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freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 desktop environment
Desktop environment

In graphical computing, a desktop environment commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface that is based on the desktop metaphor which can be seen on most modern personal computers today....
s for the X Window System
X Window System

The X Window System is a computing software system and network protocol that provides a graphical user interface for networked computers. It implements the X Window System protocols and architecture and provides windowing system on raster graphics Visual display units and manages Keyboard and pointing device control functions....
 (X11) on Linux
Linux

Linux is a generic term referring to Unix-like computer operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Their development is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed by anyone under the terms of the GNU GPL license...
 and other Unix-like
Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....
 operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington
Havoc Pennington

Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington is well-known in the free software community due to his work on GNOME, Metacity, GConf, and D-BUS. He works for startup , "developing a consumer product that involves hardware, software, and online services"....
 from Red Hat
Red Hat

In computing, Red Hat, Inc. is a company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1995, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
 in March 2000.

The organisation focuses on the user. 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.

The most widely used free software
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 X desktops, GNOME
Gnome

A gnome is a mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and wiktionary:subterranean lifestyle. The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus....
, KDE
KDE

KDE is a free software project based around its flagship product, a desktop environment for Unix-like systems. The goal of the project is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system....
 and Xfce
Xfce

Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris and BSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use....
, are working closely with the project.






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freedesktop.org (fd.o) is a project to work on interoperability and shared base technology for free software
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 desktop environment
Desktop environment

In graphical computing, a desktop environment commonly refers to a style of graphical user interface that is based on the desktop metaphor which can be seen on most modern personal computers today....
s for the X Window System
X Window System

The X Window System is a computing software system and network protocol that provides a graphical user interface for networked computers. It implements the X Window System protocols and architecture and provides windowing system on raster graphics Visual display units and manages Keyboard and pointing device control functions....
 (X11) on Linux
Linux

Linux is a generic term referring to Unix-like computer operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Their development is one of the most prominent examples of free and open source software collaboration; typically all the underlying source code can be used, freely modified, and redistributed by anyone under the terms of the GNU GPL license...
 and other Unix-like
Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....
 operating systems. It was founded by Havoc Pennington
Havoc Pennington

Robert Sanford Havoc Pennington is well-known in the free software community due to his work on GNOME, Metacity, GConf, and D-BUS. He works for startup , "developing a consumer product that involves hardware, software, and online services"....
 from Red Hat
Red Hat

In computing, Red Hat, Inc. is a company in the free and open source software sector, and a major Linux distribution vendor. Founded in 1995, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina with satellite offices worldwide....
 in March 2000.

The organisation focuses on the user. 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.

The most widely used free software
Free software

Free Software or software libre is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with minimal restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things and to prevent consumer-facing hardware...
 X desktops, GNOME
Gnome

A gnome is a mythical creature characterized by its extremely small size and wiktionary:subterranean lifestyle. The word gnome is derived from the New Latin gnomus....
, KDE
KDE

KDE is a free software project based around its flagship product, a desktop environment for Unix-like systems. The goal of the project is to provide basic desktop functions and applications for daily needs as well as tools and documentation for developers to write stand-alone applications for the system....
 and Xfce
Xfce

Xfce is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris and BSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use....
, are working closely with the project. The project recently released Portland
Portland Project

The Portland Project is an initiative taken to establish a greater Linux foothold in the desktop market. It aims at resolving a number of key factors that are believed to reduce the adoption rate of Linux distributions as operating system....
 1.0 (xdg-utils), a set of common interfaces for desktop environments.

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

Hosted projects


fd.o provides hosting for a number of relevant projects. These include:

  • X.Org Server
    X.Org Server

    The X.Org Server is the X server in the official reference implementation of the X Window System. The current stable release is 1.6.0, which is part of X11R7.5, and was released on 25 February 2009....
    : the official reference implementation of X11. The current version is a fork of XFree86
    XFree86

    XFree86 is an implementation of the X Window System. It was originally written for Unix-like operating systems on IBM PC compatibles and is now available for many other operating systems and platforms....
     before the latter changed its license.
  • D-Bus
    D-Bus

    D-Bus is a simple inter-process communication system for software applications to communicate with one another. D-Bus was heavily influenced by KDE2–3's DCOP system and has replaced it in the KDE 4 release; it is supported on Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X operating systems and is used by Qt 4 and GNOME....
    , a message bus akin to KDEs DCOP
    DCOP

    DCOP, which stands for Desktop COmmunication Protocol, is a light-weight inter-process communication and software componentry communication system....
     or GNOME's Bonobo
    Bonobo (computing)

    Bonobo is a software componentry for creating reusable software components and compound documents. It was created formerly by Ximian for compound documents used in GNOME....
    .
  • Drag-and-drop
    Drag-and-drop

    In computer graphical user interfaces, drag-and-drop or DnD is the action of clicking on a virtual object and dragging it to a different location or onto another virtual object....
    : X drag and drop still does not work consistently.
  • HAL
    HAL (software)

    In the field of Unix-like software, HAL, a hardware abstraction layer and software project developed by freedesktop.org, allows desktop applications running within an operating system to get ready access to information about Computer hardware so that they can locate and use such hardware regardless of Bus or Peripheral device....
    , (hardware abstraction layer) is a consistent cross-operating system
    Operating system

