How to Find Out More | UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition (Complete Reference Series)

A number of useful books and web sites provide information about both the CDE and the KDE desktop environments. Here are some of the more useful ones.

Useful Books on CDE

While most of the commercially available book material was printed a few years back, most of the information and concepts in these books is still relevant to CDE today.

Fernandez, Charles. Configuring CDE: The Common Desktop Environment. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 1996.
McFarland, Thomas C. X Windows on the World: Developing Internationalized Software With X, Motif and CDE. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 1996.
Mione, Antonino. CDE and Motif: A Practical Primer. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 1997.

In addition to these books, there is a book series published by the OpenGroup covering both CDE 2.1 and Motif 2.1. Information about titles in this series can be viewed on the web page at http://www.opengroup.org/publications/catalog/mo.htm. In addition to these titles, there are some CD-ROMs that you can obtain-some of them for free-if you are an OpenGroup member.

Useful Web Sites for CDE

One of the most useful CDE web sites is the official web site, http://www.opengroup.org/cde/. You can find out about CDE in general and about the Motif Window Manager it uses.
Another useful site is the Sun site, http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/cde/. This site contains a lot of information about using CDE in the Solaris environment as well as CDE in general.
HP provides an online HTML document entitled HP CDE2.1: Getting Started at http://docs.hp.com/en/B1171–90500/index.html. There is a printable PDF version at http://docs.hp.com/en/B1171–90500/B1171–90500.pdf.
Finally, there is a good page describing the X Window management aspects of CDE at http://xwinman.org/cde.php.

Useful Books on KDE

Although these books on KDE are a few years old and cover version 2.0, they are still relevant for many of the concepts in development. Most information for version 3.0 is available on the web. The planning date for the version 4.0 release is 4Q2006.

Boloni, Lotzi. Programming KDE 2.0: Creating Linux Desktop Applications. Berkeley, CA: Publishers Group West, 2000.
Nash, David. KDE Bible. Indianapolis, IN: Hungry Minds (Wiley Publishing), 2000.
Powell, Dennis E., and Bob Bernstein. Practical KDE. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 1999.
Sweet, David. KDE 2.0 Development. Indianapolis, IN: Sams, 2000.
Thiem, Uwe. KDE Application Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 1999.

Useful Web Sites for KDE

The web is the best place to find information on KDE. Not only is the information updated frequently, it is organized such that you can find great details about specific topics without wasting time.

One of the most useful web sites for KDE is the project family web site, http://www.kde.org/family/. This is a master list of all web links associated with KDE. It contains-among other things-background information about KDE, download sites for both end-user applications software and developer software, general user contact information, and teams that are involved in various aspects of KDE development.

There is also the official web site www.kde.org. This site provides a wealth of information about all aspects of KDE, including online documentation, FAQs, development opportunities, and lists of communities that you can participate in to find out about and contribute information on KDE.

Developers can follow the link to the developers’ corner at http://developer.kde.org, or the KDE developers’ blogs at http://www.kdedevetopers.org/. People who want to find out more about what is going on in the KDE world can go to http://dot.kde.org/.

If you want to see all of the wallpapers, themes, icons, and other artwork that is available for your KDE desktop, try the link http://www.kde-took.org/.

You can see what types of mailing lists exist for KDE and subscribe to them at http://www.kde.org/mailinglists/.

For information about KDE on Solaris UNIX systems try the web page at http://solaris.kde.org/links.php. You will find a lot of useful links there to information about Solaris and KDE as well as general KDE information.

For information about how to get KDE on IBM’s AIX systems, you should consult the web page at http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/aix/products/aixos/linux/index.html.

For information about progress in porting KDE to Darwin under Mac OS, see the web page at http://kde.opendarwin.org/.

For users who are familiar with Wikipedia, there are a number of wiki pages that discuss KDE. The links start at http://wiki.kde.org/ and http://wiki.kdenews.org/.