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"One of free software's premier applications, KDE's CD and DVD burning suite K3b, is about to hit the big 1-0. This milestone touts rewritten DVD video ripping and a refocused interface design. The new release represents a level of feature-completeness and stability that surpasses all previous K3b releases and, perhaps, all free software competitors." Read more at Linux.com, including plans for KDE 4. Read More

Sekou Diakite has released an alpha version of a KDE Look and Feel for Java. This is an interesting step forward in Linux/Unix desktop integration since Java applications can now use the KDE/Qt libraries for drawing Java widgets and even directly use existing KDE widgets such as the file or color choosers. See the webpage for further details of this accomplishment including future plans and, of course, screenshots. Read More

Witold Wysota wrote in to inform us of the newly launched Qt Centre which is being billed as the ultimate Qt community site. With the support of Trolltech, Witold and former Qt Forum administrators, moderators and fans Axel Jaeger, Daniel Kish, Kevin Krammer, Johan Thelin, Jacek Piotrowski and Michael Goettsche have banded together to form the new site after learning that the Qt Forum as well as KDE-Forum.org had been hijacked for the purposes of boosting the Google Page Rank of unrelated external sites and have otherwise become neglected. If you had any public links to either Qt Forum or KDE-Forum.org please consider removing them or using the nofollow attribute. Let us hope that the new Qt Centre flourishes! Read More

I'm happy to announce that KDE Dot News is now fully hosted and supported by the OSU Open Source Lab. OSUOSL have graciously provided us with both server and network hosting, although of course, OSUOSL has long been hosting us on their network while we had been sharing the Ark Linux webserver. As we outgrew the Ark Linux server and ran into resource limitations however, OSUOSL also graciously offered us new server hosting. The dot is now significantly more responsive and we should definitely be seeing an improvement in uptime as well. A big thank you to OSUOSL and all the great guys on their support team -- it's been a true pleasure working with you. Read More

In some good news for KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, the famous African entrepreneur, announced at the Ubuntu Below Zero conference that he is now using the Kubuntu distribution (screenshots) on his own desktop machine and affirmed his commitment to the KDE-based distribution.
As per the website, "Kubuntu is a user friendly operating system based on KDE, the K Desktop Environment. With a predictable 6 month release cycle part of the Ubuntu project, Kubuntu is the GNU/Linux distribution for everyone." Kubuntu has apparently been prominent throughout the conference with a large number of Kubuntu users having shown up. As a first class Ubuntu citizen, CD copies of Kubuntu will be freely available to users. Congratulations to the Kubuntu team for their dedication and hard work in bringing the KDE desktop to Ubuntu! Read More

I am pleased to announce that KDE Dot News has gained new hosting sponsors. We are now hosted on the Ark Linux server through the OSU Open Source Lab network, having successfully completed the transfer little more than a week ago. As some of you may know, we have a long history of having been hosted and co-hosted with Ark Linux, so it is great to be back with our old friends. Read More

Week after week since November 2002, Derek Kite has been posting the KDE CVS-Digest without fail. This week, due to technical issues beyond Derek's control, there will be no digest. KDE CVS-Digest is the longest running and one of the most appreciated KDE development reports in the KDE community. Derek first announced the digest on the dot on November 29th 2002, but had in fact been pushing out trial issues since November 9th. By my count that's 125 issues of KDE CVS-Digest so far, compared to 76 for KDE Traffic and 28 for KDE Development News. Hats off, Derek! Read More

Flexbeta is running a side-by-side comparison (all-in-one page) of CD/DVD burners NeroLinux and K3b. K3b gains plenty of praise for its integrated user interface, look and feel, functionality, free license, and quite simply comes out on top. A good read if you need to be reminded of the goodness that is K3b. Read More

Several weeks ago the KDE Dot News server was compromised. After a prolonged and painful downtime, we're pleased to announce that KDE-Forum.org and KDE Wiki are now back and functioning. KDE-Forum.org is now in the capable hands of Christian Kienle of QtForum.org who gracefully offered to take over after the former admin decided to pursue other interests. I'd like to thank both these two as well as David Legg, Lukas Masek, Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, our sponsor Pierre-Emmanual Muller of CafeWiki, and the KDE Security Team for helping in bringing back these services. Read More

As part of the GStreamer invasion of KDE, Ronald Bultje has implemented Kiss, a simple version of a Totem-like video player for KDE with a GStreamer-backend (screenshot). I took a look at the source code and it looks fairly simple -- it's actually 23K worth of well-separated code in all, with the other 2.8M being makefile/configure overhead. Even if one doesn't understand the GStreamer parts, you could probably copy and paste them into your own KDE application. (Incidentally, this application seems to have been made with KDevelop, for those of you who need inspiration.) Read More

Gone are the days when KDE users would lament for an XMMS replacement. With the likes of amaroK (down) and JuK on the scene, it would seem that KDE Multimedia is gaining new fans. Which brings us to this user's opinion piece on amaroK (coral). It may be illogical... but at least it has screenshots. It'll be interesting to see what KDE Multimedia 4.0 looks like. Read More

KDE 3.3.1 has been released. This latest and greatest from KDE mercilessly exterminates bugs in Konqueror, KHTML, the KDE Edutainment module, the KDE JuK box and more. Better yet, Plastik is now ridiculously fast and has become a strong contender for the default style in KDE 3.4. Also, the Quanta Web Development tool has been enhanced and now has the VPL (Visual Page Layout aka WYSIWYG) mode enabled. For the gory details, read the KDE 3.3.1 changelog. Read More

Not so long ago Richard Dale announced Korundum, a RAD environment for KDE that makes developing desktop applications extremely fun and easy. Now, another KDE developer has announced Rubydium, his efforts to bring Just-In-Time optimisations to the Ruby runtime. Could Ruby become a serious contender for KDE application development? The combination of Ruby, KDE and a fast runtime could mean competition to Java and .Net on the Linux desktop. Read More

Several sources have been reporting on the GPL'ing of YaST, SUSE's system administration and setup tool that is fairly well-integrated into KDE (and reportedly even more so in SUSE 9.1). While this suddenly makes SUSE all the more palatable to the free software community, it could also be quite interesting for KDE. YaST is potentially a starting point for a free cross-distribution, and eventually maybe even cross-platform, KDE-based administration tool. Read More

In a recent two part article, Linux Journal documented the transition of Sisler High School in Manitoba, Canada, to an LTSP-based desktop. In this informative interview, Tom Chance follows-up with Mr C.T. Leung on the ups and downs of the deployment of LTSP and KDE. "The cost saving is huge, in my case. [...] In my lab, I save $1000 for a copy of Windows NT/2000 server, $200 x 30 copies of Windows XP or equivalent, $1000 x 30 1GHz pc, $100 x 30 copies of Office, $100 x 30 C++. The total saving is about $45,000. However, the greatest saving is confidence! We are proud to be the first computer lab in our city doing all kinds of computer teaching without Windows!" Should be inspiring for other institutions considering the switch to a Linux-based desktop. Read More

Lukas Masek (aka luciash d' being) has announced the successful completion of the move of the KDE Wiki to the KDE Dot News server. With the move, KDE Wiki gains not only more computing resources, but also a new domain name in the form of wiki.kdenews.org. Many thanks to luci and of course to our sponsor Pierre-Emmanuel Muller of LeVillage. Read More

With the release of Qt 3.3 some days ago, IT Manager's Journal recently featured an interesting article on Trolltech. "How's this for a backhanded yet powerful endorsement of a company's products? Pixar Animation Studios, creator of such movie hits as "Finding Nemo," "Toy Story," and "Monsters Inc.", uses Trolltech's software throughout its operation but won't talk about it publicly because it thinks it would be giving away a competitive advantage." Commemorating the same occasion, OfB.biz also featured an interview with Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord. "With the potential for a substantial performance improvement, Qt 4 could be coming out about the time Nord estimates that GNU/Linux desktop adoption will start to become more mainstream. He remarked that there has been a shift in Qt purchasing [to Linux] over the past few years." Just a couple of articles you might find interesting. Read More

In a TechDOT.com interview, MEPIS Linux founder Warren Woodford explains their choice of desktop and toolkit: "The bottom line is that I believe KDE gives a better user experience and that Qt is a better application building framework." No arguing with that. Take a gander over to their photo gallery and project sections to see some of the desktop tools they are working on. Read More

As a followup to our previous Novell/SUSE article, we have further good news. Following the completion of the acquisition of SUSE by Novell, SUSE CEO Richard Seibt, who had previously expressed a strong commitment to KDE, has been promoted to president of Novell-EMEA and is now in a position to not only to maintain SUSE's strong KDE support but also to help deploy it more widely around the world. Even more interesting, SUSE R&D Vice President Markus Rex will now be responsible for Novell's Linux desktop activities and not solely Miguel and Nat as previously hinted. com.com is reporting further details. Read More

Rahul Gaitonde has written a fairly comprehensive review of KDE 3.2 Beta 2 for OSNews based on his 3 week trial. "The target machine - my only computer - is a Pentium II 266 MHz with 384 MB RAM, with an Intel i810E chipset. [...] The first thing you notice when you start up a few apps is - 'Boy, this is Fast!'. KDE 3.2 is significantly faster than 3.1, and certainly way faster than Gnome 2.4 on my machine. It reminds me of the kind of responsiveness that Windows 98 used to give me on this same configuration few years ago (minus the crashes). Konsole opens up almost instantaneously, and Konqueror takes only about 3 seconds the first time. I was afraid that the increase in bloat with every release of KDE since the 1.x series would one day prevent me from using this computer at all with KDE. I'm glad the guys over at KDE have so splendidly allayed my fears." The review has a lot of screenshots and other information on the release. As usual, Plastik gets huge props. Read More

With the KDE development and user communities flourishing more than ever, some people are anxious to drum up panic and drama surrounding corporate plays such as the acquisition of SUSE by Novell. As you might know, SUSE has thus far been a huge KDE believer and by using KDE has benefited from a loyal and enthusiastic Linux desktop userbase of its own. Last year, Richard Seibt CEO of SUSE confirmed this sentiment and pledged to maintain SUSE's strong support for KDE. A recent investigation by TechCentral reveals the same: "SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own." said John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region. "We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux." Read More

I'm pleased to announce that the dot-stories and dot-headlines mailing lists are finally back online. For those of you who don't know, dot-stories is the list to be on if you wish to receive the latest KDE Dot News in your inbox, and dot-headlines is the list you should subscribe to if you wish to receive the headlines only. Read More

eWEEK is currently featuring an article on the UserLinux and KDE debacle. Indeed, exciting times are ahead as we forge on with our plans for both KDE::Enterprise in general and the KDE/Debian project. You've heard of cool hacks to make KIO slaves accessible on a system-wide basis, you've heard of GTK/KDE integration (don't be surprised if KDE Gimp, a.k.a. Kimp, makes an effortless return), you've heard of the new Debian tools in development, you've heard of a KDE/Debian live CD. All of this and more is coming to fruitation. See you next year! Read More

