol to replace X11; features: no tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker
• X.Org Server: the official reference implementation of the X11 protocol
• XCB, an Xlib replacement.
• Xephyr is a display server

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,^[9] 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 to 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),^[10] and CVS^[11] web hosting, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and other resources to free software projects that work toward the above goals.

See also

• X.Org Foundation
• Comparison of open source software hosting facilities
• Linux on the desktop

References

Notes

• The Big freedesktop.org Interview (Rayiner Hashem & Eugenia Loli-Queru, OSNews, 24 November 2003)

External links

• Official website