    An operating system is an interface between hardware and applications; it is responsible for the management and coordination of activities and the sharing of the limited resources of the computer....
     layer.
  • fontconfig
    Fontconfig

    Fontconfig is a library designed to provide system-wide Computer font configuration, customization, and application access. Fontconfig is written and maintained by Keith Packard....
     is a library for font discovery, name substitution, etc.
  • Xft
    Xft

    Xft, the "X Window System FreeType" Interface library, is a Free software software library written by Keith Packard. As of version 2.1, it is licensed under a quasi-BSD license....
    , anti-aliased fonts using the FreeType
    FreeType

    FreeType is a library written in C that implements a font rasterization engine. It is used to rasterize characters into bitmaps and provides support for other font-related operations....
     library, rather than the old X core fonts.
  • Cairo
    Cairo (graphics)

    cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics-based, device-independent Application programming interface for software developers....
    , a vector graphics library with cross-device output support.
  • Direct Rendering Infrastructure
    Direct Rendering Infrastructure

    In computing, the Direct Rendering Infrastructure is an interface and a free software implementation 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....
    , or DRI, is an interface used in the X Window System
    X Window System

    The X Window System is a computing software system and network protocol that provides a graphical user interface for networked computers. It implements the X Window System protocols and architecture and provides windowing system on raster graphics Visual display units and manages Keyboard and pointing device control functions....
     to securely allow user applications to access the video hardware without requiring data to be passed through the X Server.
  • GStreamer
    GStreamer

    GStreamer is a Pipeline based multimedia framework written in the C with the type system based on GObject. GStreamer allows a programmer to create a variety of media-handling components, including simple Audio frequency playback, audio and video...
    , is a cross-platform
    Cross-platform

    In computing, cross-platform is a term used to refer to computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented and inter-operate on multiple computer platforms....
     multimedia framework
    Multimedia framework

    A multimedia framework is a software framework that handles Electronic media on a computer and through a network. A good multimedia framework offers an intuitive Application programming interface and a modular architecture to easily add support for new codecs, container formats and Streaming media....
    .
  • Mesa 3D
    Mesa 3D

    Mesa 3D is an Open source software 3D computer graphics Library that provides a generic OpenGL implementation for rendering three-dimensional graphics on multiple platform ....
    , an implementation of OpenGL
    OpenGL

    OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language cross-platform Application programming interface for writing applications that produce 2D computer graphics and 3D computer graphics....
    .
  • XCB
    XCB

    In computing, XCB is a C binding for the X Window System. It is implemented as free software and aims to replace Xlib. The project was started in 2001 by Bart Massey....
    , an Xlib
    Xlib

    Xlib is an X Window System protocol client library in the C . It contains subroutines for interacting with an X Server . These functions allow programmers to write programs without knowing the details of the protocol ....
     replacement.
  • GTK-Qt engine
    GTK-Qt

    The GTK-Qt Theme Engine is a project allowing GTK+ to use Qt widget styles. It uses Qt to draw the widget into an offscreen buffer, then draws a copy of the contents of this buffer onscreen....
    , a GTK+ 2
    GTK+

    GTK+, or The GIMP Toolkit, is a cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. It is one of the most popular toolkits for the X Window System, along with Qt ....
     engine which uses Qt
    Qt (toolkit)

    Qt is a cross-platform application development framework, widely used for the development of graphical user interface programs , and also used for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers....
     to draw the widgets, providing the same look and feel
    Look and feel

    Look and feel is a term used in descriptions of products and fields such as product design, marketing, branding and trademarking, to describe the main features of its appearance....
     of KDE apps to GTK+2 apps.
  • Poppler
    Poppler (software)

    Poppler is a free software Library for viewing Portable Document Format documents; it is maintained by freedesktop.org. Poppler is based on Xpdf-3.0 codebase and was created for two stated reasons: to allow easier reuse of the rendering engine to reduce redundant work, and to go beyond the goals of Xpdf and integrate more closely and reuse...
    , a PDF rendering library.


Also, Avahi
Avahi (software)

Avahi is a free software Zeroconf implementation, including a system for multicast DNS/DNS-SD service discovery. It allows programs to publish and discover services and hosts running on a local network with no specific configuration....
 (a free Zeroconf
Zeroconf

Zero Configuration Networking , is a set of techniques that automatically creates a usable Internet Protocol network without configuration or special servers....
 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.

  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
    Linux Standard Base

    The Linux Standard Base, or LSB, is a joint project by several Linux distributions under the organizational structure of the Linux Foundation to standardize the software system structure used with the Linux operating system....
     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
    Git (software)

    Git is a free software distributed revision control, or software source code management project with an emphasis on being fast. Git was initially created by Linus Torvalds for Linux kernel development....
     and CVS
    Concurrent Versions System

    In the field of software development, the Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a free software revision control system....
    ), web hosting, Bugzilla
    Bugzilla

    Bugzilla is a World Wide Web-based general-purpose bugtracker tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and software license under the Mozilla Public License....
    , mailing lists and other resources to free software projects that work toward the above goals.


See also


  • Ubuntu
  • Maemo
    Maemo

    Maemo is an operating system for the Nokia Internet Tablet line of handheld computers. It was originally named "Internet Tablet OS".Maemo is similar to many handheld operating systems, and features a "Home" screen?the central point from which all applications and settings are accessed....
  • Comparison of open source software hosting facilities


External links