Datschge pointed me at some interesting work by Rohit "kol" Kaul on KDE-Look.org. Complementing the recent efforts at KDE'fying OpenOffice.org is an icon theme generator as well as an accompanying static theme. The screenshots are very interesting, if anything. In addition, kol has done the same work on Evolution in a nice little showdown with Kontact. Also, who needs Keramikzilla when we got Konqueror? But there you go... we got it all. By the way, you might want to browse a few more screenshots of Sodipodi flaunting KDE integration -- some Karbon shots in there too. The pieces of the integration and assimilation puzzle are falling into place quite nicely! Read More

As part of an exciting new initiative by a group of KDE and Debian developers, a strategy has been formulated to conquer the enterprise desktop. The proposal covers integration and development of standard KDE features as well as developing Debian-specific integration such as an installer and system tools. We have a lot of Debian expertise on board, so focussing on a single Debian target instead of a wide variety of platforms makes a lot of sense here. We hope that similar groups with relevant expertise will form around other efforts such as Fedora and Cooker, where others like SUSE and Ark Linux are already doing an excellent job themselves. Want something controversial to discuss? Check out our proposal for integrating GTK+ into KDE. Read More

The Quanta team is pleased to announce the Bleeding Edge (BE) branch of Quanta Plus. Quanta 3.2 BE 1 features a number of new improvements including an "awesome new CSS editor", KFileReplace support, auto save and crash recovery, and much more. Note that VPL (WYSIWYG) mode requires kdelibs CVS or the upcoming beta. If you are looking for something to give thanks for this season, or you just like pretty screenshots, the Quanta Plus project is a worthy pick. The Quanta Plus project is supported by your donations. Read More

To the surprise of many, KDE turns up unexpectedly on the extended DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Dan, Robert and Antonio were the first of several to point out that KDE was clearly being used by Weta Digital (likely on IBM Linux Intellistations) in an animation shot with Gollum and Sam. This isn't the first time KDE has been spotted either on the silver screen, television, or being used behind the scenes of Hollywood. Read More

Waldo Bastian talks about KDE's involvement in freedesktop.org as part of a larger interview with several major players of the interoperability and common infrastructure movement. Waldo knocks down certain myths and covers everything from accessibility to the DCOP-inspired D-BUS. Read More

theKompany.com has just announced that Rekall, the rapid application development database tool for Linux, similar in concept to MS Access, has been released under the GPL. Rekall can be built with KDE3 support as well as Qt-only. "Rekall will be supported via a community portal www.rekallrevealed.org. The codebase will be available as source tarballs, and CVS access will also be available for those who wish to stay on the bleeding edge. Feedback, bug fixes and contributions are actively sought. This is meant to be totally community driven and oriented." KOffice has of course evolved Kexi (devel) in the meantime. It will be interesting to see how things play out with Kexi being very new and Rekall relatively mature, but either way the GPL'ing of Rekall is fantastic news for the Linux community at large. Thank you, theKompany.com for your KDE support. Read More

Andreas Beckermann wrote in to point out the huge amount of progress in the latest release of Boson (0.9), a real time strategy game for KDE. Screenshots here. Right after the beta announcement, KDE user illogic-al submitted his personal preview of KDE 3.2 on I-Kubed.org. It's been noted that there may be inaccuracies in the review -- but can you feel the excitement?! Finally, several of you also wrote in to point out Linus Torvalds' comments on KDE in a recent interview on OET: "I think the biggest single thing that has happened [...] has been a lot of good library frameworks. Qt in particular I think made a huge difference. And the KDE libraries and toolbuilder infrastructure. [...] I just noticed that the KDE people consider it more important to have it working, and sane.
I don't get involved very much. I used to send a lot of bug reports to the KDE people, until I didn't have bugs anymore and I stopped." Thanks, Linus! Read More

KDE Traffic #62 was quietly released last week. A whole lot of news in this one, including some discussion on the new KPrefs, GConf2, quick tab access in Konqueror, a lot of KOffice news (beta 3 feature freeze, better support for Word 6 and Word 95), and mention of the new pim.kde.org design. Thanks Russell! Read More

During the LinuxTag 2003 conference, KOffice hackers Ariya, Norbert and Phillip had a chance to meet and discuss the current state of KSpread as well as the future direction of the project. Plans include an Excel export filter as well as switching to the OpenOffice.org Calc format -- read on for the full KSpread Development Roadmap that resulted from the discussions. Read More

In the third article of what is turning into a regular column, Savanna Says: Kneat Knoppix! You should really read this if you had wanted to try or demo KDE before but you couldn't -- because you thought it required a full Linux or Unix installation. Read More

In the following interview, Andrew Stanley-Jones, original author of KSirc, gives us some of the insights behind the design of KSirc -- the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client for KDE. Read on for such gems as "No company I've ever worked for has offered to pay me to write a client that allows you to waste time chatting online" and "I argue [that chatting on IRC] keeps me awake during a chick flick". This interview was featured some time ago on KDE.de and is provided in English courtesy of Andreas C. Diekmann. Read More

After her review of JuK, Savanna is back with a unique perspective on the importance of Kontact (preview) to KDE's success. Read on for an entertaining write up of this up and coming app. Read More

In this entertaining review, Savanna takes us through her discovery of JuK, a new pearl in the treasure trove of KDE applications. Expect to see JuK ship with KDE 3.2 since it has already made an appearance in the KDE Multimedia module. Kudos to Savanna for taking the time to contribute the review and, of course, hats off to the developers of JuK! Read More

The ContentPeople are currently featuring a review of Quanta Plus by Jono Bacon. "Quanta manages to balance a full array of features, without useless bloat. I found very few features within the environment that I didn't use regularly. To me, this is evidence of how careful the developers are to keep Quanta Plus lean, rather than flashy. " As you may recall we recently featured an interview with the folk behind Quanta. Quanta is the kind of application that makes KDE look good, so keep those donations coming. Read More

KDE enthusiast Siddhu Warrier has kindly contributed a write-up of his experiences with setting up a Samba server using Linux and KDE. For those of you who don't know what Samba is, the bottom line is that with a little black magic, you can conveniently access files, directories and printers on a Linux machine from a Windows machine and vice-versa all over the network. Intrigued? Pull up your sleeves and check out the article. Thank you, Siddhu, and to the rest of you: caveat emptor! Read More

Helio Chissini de Castro of Conectiva recently gave a KDE speech at Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and was kind enough to write up his experiences for the rest of us. In recent years, Rio Grande do Sul has become a GNU and consequently GNOME stronghold, so prepare yourself for an entertaining if not graphic read! Update: 06/13 20:20 by N: Only fair to point out Miguel's comments on this article. Read More

With the release of Trolltech's Qt 3.2.0 beta1, the upcoming KDE 3.2 has gained increased support for Indic languages both in terms of rendering and text input. Currently, Devanagari (screenshot), Bengali (bn-2, bn-3, bn-1) and Tamil have been tested but Syriac, Tibetan, Khmer and others are expected to work as well. Dirk Mueller writes: "The KDE Project encourages interested people who understand these languages to submit feedback and help the i18n teams (Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Tibetan, etc) with contributing a fully localized KDE 3.2." These languages require Open Type fonts and a working Xft installation. Read More

Cavendish informs us that the developer documentation (en) for Qt 3.0 (en) has now been translated to Simplified Chinese. Progress information is available here, and a mailing list is also available for those interested. New: translated Qt OpenGL tutorial. Read More

Russell Miller recently took over as maintainer and editor for KC KDE (from a long line of predecessors) and has lost no time in releasing issue #47! This week he covers everything from KImageEdit MMX optimizations to KDE hacker Ellis Whitehead's joyful step up in life. Congratulations Ellis, and thanks Russell! The more news the merrier... Read More

In this fascinating interview, Eric Laffoon and András Mantia give us a glimpse into the world of the Quanta Plus project. Read on for everything from tantalising references to Kommander, billed by Eric to be part of the foundations for the next generation desktop and user experience, to details of future plans for Quanta VPL (Visual Page Layout). We also launch a call for help from the users, either in the form of Quanta contributions or much-needed donations to help sponsor the work. Read More

George Staikos recently added a fun new feature to Konqueror that sidebar lovers everywhere should appreciate. Those of you running Konqueror from CVS (or a recent enough Mozilla) can go to the Dot's new configure page to add a nifty KDE Dot News side panel to their browser. The rest of you, while waiting for KDE 3.2, can view some screenshots illustrating this feature on: KDE Dot News (shot2), Gnome Desktop News, KDE and GNOME both, CNN.com and National Geographic. Those of you who think this feature is neat will also enjoy the upcoming RSS sidebar news applet (shot1, shot2) by Marcus Camen, Ian Reinhart Geiser (RSS DCOP service) and Frerich Raabe (librss). This plugin, currently available from kdenonbeta, should work with any existing RDF/RSS news source. Thanks to George, Marcus and Ian for supplying the screenshots, on top of these very cool hacks. Read More

Last week, CORBA-lover Michael Meeks released some slides that caused something of a stir amongst some in the KDE community. In his slide, Michael Meeks attempted to make the case for GNOME as the only viable desktop on Unix by directing the heat of his argument at the cost of Trolltech's Qt -- the wonderful cross-platform toolkit on which KDE is based -- for proprietary development. Rising up to the challenge, George Staikos has written a nice article that compares the cost of Qt vs GTK in the real world. Read More

Earlier this week, NewsFactor Network spoke to KDE developers Ralf Nolden and David Faure as part of a report on the Linux Desktop. Ralf talks about enterprise features in KDE such as Kiosk mode and desktop sharing (interactive demo), while David covers the KDE Kolab groupware solution and Kontact. Read More

CeBIT 2003 kicks off tomorrow and as usual KDE will be present. The KDE team will be showcasing current developments scheduled for KDE 3.2, Rainer Endres will be giving a talk on KDE on the corporate desktop and Martin Konold will be presenting the latest and greatest on the KDE Kolab Groupware Solution. Plus, be sure to check out the Opie Team for synching KDE with PDAs, and feel free to join the key-signing party. Read More

OSNews.com is featuring an interesting three-way interview (5 pages) with KDE's very own Waldo Bastian and Aaron J. Seigo as well as GNOME's Havoc Pennington. An interesting diversity of opinions on various UI and usability issues is presented. "On the Ok/Cancel issue: KDE has implemented things in such a way that allows all KDE applications to have the order of these buttons flipped with a change to a single line of code. It is exactly this sort of brilliant design that allows KDE to be so internally consistent. So the question often comes down to whether or not we should make a change, rather than if we can. Personally I think it is irresponsible to impose personal aesthetics on your users in a seemingly random fashion by disrupting the interface they know without very compelling reasons to do so." Read More

