KDE on Cygwin is the port of
K Desktop Environment 1
K Desktop Environment 1 was the inaugural series of releases of the K Desktop Environment. There were two major releases in this series.
Pre-release
The development started right after Matthias Ettrich's announcement on 1996-10-14 to found th ...
,
2, and
3 and the corresponding versions of the
Qt toolkit
Qt (pronounced "cute") is cross-platform software for creating graphical user interfaces as well as cross-platform applications that run on various software and hardware platforms such as Linux, Windows, macOS, Android or embedded systems wit ...
to the
Windows Operating System
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ser ...
by using
Cygwin
Cygwin ( ) is a POSIX-compatible programming and runtime environment that runs natively on Microsoft Windows. Under Cygwin, source code designed for Unix-like operating systems may be compiled with minimal modification and executed.
The Cygwin in ...
, a
POSIX
The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...
emulation
Emulation may refer to:
*Emulation (computing), imitation of behavior of a computer or other electronic system with the help of another type of system
:*Video game console emulator, software which emulates video game consoles
*Gaussian process em ...
layer.
''KDE on Cygwin'' helps Windows computers to run applications originally created for Qt and KDE, by providing the applications with the necessary dependencies in a transparent manner.
The project is no longer being developed as since 2009 there exists a natively-compiled version of
KDE SC 4
KDE Software Compilation 4 (KDE SC 4) was the only series of the so-called KDE Software Compilation (short: KDE SC), first released in January 2008 and the last release being 4.14.3 released in November 2014. It was the follow-up to K Desktop En ...
for Windows.
History
The project was started by Ralf Habacker in May 2001. Its goal was to ensure compatibility of major programs that were originally only available by using a Linux distribution.
After cessation of active development of ''KDE on Cygwin'', the efforts to provide the KDE environment on Windows continue with the ''KDE Windows Initiative''.
Ported Software
As with many emulation examples, not all the common KDE programs are guaranteed to work unmodified on ''KDE on Cygwin'' due to the complex interaction of all the libraries needed. The
open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
nature of KDE and several of the programs running on it, allows some of these shortcomings to be found and circumvented.
The project has ported various Qt and KDE versions, and are considered of
beta
Beta (, ; uppercase , lowercase , or cursive ; grc, βῆτα, bē̂ta or ell, βήτα, víta) is the second letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of 2. In Modern Greek, it represents the voiced labiod ...
quality.
KDE-Cygwin page on SourceForge
/ref>
Qt
* 1.45
* 2.3.1
* 3.0.4
* 3.1.1
* 3.2.3
K Desktop Environment
* 1.45
* 2.2.2
* 3.1.1
* 3.1.4
References
External links
KDE on Cygwin homepageCygwin official homepageKDE homepage
KDE
{{KDE-stub