You Can Experiment With KDE 2.2.2 & Qt2 This Christmas

If you find yourself with some extra time this holiday season and want to dive into a classic codebase on your modern Linux desktop, KDE developer Helio Castro has been working on his porting skills by porting KDE 2.2.2 and Qt2 to work on modern Linux systems.

KDE 2 was released in 2000 with the use of the DCOP communication protocol, the still-living KIO I/O library, KHTML that at the time brought HTML 4.0 rendering, and Konqueror came as the default web-browser.

So far he's got kdelibs 2.2.2 working -- tests are passing, graphics are working, and overall a bit beyond a "proof of concept" stage. As part of this "KDE 2 Restoration Project" he's trying to maintain the original code as much as possible but along the way also replacing the Autotools build system with CMake.

Those wanting to learn how to get involved with this software restoration project and play around with some old KDE2 code, stop by Helio's blog.

For those wanting to go back even further to relive some old Linux desktop software, last year as part of KDE's 20th birthday they also re-released KDE 1 for modern Linux systems.