The KDE Web Team is proud to present a new and exciting design for the official KDE site! This is the first overhaul of the flagship homepage since Kurt's vastly successful update more than two years ago. The KDE Web Team has maintained a focus on standards-compliance as well as improved the overall usability and accessibility of the site. Also featured prominently is an overhaul of the content as well as the implementation of a whole new design matching the shiny new Keramik/Crystal look from KDE 3.1. Read More

In breaking news, convicted French hacker Philippe Fremy has been accused of spreading malicious rumours regarding an alleged stab at Qt and companion PyQt by the highly regarded IBM developerWorks. But the concerted effort at dragging people's names through the mud does not end there. Emotions ran high when it was noted that the peeps at Slashdot couldn't leave IBM's rumoured courtship of Qtopia alone. Read More

We're pleased to note that KDE-Forum.org is now back online after a rocky start. A big thanks goes out to Pierre-Emmanuel Muller and Cyberbrain who are now hosting this site, and of course to zenok, fan of KDE and creator of KDE-Forum.org for web-based KDE-related discussions. Please note that Cyberbrain is also the host of KDE Dot News as well as several other less obvious KDE services and has been single-handedly responsible for virtually trouble free operation and peace of mind since June 2002. Other KDE-related web forums available are: KDE-Forum.de for German speakers and the KDE-France forums for French speakers. In other good news, Frank reports that the terrific and invaluable KDE-Look.org site has found new sponsorship from Lindows.com -- a big thanks goes out to Kevin Carmony, President and CEO of Lindows.com, as well as to everyone else who offered to help the site. The KDE community should feel proud to have so many friends and willing sponsors. Read More

Trolltech has announced a new beta of Qt Script for Applications. In the words of the blurb: "The QSA toolkit is made up of the following components: QSA library, which the developer of the C++ application uses to make their Qt-based applications scriptable. Qt Script, an easy-to-learn, multiplatform interpreted scripting language. Qt Script is based on the ECMAScript standard (as is JavaScript) . Qt Scripter, a multiplatform IDE which developers can make available to their end-users. Qt Scripter (screenshot) can be used to write and edit code, to visually design forms, and to run and debug scripts." With this release, QSA is now available under the GPL. Very cool stuff and should bring a whole new level of application extensibility to KDE/Qt applications that need it. Update: 12/20 18:09 by N: Looks like we forgot about KDE's own KJSEmbed (README, doc). Read More

Boson, the real-time 3D strategy game for KDE has been freshly ported to OpenGL in its 0.7 incarnation (screenshots). There is no AI yet, so a minimum of 2 players is required. From UnixReview.com: "Do you miss the nice, slick GUI CD burning programs under Windows and Mac OS X? Or just want to stop using command-line tools to burn your CDs? K3b might just be what the doctor ordered." Check out the full review of K3b including screenshots. Finally, a couple of people wrote in to point out the launch of the KDE-Forum.de web forums for German speakers. English web forums should be available soon. Read More

Corey Taylor has written an article for OSNews.com called "KDE 3.1 RC2: I'm Hammering". He has some font and icon issues with Red Hat 8.0, but overall seems happy. It's good to see people actually appreciating the new eyecandy and all the hard work by the artist team and developers. A wider range of opinions can be seen from their readers -- one even provides some nice screenshots of Liquid and Keramik. Sit tight for KDE 3.1, which has been delayed in favour of more RCs. Read More

Switch wrote us a while ago to inform us of unofficial KDE 3.0.4 packages for Debian PowerPC. Instructions here in Spanish -- English users just have to grab the sources.list line. In related news, Zack Rusin wrote in to inform us of the Debian Desktop project. "The Debian Desktop subproject is a group of volunteers who want to create the best possible operating system for home and corporate workstation use. Our motto is 'Software which Just Works'". Proper integration of KDE into Debian seems to be considered an important part of this project. In fact, one of the school labs here uses Debian with KDE 2.2.2 provided on the workstations. It's done fairly well with few unpleasant surprises. Even better, the major teaching labs here use FreeBSD thin clients with KDE 3.x installed as the desktop. Very cool. Read More

Have you ever wondered how to export your appointments from Microsoft Outlook and re-import them in KDE's KOrganizer? The second KOrganizer workshop (de) covers Randy Pearson's Outlook2VCal tool in fully illustrated detail. For more information on the KOrganizer workshop series click here. Good work, Klaus! Read More

Ismail Donmez wrote in to point out that ZDNet UK is featuring a nice article on the upcoming KDE 3.1. The article is based on Dre's excellent teaser preview, and despite one or two slight inaccuracies, provides some very nice publicity for KDE aimed at the general computing public. Read More

For those of you not yet convinced of the evils of the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), Philippe Fremy presents the English version of an article by Pascal Audoux that pits MFC against Qt. "The [Qt] architecture is a good object-oriented one and was obviously intelligently designed. The result is a toolkit very consistent regarding naming, inheritance, class organisation and methods. Method arguments are the ones you want to supply, no more. They always come in the same order for different classes. And the return value is logical. Everything is powerful and simple at the same time." I also found this old comparison of Qt to Java (see this one too) rather interesting. Read More

Sebastian Biot looks at KDE Usability in the first of a series of studies. "While some participants noted that KDE looked different from Windows, none seemed bothered by the differences and the look-and-feel of KDE. Users identified all the elements of the interface without any trouble including KDE's Konqueror and KMail icons. Most users seemed to understand the K menu's presence and function intuitively and they used it much more than I had anticipated. This test conducted in early July 2002 with four participants outlines of some of KDE 3.0's shortcomings including inconsistencies in KFileDialog and the difficulties of working with Konqueror's embedded viewers." It's good to see people stepping up to do this kind of work -- the good news is that discussion of the study has already been started (kde-usability, kde-cafe). Read More

Linux Today takes a closer look at Kernel Cousin KDE and the new KDE Myths site, particularly how they originated (1, 2) as a community effort by Aaron J. Seigo. "Our spotlight here is on Aaron's KDE Kernel Cousin. Aaron started as "a happy KDE user." But he wanted more. He wanted to get involved in the KDE project himself, so to him that meant getting to know as much about the people, culture, and goings on as possible. Soon he found himself on not only kernel issues for KDE, but also on more than a dozen other lists related to various aspects of KDE development. Several thousand pieces of mail a week flooded into his mailbox." A great read and a nice tribute to Aaron. Read More

A brand new alpha of the breath-taking KDE 3.1 development branch has been announced. This release sports everything from wonderful new eye candy to tons of popular new features including new and exciting "easter eggs" (aka bugs) just waiting to be discovered. Remember, this is not a stable release -- those of you concerned with stability should use KDE 3.0.2, whereas those of you who want to help KDE 3.1 be the best KDE ever should use this alpha. Kudos to Dre for writing the announcement and to the tireless Dirk Mueller for coordinating this release. Party! Read More

MozillaQuest is running a nice little story on the upcoming Tabs feature in Konqueror. "The K Desktop Environment (KDE) certainly has done lots to narrow the gap between the Linux desktop and the Microsoft Windows desktop. And the addition of tabbed-browsing to KDE's Konqueror browser is one more large step in closing that gap. In our opinion, the K Desktop Environment already is just as good as, if not better than, the MS Windows desktop." Stay tuned for the next alpha! Read More

Tux Reports is featuring a brief review of KWord 1.2beta2 particularly highlighting the popular WYSIWYG feature. "KWord launched into a beautiful layout. Since I hadn't seen any screenshots of the new layout, it caught my attention. Nice job!" The review includes some nice screenshots. Read More

KDE-nl was present at Linux@work 2002 last June and they've written up an nice bilingual report on the event, complete with annotated photos. "In the morning at 8.00 AM we arrived at the Radisson Hotel. Fabrice and Rob already arranged the booth(table): at the wall you could find a poster of Konqi in A0-format, on the table there was one laptop, some Linux and KDE mascottes, KDE-flyers, a SuSE 8.0 box and a giant Tux. We also had a bust for displaying T-shirts. The laptop showed an installed SuSE 8.0 with the standard out-of-the-box KDE 3.0-desktop along with KOffice 1.2-beta1." Nice job, guys. Read More

As scheduled, the KWinTV rewrite has left the vapourware stage with the first alpha now available. It looks great already, and should become a killer application for those of you owning a TV card. " This release is intended as a basic demonstration of the design of the application. It provides functionality in the form of support for Xv video streams, OSS mixer (/dev/video, mixer 0), and XML channel files. It most likely only works on Linux, and in fact may only work on ia32 hardware. Camera devices may or may not work." See the Alpha 1 announcement for full details on what is and what isn't working at this point. Read More

KOffice 1.2beta2 is out, sporting an impressive number of changes, with improvements all around the board including substantial filter enhancements, footnotes in KWord, and templates in KSpread. "This release, which is available in 56 languages, includes a frame-based, full-featured word processor (KWord); a presentation application; (KPresenter); a spreadsheet application; (KSpread); a flowchart application; (Kivio); business quality reporting software; (Kugar); and two vector-drawing applications (alpha) (Kontour and Karbon14). Additionally, KOffice includes robust embeddable charts (KChart) and formulas (KFormula) as well as a built-in thesaurus (KThesaurus) and numerous import and export filters." Read the full announcement for details. Huge congrats to the KOffice team for their hard work and dedication, and kudos to Dre for writing the announcement. Wooo! Read More

A new "modding site" has interviewed our own Cristian Tibirna, one of the first KDE core developers. Paul Wiegers wrote in to point out that Konqueror has gained more recognition in the Internet community, this time in the form of support for HierMenus. The same site also features a flattering introduction to Konqueror with screenshots. Out of frustration, our own Rik Hemsley has written up an article on dirty reporting. And, last but not least, congrats to the Gnomes on their new release! The latest GARNOME even features KDE 3.0.1. Read More

By popular demand, we are answering some of the most frequently asked questions at the dot. Read the following FAQ if you are interested in understanding how the dot operates, how best to contribute articles, and how to help improve the dot in general. Nothing is really set in stone here. The FAQ will be updated as required and as per your comments, and may eventually be moved to a different final location. With your help, KDE Dot News can hopefully improve and serve your needs better in the future. Read More

The KOrganizer website is featuring a new workshop series. The first awesome document is chockful of screenshots and useful tips on how to use group scheduling. In other butt-kicking news, the first stable release of KOrganizer/Embedded for Qtopia has been released. Get organized! Read More

The latest issue of Kernel Cousin KDE is out. This week read about the KDE 3.1 release schedule and feature plan, KOffice news, Kicker Xinerama tweaks, KDE/GNOME interoperability, KDE on HP/UX, and kde-edu discussions. Kudos to the KC KDE Team! Read More

We run into the best of luck at KDE Dot News. This time the air-conditioner in our server room died, resulting in a temperature of 52 degrees Celcius and a core meltdown. Since we had also been suffering from limited bandwidth for a while now -- since the week of the KDE3 release when we managed to kill our host's pipe -- we decided to take this opportunity to move to a new hosting solution. Happily, we were awash with wonderful offers for help and support of all kinds from the community. It was an extremely tough call but we finally settled for a generous offer from CEO Guillaume Esnault, Robert Royer and Pierre-Emmanuel Muller (also involved with the KDE French translation team) of Cyberbrain for professional ISP hosting in a securised datacenter, including a dedicated Compaq ML 330 Proliant (as not seen in Star Trek) directly connected to two 9Gb black fibers (open bandwidth use), full support, backups, and 24/24 monitoring. A word of warning though: Expect some minor downtime as we further upgrade the hardware over the coming days. On the bright side, once we are settled, we will be able to support other KDE sites and services on this baby. Read on to see why we should be proud of this community. Update: 06/21 14:31:22 CEST by N: The upgrade has been successfully completed. Say 'bonjour' to all of 640 MB of RAM and a new 36 GB SCSI harddrive! Thank you, Cyberbrain team. Read More

Laurent Rathle wrote in to plug the Kde France site where French speakers can enjoy forums, news, translations of KDE Dot News items as well as KC KDE issues, amongst other resources. Alongst with KDE.org/fr/, KDE French users should be well catered for. Read More

Kernel Cousin KDE returns from its brief hiatus with two new rewly editors in charge, Juergen Appel and Zack Rusin, and a new team of contributors working directly on the kckde module in CVS. Issue 37 covers everything from the new and exciting KMathCenter (screenshots) to Kopete discussions, Kicker improvements, and a brand new Keramik window decoration (shot1, shot2, shot3). Wooo! Read More

As part of the May 2002 issue of "Application of the month" series on KDE.de, Klaus Stärk has interviewed Håvard Frøiland, author of KTouch. KTouch is part of the KDE Edutainment Project and provides a quick and fun way to learn the useful and impressive skill of touch typing. See the main homepage for further details and screenshots -- the interview follows. Read More

Recently, there have been some comments in the press regarding KDE's look and feel which were, to say the least, rather unflattering. The comments centered mainly around KDE's icons and the overall elegancy of the desktop. Like many of us, Mosfet felt these comments were unwarranted and somewhat misinformed, but he took the extra step of writing up a public response. I'm glad someone did. A lot of people have always enjoyed KDE's default look and feel, but with sites like KDE-Look.org (includes icon themes), appsy's theme section, as well as the new dedicated themes section on freshmeat, there are now more possibilities than ever to adjust KDE to your personal liking. KDE 3.1 will offer even more. Read More

Thomas Capricelli, Philippe Fremy, and Mickael Marchand are pleased to present the first ever stable version of KVim, finally bringing us "the power of VIM with KDE's friendliness". In case that means nothing to you, VIM stands for Vi IMproved and has become the defacto standard version of Vi on most Linux distributions. Vi is the traditional, ever popular, text editor on UNIX systems which can sometimes be a challenge to new users. As the names imply, VIM adds many powerful improvements over Vi, and KVim wraps the whole thing up in a nice KDE interface. Best of all, KVim offers a KPart for out-of-process embedding in KDE. The KPart can currently embed either of GVim or KVim in Konqueror, but further work is required before proper support for KDevelop, KMail and Kate is available. It also looks like KVim will be integrated into the main VIM source distribution in the future. Great news! Read More

The toolkit we know and love has finally been ported to the text console. The Qt-Console project reports having reached the point of successfully running ports of Konsole, KMail and even Konqueror on the console. The project takes KDE portability to a whole new level -- think running KDE apps on your cellphone -- and ranks right up there with the Textmode Quake hack in terms of coolness. Just don't expect High-Performance Liquid to work. Read More

After a brief hiatus that seemed closer to an eternity, I'm pleased to report that the dot is back and all is good. A big "Thank You!" goes out to Chris McDonough and Jim Fulton of Zope Corporation, Chris Withers of Squishdot fame, and the wonderful Zope community at #zope for their excellent support throughout this matter. Read More

Lo and behold Tink's latest community undertaking, the KDE Cafe mailing-list. In her own words: "KDE-Cafe is the virtual chill-out zone of KDE, a cross between Slashdot and IRC, a cross between the local pub and the opinions page of your newspaper. Specially designed for KDE addicts like you." So there. More details ahead. Read More

Chris Howells wrote in to announce his latest project, KDE Worldwide, to the world. KDE Worldwide wants to promote KDE internationally by providing information and to assist those interested in the localised and translated versions of KDE. A worldwide developer map is currently in the making -- if you are a contributor/developer, please help complete it by submitting your coordinates. There's a set of relevant links and those of you interested in this project can join the mailing list. In particular, Chris is looking to host more international content, including material such as any language tutorials, articles, screenshots, and content that could help enhance the international community's appreciation and experience of KDE. Read More

This week's edition of KC KDE is out. Read about the huge scary number of KDE3 bugfixes that have emerged from the low-profile KDE III gathering, everaldo's Crystal project (with plenty of screenshots), Kicker's menu sidebar, an aRts update, the new kde-promo FAQ, Karbon moving into KOffice, and more. Read More

For those of you waiting for KDE news from FOSDEM, Rob Kaper wrote in with a photo impression of the event. In addition, Philippe Fremy and Thomas Capricelli have provided us with their own report including links to their interviews with FOSDEM organizer Raphael Bauduin, Python author Guido van Rossum, the KOffice team, and more photos. Enjoy. Read More

David Faure, proud owner of an excellent t-shirt, has written a very nice article for IBM developerWorks. David gives a beautiful overview of KParts and touches on everything from DCOP to XML-GUI, XParts, and CORBA. "KParts is also used in more high-level interfaces, such as the TextEditor interface. The former is a complete interface that models the API of a text editor so that applications can interchangeably use any text editor available that implements this interface. vi users will love being able to type mail in KMail using a vi text-editor component (such a component is under development). A general ImageViewer interface is under development as well." Great to see KDE development getting the exposure it deserves. Read More

While we wait for KDE CVS and KDE mail to be resurrected, Hetz wrote in with a pointer to .dep's impressions of a pre-beta2 version of KDE3. It's actually quite positive (he finds KDE3 stable already), with screenshots, but also not without some criticism of KMail changes and a good point about the difficult-to-kill KOrganizer alarm daemon. Read More

As MacOS X, and arguably, GNOME, have shown, many people love photorealistic icons despite the theoretical trade-offs with usability. So if you've ever wondered about the philosophy behind KDE's default icons, you might want to read Torsten Rahn's recent article on the matter. Tackat explains how KDE's default icons are a compromise between good usability and beauty, using a mock up of traffic signs to illustrate his points. To conclude, Tackat proposes a slightly different approach for KDE 3.1: Add more photorealistic design to the application icons, while sticking to 2D for toolbars and mimetypes. But wait, there's more. In related news, Kristof Borrey has announced the release of iKons 0.5.5. More importantly, Kristof is now working on getting iKons 0.6 in shape for inclusion in KDE3. For other icon activity, check out everaldo et al on the kde-artists list. I should also point you to the growing number of KDE icon themes on KDE-Look.org. Read More

TrustCommerce has spent the the last 12 months or so transitioning to KDE/Linux-based desktops for general staff, with "resounding success". As Chief Software Architect, Adam Wiggins has written an excellent essay detailing the situation, requirements, issues, and the process of switchover. Apps such as KMail, Konqueror, and KOrganizer have been successfully deployed, along with the main KDE desktop. Check Part II of the essay for those details Read More

Matthias Ettrich is proposing a new strategy for more strongly integrating Qt-only applications into KDE. It's an intriguing proposal and relevant to KDE, considering the growing number of cross-platform but Qt-only applications becoming available. The initial "not-perfect but simple" basic idea is that a small libQtKDE proxy library would invoke KDE functionality when available, or otherwise fall back to Qt functionality. This would not involve changing Qt or KDE, but would require the programmer to link against the libQtKDE wrapper. The benefits for the former Qt-only developer is that KDE functionality would be made available cheaply without giving up the Qt-only cross-platform approach. The benefits for the KDE user is that what would have otherwise been a pure Qt-only application could now potentially integrate much more strongly with KDE. Good thing or bad thing? Read on for the full details of the proposal. Read More

LinuxPlanet is running a review of KSpread. The article is nicely written, warmly positive, but also points out some of the more serious missing features of KSpread, such as a lack of spreadsheet functions. "As far as the interface goes, everything was simple and clean. There is a function drop-down menu if you want it, or you can use a Formula Editor to build your functions. Using the Formula Editor gave you the distinct advantage of receiving an explanation of what each function was and also brought up ways to further modify the function at hand." I'm far from an office person myself (hence don't have any real KSpread test cases), but I could not reproduce the claim that opening modest-sized KSpread files was slow, on my old Celery running Mandrake 8.1 GE. Read More

Our friend Raphael Bauduin has interviewed KDE bindings guru, Richard Dale, on FOSDEM.Org. "The bindings are regenerated for each KDE release. I take a patch of the manual edits that were needed for the previous release. Then run the new headers through kalyptus, and apply the patch of manual edits. Recently, it took about a week and a half to regenerate the bindings for C/Objective-C/Java, after about two months worth of KDE C++ header changes from the previous release." Richard has done an excellent job, almost single-handedly paving the way for new and exciting KDE bindings. If C++ is not your forte, be sure to investigate his work and check the KDE bindings page for other sparse details. Read More

Thanks to the efforts of Christopher Molnar, KDE mailing lists are now accessible read-only through NNTP at news.uslinuxtraining.com (news, web). In other words, KDE Mailing Lists are now neatly accessible through your favourite newsreader (KNode, tin). The lists are also available through anonymous IMAP at the same server. See the official mailing list page for more details. In related news, Jono Bacon wrote in to point us to the new KDE::Enterprise Forum over at KDE::Enterprise. The forum provides a place for discussions regarding the use of KDE within businesses, education, charities, and so on. Enjoy. Read More

Benjamin C. Meyer wrote in with the news that Kinkatta has been ported to Qt/Embedded. Kinkatta-Lite has been tested on Sharp's new Zaurus as well as the iPAQ. Ben will be demo'ing Kinkatta-Lite on the Zaurus at CES Las Vegas, courtesy of Sharp, and will release source and binaries when he gets back. Until then we will have to content ourselves with the screenshots. Jono Bacon is currently organising the KDE presence for Linux Expo Birmingham, UK on May 29th + 30th. Jono is scheduled to talk on KDE in business, while Richard Moore will be giving a talk on XMLGUI. Get involved. Finally, Someone wrote in to point us to this article at DebianPlanet. Sadly it appears that the long time maintainer of KDE Debian packages, Ivan E. Moore, has stepped down. Ivan has been responsible for some of the best KDE packages around, and his work will be missed. Other Debian developers have stepped up to fill in his shoes. Read More

Eric Laffoon reports that the stories of the demise of GPL'd Quanta have been greatly exaggerated, and to prove it, the Quanta Plus developers have released Quanta Plus 2.0. For those of you who don't know yet, Quanta Plus is a popular and rapid web development tool for KDE. Read More

Chris Howells wrote in to inform us of the new KDEPrint site at printing.kde.org. The site is chockful of information including pretty screenshots, a description of new KDEPrint features slated for KDE3, information, presentation, and general documentation including a faq, handbook, and tutorials. But wait, there's more! For no extra cost, you may subscribe to a brand new kde-print mailing list where both users and developers are welcome. So if you have trouble or issues with KDEPrint not already dealt with by the site, feel free to subscribe to that list. Enjoy. Read More

This week, Aaron J. Seigo, Juergen Appel and Rob Kaper present the jam-packed Kernel Cousin KDE #26. Read about how Linux father, Linus Torvalds, is also a model KDE user and bug reporter, LISa the new Lan Browsing Wizard, Kinkatta plugins, the Boson real-time strategy game, a KDE Script Interface, news of a kdeedu module, the KDE3 beta1 week delay, and much more. Thanks, guys! Read More

Guillaume Laurent was the first of many to point out that the KDE on Cygwin project has successfully ported KDE 2.2.1 to Cygwin. What this basically means is that you can now have a recent KDE running under Windows with the help of Cygwin and Cygwin/XFree86. The full announcement is here. This is an early port in pre-alpha form so there are still problems, but a large part of the issue has been tackled. Many congratulations and kudos to the hackers involved. Now who's going to use this? Will there be a native windows port? Check out the faq for the answers to the most common questions. Read More

Daniel Naber wrote in some time ago to inform us of a new XML plugin for Kate. "The plugin gives hints about what's allowed at a certain position in an XML file, according to the file's DTD. It will list possible elements, attributes, attribute values or entities, depending on the cursor position. You can also close an open element with a keyboard shortcut. DocBook is also supported, so hopefully people will use Kate + XML plugin to write KDE documentation." This should be useful to the tons of us working with structured data in XML. I gave KXMLEditor a whirl the other day but although it looks nice, it basically ignored my DTD. I hear Richard Moore also has XMElegance in the making. Yup. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo wrote in to point out that a new issue of the worthy Kernel Cousin KDE is out. This week, read updates on multimedia in KDE3, future plans for Noatun, the elusive PyKDE2, a brand new JavaScript engine, and more. Hopefully, we'll also get some details on the new DCOP drooliness (more, more, more) soon. :-) Read More

In the latest news batch, Per Wigren wrote in to inform us that the worthy KonCD has been added to KDE CVS. I've used this CD burner front-end successfully in the distant past, and it has evidently progressed in leaps and bounds since then -- screenies ici. On the less fun side of things, we have had news of legal wranglings between Future Technologies (site no longer accessible -- this is the FTKDE company) and KDE developer Mosfet who wrote the popular Liquid style, also named FTLiquid at some point. See Mosfet.org, Slashdot and LinuxToday to get some of the story. On a happier note, Benjamin Meyer gleefully points out that Kinkatta 1.00 is out. He has worked hard to provide a fully functional and stable (not to mention purty) AOL(TM) chat client. Finally, for those of you having trouble with concurrent KDE installations, Pupeno has nicely written up his experiences on installing another KDE (such as KDE CVS) alongside a stable KDE installation. He uses Mandrake 8.1, but the experience should be useful to anyone having trouble with the regular instructions. Read More

Klaus Staerk alerted us to the launch of pim.kde.org. The main goal of this site is to organize KDE Personal Information Management news updates as well as group together all the related projects and goals. The site already has some basic information about not so well-known PIM projects such as Kandy, Karm, and KAlarm. Also available is information on current and future roadmaps for KDE PIM. Read More

Jan-Oliver Wagner writes: "We are happy to announce that the German Federal Agency for IT Security, BSI, has contracted us (Intevation, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult and g10 Code) to ensure Free Software support for their email security standard, Sphinx. Sphinx basically consists of S/MIME, a PKIX compatible X.509 profile, together with certificate revocation lists (CRLs) based on LDAP. The code developed will be modular allowing inclusion in several MUAs released under the GNU GPL." Sphinx-enabling KMail and Mutt are essential goals, see gnupg/aegypten/ for more information. Read More

In a commendable flurry of submissions, Anonymous wrote in with a link to an announcement from China-based Dynasoft on a "sophisticated Chinese KDE desktop environment, hybridly-licensed, and based on Red Hat Linux 7.1". Looks promising (English, Chinese), although the screenshot section is a bit wack. Andreas Beckermann wrote in with an announcement for KGame -- the short is that KGame is part of libkdegames and provides a sweet API to make the life of the game designer that much easier. Jono Bacon wrote in to tell us about the first interview on enterprise.kde.org; it's with Shawn Gordon of theKompany. Moritz Moeller-Herrmann pointed us to an indepth perspective on CDE, KDE, GNOME featured on ZDNet. Naturally, they like KDE. Finally, George Russell wrote in with the latest updates on all of two (2) upcoming KDE releases: "The developer site has a preliminary release schedule for a 2.2.2 release - incremental bug fixes over 2.2.1 - details are here on the KDE site. The KDE 3 Alpha 1 release will be on Friday. Release coordinator spells out the reasons for the 1 week delay in this email on the core development lists." Thar you go, thanks to all. Read More

Normally a new beta wouldn't be dot news, but the new Qt 3.0.0 beta6 release is notable for one reason: QCom is gone. In a mail sent to qt-interest, Trolltech explains, "The feedback we received on this module during the 3.0 beta phase has been mixed. Many users think this module lacks the intuitiveness and compactness that they have learned to expect from a Qt API. Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to withdraw the QCom API from the Qt 3.0 release. We will continue to develop this API until it is evolved enough for our customers, and will include the improved version in a later release.". They also note that the new Qt3 plugin functionality is still available under a much simplified API, see the changelog for full details. IMHO, this is all quite reasonable and is probably for the best -- even on the dot, people turned out to be quite opinionated about QCom, although most of the heat seemed to be directed towards COM itself. As a final aside, theKompany is pushing its Korelib as an alternative option. Read More

Some time ago, Bowie J. Poag wrote in with a link to the System 26 GUI Component Stockpile, a large public repository of raw materials such as individual sounds (clicks, beeps, bells and whistles) and images (buttons, textures, pixmaps, etc) specifically geared for use within GUIs. This may to be a good place to start if one were building a new KDE theme. And speaking of themes, kde.themes.org seems to be back although there does not appear to be any recent submissions. Are KDE users simply not interested in themes these days? Also a while back, rsk wrote in with this news: "Wow, it looks like the same guy that offered up all the suggestions for integration of the KDE PIM features has put his money where his mouth is. He is offering $350 and any product from Tux Store to the developer(s) that implements the features he's asked for in his story." I'm unaware of the current status of this contest, but any KDE developer interested can check out the full offer and contact the author directly for details. Finally, Robin Sharf wrote in to inform us of a port of Konqueror/Embedded to BeOS (with screenshot). Update: 09/07 6:00 PM by N: Also managed to miss this one: The first releases (since the AOL fiasco) of Kinkatta are out. Go to the page for a bigger update and the full skinny. On the plus side, KDE support is (literally) looking good but Benjamin would like to step down as maintainer and is seeking someone to fill in those shoes. Read More

Eva wrote in to inform us that the Solaris packages for KDE 2.2 are finally ready. They are targeted at the Sparc and Ultra Sparc architectures, and work with Solaris 6/2.6, 7/2.7 and 8, and possibly Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1 as well (Don't blame us for these confusing version numbers). You can get them here -- be sure to check out the README. You may also be pleased to learn of the new kde-solaris list which already has a great number of subscribers despite the fact that it has not yet been announced! This is a good list to use if you are having problems with the binaries. Hopefully more of you running Sun systems can now enjoy KDE on your desktop and with less problems. Read More

The dot was down again this weekend as many of you had noticed, and while I myself was blissfully enjoying Halifax. This time it was the result of somebody exploiting a security hole in our apache configuration and DoS'ing us in the process. We've closed up the problem, and hopefully we will go forward with our plans to provide better availability in the future. In worse news, master.kde.org, one of the key KDE servers that handles mail, mailing lists, KDE FTP, several websites, and some other duties has been unreachable for some time now -- word on the street is that the machine has suffered a big harddrive crash over at Uni-Tuebingen. As a result of this, primary KDE communications have been cut, packagers can't upload the binary packages for KDE 2.2, and inevitably the KDE 2.2 official release has been delayed. Hang in there folks, hardworking KDE people are busy migrating essential services over to other servers. In more fun news, Newsforge is running some interesting coverage of the Linux/KDE deployment by the City of Largo, Florida, that we featured on the dot some time ago. (as seen on Slashdot) Other tidbits that may be of interest: KMonop has now been renamed to Atlantik, and Otter wrote in with the good news that kde.themes.org is not dead but simply undergoing a big upgrade. Get ready to submit those KDE2 themes! Read More

Matthias Ettrich's talk on Universal Components at LinuxForum (also given at LinuxTag) is finally now online. You can view the slides as you watch in Real Video format (part 1, part 2) or listen in ogg format. Matthias covers everything from basic concepts of components to CORBA, COM, Universal Objects, and UCOM in Qt3. Particularly notable is the coverage of Universal Objects, which is apparently a concept that originated from a Borland/Kylix developer, and the promise of future component interoperability between the likes of Qt, KDE, Kylix, Phoenix Basic, Python, GTK+ and what not. Read More

Benjamin Meyer, author of Kinkatta (the app formerly known as Kaim, renamed at the kind suggestion of AOL), is ready to present his next project, Sondra. Sondra is an on-the-fly MP3 playlist generator that is really quite original in its concept. You can rank a song while listening to it, and this personal ranking, along with some other pertinent information such as the number of times you have listened to the song, is written to the MP3 using the new ID3 format. Sondra uses this information to generate the playlist on the fly, creating the amazing feeling that one is listening to a radio station but one that is particularly geared towards one's preferences. Sondra has a KDE-interface, a command-line interface, and the backend is implemented as a library, so anyone can use it with maximum flexibility. Read More

George Russell wrote in to inform us of the KHTML port to AtheOS. "The main focus for V0.3.5 [of AtheOS] however has been on the KHTML-based web browser. I have ported the HTML parser/renderer used in the Konqueror web browser (KHTML) to AtheOS. KHTML is a very capable HTML parser and renderer that supports both CSS and javascript, and so does the AtheOS web browser. Finally, a high-quality web browser for AtheOS! The browser is part of the 0.3.5 base install and the 0.3.4->0.3.5 upgrade archive." Now that the dust from the slashdotting has settled, you can actually check out the screenshot (dot mirror). This has not been the first, and undoubtably, it is not the last port of KHTML to strange new platforms. So huge kudos go out to the Konqueror/KHTML developers, and all those people out there who helped shape this resource. Read More

Sorry guys, the dot went down again this weekend after 51 days of uptime on the new server. We suspect that the problem is an overworked harddrive. Bero is on it (bonus: woo, we have ext3 now), but you can expect minor flakiness as we fully work out the issues. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo is back with much appreciated KDE development news. This week read about the app currently known as Kontour, XIM support for KOffice, and more. "The self-imposed lull in new features and the looming inevitability of starting work on the next version of KDE has given many developers some time to consider the future of KDE. As a result several large threads regarding which direction to take things in the near future have occurred on several of the KDE development lists, some of which are covered in this issue." Go get it here. Read More

As a follow-up to Waldo Bastian's analysis of KDE startup times, Leon Bottou has implemented an inspired hack to improve the startup of C++ programs under GNU/Intel systems. "Waldo Bastian's document demonstrates that the current g++ implementation generates lots of expensive run-time relocations. This translates into the slow startup of large C++ applications (KDE, StarOffice, etc.). The attached program "objprelink.c" is designed to reduce the problem. Expect startup times 30-50% faster." Update: 08/01 4:52 AM by N: Consult Leon's objprelink page for some great details and up-to-date information on this hack as well as on the prelinker mentioned by Bero. Thanks to freekde for the tip-off. Read More

In the second part of his review (mirror), Kent Nguyen walks us through the KSpread component (mirror) of KOffice 1.1 Beta 3. As usual, the review is complete with screenshots, and edits are courtesy Tina Gasperson of Newsforge. Read More

TheKompany.com has contributed several apps to KDE such as Kivio and Kamera. In this Slashdot interview, Shawn Gordon gives us more insight and details on his company. One of the things that has come out is that theKompany.com is moving products towards the Qt strategy, so that more platforms (including Windows and Mac) can be easily targeted. Read More

If you thought news here was a tad slow lately, you'd be right. Most of our editors are either on vacation or have taken some time off, and we haven't really gotten all that many submissions from you either. Fortunately, Neil Stevens comes to the rescue with his brainchild freekde.org, a dedicated KDE news site with an editorial slant towards Free Software and whether to use tabs or spaces for indentation. They already have a few articles and reviews of interest on the site, so go check it out. While it's about time that KDE had more than one news site dedicated to it, I admit I'm keeping a jealous eye out on the new competition in town. Oh, and if you're still lacking for desktop news, you might want to check out GUI-Lords.org as well. And if you're still bored, please submit some content to the dot! Read More

Lately, we've been spending some time improving the dot and implementing new features. While our efforts are far from over, we thought we'd announce a few of the things we've done so far. Dre has finally implemented one of the most requested features of the dot: You can now receive timely email notification of dot-headlines, or, depending on your preference, you can receive the full text of the dot-stories. As if that wasn't enough, I went ahead and implemented Flat Forty. Flat Forty can be thought of as a poor man's flat mode with a twist: You can now view the 40 most recent stories and comments globally. While mostly useful as an administrative trollbuster, we think you might enjoy it too. We hope to optimize Flat Forty eventually so that we can provide an efficient timely dynamic generation of the page. Read on for some dot fixes... Read More

KC KDE is back this week with a double issue spanning the last 14 days. Read about video embedding in Konqi, KOffice news and plans, a new proxy configuration GUI (complete with screenshots), and much more. Thanks, Aaron. Read More

While most headed off to the LinuxTag event, a handful of brave KDE people decided to tackle the London Linux Expo. Read Anne-Marie's entertaining account for some of the great stuff that went on there -- including photos of the bar encounter with a friendly gnome. Also check out Lee's site for more photos. Many thanks and kudos are due to Giles, Anne-Marie, Oliver, Lee, Jono and Mark who staffed the booth (and did an excellent job), our sponsors, and anyone else who helped, including: the KDE League, SuSE UK, Nick Veicht from Linux Format, and Cheep Linux. Oh, and bonus points if you can spot the Adobe inside joke. Read More

For those amongst you who gr0k spanish, KDE hacker Antonio Larrosa Jiménez will be presenting a KDE development talk on IRC this Saturday. The talk will mostly cover material from Antonio's well-known tutorial (browse online). If interested, be sure to drop by server irc.irc-hispano.org on channel #linux-prog, Saturday 7th at 20:00 (spanish time). If you need any help with IRC, check the IRC help site first. Read More

This week in KC KDE, Aaron and Rob bring us news about SOAP and DCOP, KMonop vs Capitalist, a new Cervisia KPart (2), print services integration into Konqueror, the KDE CVS Geek of the Week (you may now use PrintScreen for those KDE snapshots), and more. Read More

The KDE source code is now available under the LXR system, courtesy of our friends at nadmm.com. Users and developers may now browse the KDE source code complete with cross-references, which should prove extremely useful. For those of you wondering about the difference between lxr.kde.org and webcvs.kde.org, read on for an explanation from Kurt. Read More

Kent Nguyen has written a very nice and entertaining review of KWord (dot mirror available) as part of a more extensive KOffice examination. With the help of an alter-ego or two, as well as some editorial guidance from Tina of Newsforge, Kent covers everything from KWord frames to component embedding and groupware features, with more than a few illustrative screenshots. Over the next few weeks, look forward to Kent's reviews of KSpread, KIllu, KPresenter, Kivio, and Krayon. Read More

KOffice 1.1beta3 has been announced. Although only a beta, this version should be more stable and feature-complete than previous versions of KOffice. A changelog versus KOffice 1.0 is available as well as an incremental changelog since the last beta. Changes include DCOP scripting enhancements, KGhostview integration, many KWord improvements, and various tweaks and polish. Binary and source packages are available here. (As usual, kudos go to Dre for putting together our nice announcement.) Read More

Brought to you by Aaron and Rob, this week's edition of KC KDE covers everything from the elusive KDE League to Kamera, music applications (Brahms, noteedit, Rosegarden), and details on a new keybindings scheme that exploits the Windows keys. Read More

A few days ago, Infusion (screenshots) was announced on apps.kde.com. Along with Citadel/UX serving as backend, Infusion aspires to compete with the likes of Aethera, Magellan, Evolution, and yes, Microsoft Outlook+Exchange. Is Infusion there yet? Nope. But from what I've seen, I've certainly been impressed by Citadel/UX, and once I managed to get Infusion compiled, I was able to enjoy some neat functionality. Coupled with the enthusiam of author Brian Ledbetter, it would seem that Infusion is going places. Read on for further details of my Infusion experience and for an interesting interview with the author. Update: 06/16 03:30 AM by N: Art wrote in with some interesting comments on the upcoming version(s) of Citadel. Read More

Robert Flemming of VA Linux Systems has written a very nice review of KDE 2.1.1 for Linux Journal. The review covers everything from anti-aliasing to IO Slaves, and comes complete with obligatory screenshots. "KDE developers may be one step closer to ``konquering'' the desktop with the most recent 2.1.1 release of the K Desktop Environment. The development cycle has intensified since the 1.0 series, bringing new features and stability improvements to users at an ever-increasing rate. In fact, as of this writing, the first alpha version of KDE 2.2 has been released for testing. End users and developers alike will benefit from the newest offering. Currently supporting 34 languages, KDE is poised to answer many of the questions surrounding Linux' viability on the desktop." Read More

Due to recent instabilities in the CVS code, Waldo Bastian has announced that KDE 2.2beta1 has been delayed in favour of a message and feature freeze that will last a few days. During that time, developers will be busy finding bugs and bringing KDE CVS up to shape for a beta release. This probably means that KDE 2.2 will be released closer to July 30 than the previously planned July 23. KOffice, on the other hand, is almost right on schedule for the 1.1beta3 release. David Faure announced the beta3 freeze, but encourages users to put the current CVS version of KOffice through its paces -- apparently too few KWord bugs are waiting to be fixed. Read More

This week, Tink brings KDE hacker Frerich Raabe under scrutiny in the People Behind KDE series. Frerich is responsible for KNewsTicker, the Kicker applet around which, allegedly, most of KDE has been designed and implemented. For more laughs, read the interview here. Read More

Two months ago, we announced the birth of Gideon, codename for the next generation version of KDevelop that was most notable for its modularity and extensibility. Since then, Gideon has made enormous strides -- not the least of which includes Java, Perl, Python, PHP and Fortran support, full Python scripting, and an editor framework that will allow one to plug in a favourite editor. Furthermore, thanks to the remarkable efforts of hacker Richard Dale, KDevelop plugins can now be developed in Java. Read on for the full update from Bernd Gehrmann including screenshots and download link. Read More

KC KDE #12 is out, with a slight delay due to a family emergency in the life of the Kernel Cousins coordinator. This week, read about the collaboration between the Abiword, wvWare and KWord developers, some very interesting developments and ideas regarding a sidebar in Konqueror, KPovModeler, and much more. As usual, credits go to Aaron J. Seigo, Rob Kaper, and Zack Brown. Get your fix here. Read More

This week, in The People Behind KDE, yours truly speaks candidly to Tink. "I'm rooting for the KDE League to have some form of impact on the PR scene any time now, but it is quite clear that community involvement is more important than ever. The community can accomplish quite a lot on its own that the KDE League could never do, though there are definitely things (such as mainstream press) best left to the League." Read it all here. Read More

KDE 2.2alpha2 is here! Blessed by release master Waldo Bastian only a few hours ago, this release has a ton of improvements over KDE 2.1.x. You can view the ChangeLog or glance at the alpha1 announcement for an overall idea of some of the changes versus the stable branch. However, to discover the rest of the cool stuff -- such as the new regexp filter in KNewsTicker or the Kicker taskbar/extension improvements -- you'll have to download KDE 2.2alpha2 and see for yourself. As usual, source is available as well as binary packages (read our policy) for Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE and Tru64. Debian users should check the regular sources. Keep in mind that this alpha release is not for people who expect a stable desktop, there is a short list of known problems already. Read More

As many of you have noticed, we have had a lot of downtime lately brought on by some severe server problems. With our regular server admin away on a well-deserved vacation, we have been forced to move to a new location, at least for now. The new server, bero.org, is owned and operated privately by our friend Bernhard Rosenkraenzer, but is hosted on the excellent network and resources of Red Hat Europe. I would like to extend a huge thanks both to Bero and to Red Hat for their support! Read More

FreeOS.com is running an interesting, circa KDE 2.1, interview with Martin Konold. Apart from a few misspellings and minor errors, it makes for an entertaining read. "Konqueror is really good. It supports Netscape plugins. Java is supported too. It's extremely standards compliant. When we started out with Konqueror, people questioned our decision. They questioned that Mozilla would be out soon why then, were we building our own browser. Well, it's been two years and look where Mozilla is." Read More

Mike Pilone has stepped up to the challenge of implementing gesture recognition for KDE. "KGesture uses libstroke to recognize definable gestures, then run an associated command. Using KDE's DCOP interface, KGesture can interact with applications already running, or launch new applications." You might be forgiven if, like me, you first thought this was a joke. KGesture works as advertised, and is almost as fun as the now discontinued KVoiceControl, but it does need a little more fuzzy logic before it becomes practical enough. I did manage to get it to work for simpler gestures -- I can draw an L-shape on my desktop and a dot.kde.org window will pop up. However, for more complex gestures such as a circle, it takes a little practice and patience to get right. With time, your help and feedback, KGesture is bound to improve. Download it here or view the screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Read More

Polls are an oft-requested feature of the dot. KDE.com has risen to the challenge with its latest user poll: "What Should Be the Highest Priority of KDE Developers Leading Up to KDE 2.2?". I just installed Linux Mandrake 7.2 (until my SuSE package arrives), and after upgrading to KDE 2.1.1, I feel that a KDE port of the configuration utilities could bring a huge amount of polish to this distribution. A KDE interface to Linuxconf might be a good start. Others would however prefer a KDE installer, and some simply think that KDE should be faster and/or less of a memory hog. Here's your chance to cast a vote and voice an opinion. Read More

In this week's KC KDE, Aaron J. Seigo covers everything from KOrganizer's architecture improvements, improved message filtering in KMail, the new KDE configuration file upgrading mechanism, to the exciting new KDE font installer. Get this, and much more, here. Read More

Mosfet took the pre- and circa- KDE2 world by storm not so long ago. His fingerprints are all over many of the styles, themes, window decorations as well as much of the KDE2 we are familiar with today. He churned out thousands of lines of code accompanied by slick screenshot after slick screenshot. Mosfet is now back with a funky new widget-style dubbed MegaGradient (screenshots: 1, 2, 3), currently in KDE CVS. As an aside, those of you wondering where Mosfet has been lately can check out Mosfet.Org for an update. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo has done it again. This week in KC KDE, you can read about KDE database connectivity, Kaboodle the light-weight embeddable media player, KPrinter progress, Kant's renaming to Kate, an updated KDE/Qt port of the featureful and fast programmer editor FTE (by KDE's very own COLA warrior), KMail improvements, and much more. This week's edition can be found here. Read More

Bernd Gehrmann writes: "As you may have noticed, the HEAD branch of KDevelop now contains Gideon which is very near to being usable and complete. This is not just another version of KDevelop, it's a big step forward: it's modular, it's extensible, it can support multiple languages, it has a project management feature that is usable for non-trivial projects. Gideon can be thought of as a a modular lego-like framework for an IDE that could be used to build a C++ IDE, a Python IDE, or even a web development platform. A complete C++ IDE is already in place." Gideon is the codename for KDevelop 3.0 and is already highly usable. This is your chance to get involved whether by contributing plugins or new features such as Python scripting. For more details, you can also check out Bernd's initial email as well as the screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Note that KDevelop 2.0 is still based on the KDevelop 1.4 branch and is scheduled to ship with KDE 2.2. Update: 04/07 02:04 PM by N: According to KDE hacker Richard Dale, Gideon now also includes Java and Objective-C support. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo is back with another excellent edition of KC KDE. This week, read about Matthias Ettrich advocating the use of CORBA/ORBit as an alternative to ICE for DCOP interprocess communication, IMAP in KMail CVS, new KWin styles and themability improvements, kdeprint updates, offline surfing in Konqueror, and more. Read it all here. Read More

The other day, I found something rather interesting in the referrer logs: Telsa Gwynne, well-known in Linux and GNOME circles, wrote up a pretty neat report of Sirtaj Singh Kang's talk at Linux.Conf.Au 2001. "One huge thing that helped KDE and would probably benefit other very big projects was that KDE had the KDE Summit which was sponsored by Trolltech. When you get all the people in same place, then magic happens. At the KDE one, Matthias Ettrich and Preston Brown got drunk to the stage of claiming "We could write better than CORBA. Hic. In a day!" The next day, of course, everyone reminded them about this claim, so they had to do something about it. 36 hours later, DCOP emerged. There was a similar effect with KOffice, which came on by leaps and bounds as a result of the summit. So, if you're big enough to get sponsors, get your people all in one place and watch the results pour out." Go read it for some pretty entertaining KDE history and insight. Read More

As everyone has been gleefully pointing out, KDE 2.1.1 is out. The main features of this release over KDE 2.1 are bugfixes, additional language translations, and numerous documentation updates. As an added bonus, you can now also "paste" a URL to Konqueror and have it automatically load the website. I'm also told that KPilot 4.0.1 is in pretty good shape in this release. See the ChangeLog for more details, and the full announcement here. Enjoy! Read More

This week in KC KDE, Aaron J. Seigo summarises 10 threads, including coverage of the new powerful Kant editor in kdebase, Palm Pilot ioslaves, KDE sockssupport, a new font selection widget with font previews, and more. Get your fix here. Read More

While waiting for KDE 2.1.1, it might be worth checking out this nice review of KDE 2.1 on Linux Orbit. "With the release of KDE 2.0 on October 23, 2000, the KDE development team upped the ante in the bid for the hearts and minds of GNU/Linux desktop users. With major improvements in features and stability, KDE users couldn't wait for the next version. When KDE 2.1 arrived on February 26, 2001, few were disappointed." Lots of pretty pictures. Read More

For those of you attending CeBIT 2001, a schedule of the KDE presentations is now available. On another note, a somewhat unlikely place where you can next find a KDE developer will be at GUADEC 2001. No other than Matthias Ettrich will be presenting a keynote. Evidently, more is going on behind the scenes such as interoperability talks (SSL) spanning such issues as cross-toolkit configuration (1-SSL, 2-SSL) and a common component model. Stefan Westerfeld will also be present. Martin Heni informs us of a new KDE Games People page. This resource should be useful to people who need help with KDE game issues, or a place for people to advertise skills and willingness to help. Amir Michail wrote in to inform us of CVSSearch II, a major rewrite of CVSSearch, the search tool for code that uses CVS comments. New features include the ability to search across multiple CVS repositories and a completely new GUI with more explicit CVS comment <-> source code mapping. Over the next week, the demo will be expanded to cover hundreds of KDE applications. Finally, in case you missed it, a demo for Kapital, the personal finance manager from theKompany.com, is now available. Read More

This week in KC KDE, you can read all of 14 topics covering RealPlayer 8 and KDE2 integration, HTML form completion in Konqueror, the new KDE2 scanner library and GUI, SDI vs MDI, kISDN and kppp integration, and more. Go get it here. Read More

Many of you have been waiting for this one. Carsten Pfeiffer wrote in to tell us about the first release of KuickShow since KDE 1.1.2 in July 1999. KuickShow is a nice image viewer based on Rasterman's Imlib, and in case you don't remember, the killer feature of KuickShow was its blazing speed. You won't be disappointed by the latest release for KDE 2.1 -- I was blown away. It's even noticeably faster than the venerable XV (hint: command line geeks should use KDE Init for that extra speed boost, others benefit automatically). You can get KuickShow here, view a couple screenshots (1, 2, 3), or view the ChangeLog. Depending on your feedback, binary RPMs may soon be made available. Read on for the details from Carsten. Read More

As the Dot has been getting more and more successful, and more and more popular, we've been attracting script kiddies and trolls like flies. As Dre previously reported: "On March 13, 2001, at 1:33 am EST, someone using the anonymizer.com service succeeded in putting malicious Javascript code into one of the posts. While the code was relatively harmless -- it changed all links on the page to point to a shockingly disgusting porno site -- we feel this security lapse requires us to disable all posting until the problem in the Squishdot code is solved." This news has been out for a while in all the wrong places (1, 2) and is attracting attention. Read on to see what we're doing about it. Read More

Various release schedules have been announced over the past week. First, Waldo Bastian, the release dude for KDE 2.2, announced the KDE 2.2 release plan. Incidentally, many more improvements than those mentioned in the schedule have already gone into CVS. David Faure, the release dude for KOffice 1.1, followed with a KOffice release plan. Finally, Ralf Nolden announced the KDevelop Roadmap for 2001. Included are plans for versions 2.0 and 3.0. Those interested in helping with KDevelop 3.0 should also read this note by Omid Givi. Read More

For what has seemed like an eternity, but really was closer to a week, our beloved dot, as well as the kde.com sites, were down. Now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Dre and MieTerra, the server has been moved across the country and is again up and ready to serve. Many thanks to all those who made generous offers to host or help us in the meanwhile. In particular, thanks go to Dave Belfer-Shevett of Stonekeep Consulting, Joshua D. Drake of the Linux Documentation Project and Guido Bakker of Synnergy Networks. Over the next few days, while the DNS updates, we will be attempting to catch up on all the KDE news. Meanwhile, we have reposted the news items previously featured on the mother site during our downtime. Read More

Harri Porten has been very busy during the last few months with JavaScript in KDE. Despite all the hard work to get things ready for KDE 2.1 he found some time to do this interview with Tink on The People Behind KDE. [As previously featured on the mother site during our unscheduled network downtime.] Read More

Michael Coyle wrote in point us to a simple set of tile buttons and panel backgrounds that ResExcellence has made available for Kicker. These actually look pretty cool. Also of potential interest are a couple of recent screenshots (1, 2) of the Kcd applet. In developer news, Philippe Fremy wrote in to point us to an interesting little analysis involving GTK+, Qt and PyQt. This may be of some interest to developers considering porting a GTK+ app to KDE/Qt. Users might want to go straight to the Klotski homepage. Finally, in laugh-it's-funny news, Segfault.org reports that the Bacon keyword has been googled. Poor Jono. Read More

As some of you may have noticed, lately we've been getting more and more postings at KDE Dot News. With the increasing number of comments, we've also been getting more and more complaints about the fact that KDE Dot News automatically switches to threading when the number of articles in a forum goes over our global threshold. We've been trying to tweak this global threshold to satisfy everyone, but that seems to have been a lost cause: Forums with too many nested articles take a while to download for people with slow net connections and aren't convenient for a bird's eye view of the responses, while forums which have switched to threading are painful for people who want to read each and every response. As of now, the default threshold has been set to 40, but I'm pleased announce that I've also implemented configurable thread thresholds. Just look to the right of this article or any other, and you should see a more or less self-explicit config box -- your preferred settings should be stored more or less permanently in a cookie. If you find any bugs, or have any comments or feedback just use the forum or, failing that, email me. Enjoy. Read More

There have been countless requests from KDE users, on the dot, on the lists, and even elsewhere, for a KDE Installer and Updater. Nick Betcher (aka Error403) has stepped up to the challenge and now needs your help to make this project really happen. His current code is in CVS and the project is in active development. The install starts off with an intro/detection screen, prompts the user for the type of installation, prompts for the destination of the KDE installation, and then prompts for the packages to install (see all the screenshots here). The project is based on pure Qt, so that the statically linked binary will be small, and as of now the network code to download RPMs is in CVS. So why does Nick need your help? It's important to him that users get their input in for this project and that he has a better understanding of what to aim for regarding look & feel as well as packaging issues. He also needs other developers to get involved, as he is relatively new to C++/OO programming. Nick has provided a convenient forum for people to voice their opinion. Read More

David Faure, our release manager, has announced the latest KDE 2.1 release schedule. KDE 2.1 will now be officially announced Feb 26, mainly due to popular demand and the fact that the KDE Artist Team is hard at work polishing up this release. For a preview of what's to come, check out the new KControl design. Definitely seems worth the wait! Read More

Bradley T Hughes has implemented multihead support for KDE 2.1, and is currently commiting the code. This is one fine feature masquerading as a bugfix but which should make a lot of people with multiple monitors quite happy. Read More

Reza Arbab wrote in to inform us that IBM has made KDE 1.1.2 and KDE 2.0.1 available (download here) for AIX. Reza intends to keep up to date with the latest KDE releases, but does need help with currently OS-specific parts of KDE (related to sound, kcontrol info panels, etc). Thanks Reza, thanks IBM. Read More

In the first of what we hope to be an exciting series, Richard Moore has published a tutorial on how to write KPart plugins for KDE 2. In this tutorial, Richard gives us a glimpse into the power of KParts by demonstrating how simple it is to extend Konqueror with a plugin. In particular, he implements a plugin for HTML Validation, but the same mechanism could have just as easily been used to write a plugin for convenient Babelfish translation of the current webpage, or indeed something much more fancy. In general, once you understand what's here you should be able to write plugins for pretty much any application or component in KDE. The full tutorial can be found on the KDE Developer Site. This story was amended and republished at 04:00 PM. Update: 01/26 04:35 PM by N: Kurt Granroth has made available various modifications to the htmlvalidator example and, best of all, has implemented a nifty BabelFish plugin. See his article for details, download the plugins here. Update: 01/28 07:55 PM by I: As yet more proof of the power and simplicity of KParts-based plugins, Carsten Pfeiffer has created another plugin, which allows easy configuration (from a light drop-down menu) of Java, JavaScript, cookies and image loading. Thanks, Rich, Kurt and Carsten. Read More

Amir Michail, creator of the CodeWeb data mining tool, is back with CVSSearch, a tool that searches for code fragments using CVS comments. It will eventually index over 350 KDE applications and promises to be very useful. Send your kudos and comments here. In other developer news, theKompany.com has announced KDE Studio Gold, a commercial release of KDE Studio (licensed under the GPL) following the hugely popular "vanilla" edition with several features and additions for professional KDE development. See the webpage for more details and for the limited time discount. Victor Röder wrote us that KSourcerer.org needs your help and support. The site has been rewritten in PHP, but both technical and content contributions are needed to get this site going.
Developers fiddling with XML and DOM might want to check out a previous article on zez.org: about code covering Parsing XML with Qt's DOM classes. Special thanks to Paul K Egell-Johnsen for having submitted this cool little item last year. ;-) Finally, if you're craving a little eye-candy, check out this screenshot submitted by Christophe Prud'homme. It features the new about:konqueror (although the latest version has already been improved), knewsticker, licq with KDE integration, the XMMS dock status app, the kpilot daemon and the korganizer daemon; it uses the KDevHP theme. Surely someone can do better? ;-) Read More

Good news from theKompany.com keeps pouring in. As several of you have pointed out, the first beta of Aethera has been announced. In case you haven't been following, Aethera is theKompany's fork of the greatly hyped/anticipated Magellan project. Beta 1 of Aethera sports POP3, SMTP, HTML, DnD, a contacts interface, sticky notes, and more. IMAP, Calendar support, etc are promised for the next beta. There is no mention of the license although source is available from the website -- most of the source files seem to be under the BSD license. For more details on Aethera, Kevin Reichard also points us to this favorable review on LinuxPlanet by Dennis E. Powell. Be sure to check out the screenshots as well. Read More

Lenny wrote in to point us to this interesting article on writing games with QCanvas. Nice, easy, and includes example source code. All six pages can be loaded in the printer-friendly version here. In Qt/Embedded news, Trolltech has announced version 2.2.2, and even more exciting a new Qt Palmtop Environment available for download under the GPL. It will be interesting to see if a KDE-enhanced version is feasible -- imagine running KDE on a Linux PC without X. For more Qt/Embedded buzz, also see this article on Lineo and Trolltech. Read More

Read all about it in this feature currently running on LinuxWorld. As we had previously reported, KDE also took the Linux Community Award 2000 at that event -- LinuxWorld have now made available a RealPlayer streaming video of the ceremony. And last, but not least, LinuxWorld talks to our own Matthias Elter in this nice little interview. Very cool! Read More

In KDE2 related news, ZDNet have reviewed KDE2 and love it. Very much. LinuxToday.com.au like it too, as seen in this article titled after a well-known Australian TV advert. LWN have provided coverage on the KDE2 release here. Trolltech congratulate KDE on the new release here. SuSE Linux have announced their KDE2 update. Speaking of updates, new KDE2 packages for Tru64 with fixes by Tom Leitner can be found here. Read More

This week, in The People Behind KDE, Tink interviews Reginald Stadlbauer, hacker extraordinaire originally behind such things as KPresenter and KWord. "I posted to the kde lists, that I'll write a powerpoint clone. As I was new to C++ and Qt/KDE, nobody took me serious (as some people told me later :-) But after some time I had something which was awfull code but worked somehow. So I got a CVS account (although coolo was not sure at that time if this is good idea, as he told me later :-) and got more and more involved into KOffice and KDE." Read More

Stefan Westerfeld has posted a first draft of cool new plans for the new multimedia architecture for KDE2, based on aRts (the "analog realtime synthesizer"). Plans include merging the two existing media players (noatun and kaiman), new media types, infrastructure improvements, improved MIDI and more. The full draft (edited by our own Dre) is attached below. Read More

BestLinux have announced Release 3 of their distribution, proudly featuring KDE 2.0. NewsForge offers some enthusiastic commentary on KDE2. ZDNet picked up the press release as well, although with a few harmless inaccuracies. Victor Röder informed us that KSourcerer.org is up again, courtesy Pingworks IT Consulting. Neil Stevens wrote us with a simple message: Instead of flooding channel #kde on irc.kde.org with support requests, please use #kde-users instead. The less noise on #kde, the better for the developers and in the end everyone wins. Read More

LinuxPlanet is the first one out with a closer look at KDE 2.0. "For years we've many of us made excuses for our Linux desktops. They did what we wanted, and what we wanted that they didn't do we learned to live without in order to take advantage of the robustness of the underlying operating system. But with KDE2 we no longer have to apologize for our desktops. Even with that annoying menu bug, KDE2 is the best desktop I've ever used on any platform." The bug that Dennis refers to was fixed a while back, and thankfully does not occur in the default KDE2 config. Update 10/26 9:20 AM by N: This bug is actually not present in the final KDE 2.0, it was found and squashed before the final release. Read More

This week's edition of The People Behind KDE features an interview with Claudiu Costin of the Romanian translation team. "In March 1999, I obtained KDE-1.1.1 and I hugely liked it, especially the idea that I had the code and I was able to change it to my will. When I saw how easy I could modify visible strings thus being able to do translations, I started to translate KPackage 1.2. Toivo Pedaste encouraged me a lot and so the translation of documentation followed." Thanks goes to Tink as usual for conducting the interview. Read More

VoteZone is running an interesting review of KDE2 and this comment on Konqueror. The review is fairly positive and has several good points, including the criticism levelled at the current Control Center layout. Read More

Luis Digital wrote us about his various presentations on the KDE2 betas directed at the Hispanic community, but with screenshots everyone can enjoy. In a similar vein, MachineOfTheMonth is presenting a review of Kandidat (warning: popup ads). As always, these kinds of reviews always tend to get out of date very quickly -- several of the issues mentioned have been addressed in more recent updates. And finally, yes, KDE2 is right on track for a release next week. Congrats to everyone involved! Read More

Sun Microsystems, probably best known at the KDE end of the spectrum for their influential paper on local vs distributed computing, recently open-sourced StarOffice, making it freely available to KDE as well as other projects. What impact will this have on KDE and KOffice? Ideally, even though OpenOffice is technically a competitor to KOffice (Sun apparently denies this) and despite the naysayers, OpenOffice will be of sizable benefit to KDE. Read on for a few of my initial thoughts on the matter. Read More

Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel recently announced Java bindings for DCOP. In other words, Java can now communicate with and control KDE2 applications. A welcome addition to the existing C bindings for DCOP, originally used by the long gone kmapnotify. Then, of course, there's kxmlrpc which provides a bridge to DCOP for anything that can speak HTTP and XML (eg, control DCOP-speaking apps from a shell script or python). And as if all that wasn't enough, there's the command-line or point-n-shoot DCOP browser/executor that just goes to show how far, flexible and mature DCOP has become in a short matter of time. Simplicity pays off in the end. Read More

The latest edition of LWN has a nice editorial on PR in free software projects. Worth a read. "An often-heard sentiment among KDE developers is that they may have a better desktop, but that the project has taken a number of hits on the public relations front. This idea was made more explicit this week with this KDE Dot News editorial on how to improve KDE's public image." Item 2: We've received word from Victor Röder that KSourcerer.org, a cool developer website dedicated to KDE, has been down lately and will remain unavailable until late October/early November when the switch to a new service provider is complete. Read More

From Rik Hemsley: "I hacked KIconLoader to allow me to get a QImage instead of a QPixmap, which was quite easy, because it uses QImage internally and only converts to QPixmap just before returning a processed pic. I also wrote a very fast blend function that takes 2 QImages and blends the first over the second, honouring the alpha channel. I couldn't find anything in Qt or KDE to do this, so I had to hand-roll it. In tests on my Celeron 600 it can blend 65 million pixels (about 1/2 of which have alpha != 0) in 5 seconds. That's about 5ms for a 256x256 image, so approximately 0.17ms for our largest icons (48x48). [...] Anyway, enough talk. I'm tired and I'm sure a screenshot is in order. ;) Apologies for the hideous background tile, but I needed something to illustrate the point." Good stuff for KDE 2.1. Read More

Due to the popular sentiment that KDE 2.0 is not quite ready for prime time, Matthias Elter, the release coordinator, has announced that a second release candidate is being prepared. RC2 will undergo scrutiny and testing by developers and packagers alike so that those final showstoppers can be found and squashed. KDE 2.0 final tarballs have been delayed one week and are now scheduled to be released to packagers on the 16th, with a public release of the packages on October 23rd. Update 10/9 3:15 PM by D: We've received word from Matthias that the RC2 tarballs will be released tomorrow, Oct. 10, on the KDE ftp servers, most likely here. Stay tuned -- we'll give you the details when we get them. Read More

Three quick news items for the sake of completeness and because they were submitted: (1) Trolltech has released Qt 2.2.1, a bugfix release with minor enhancements. KDE 2.0 will be based on this one. (2) Version 0.0.2 of KDB, the database APIs being developed by theKompany, is out. There seem to be quite a few improvements for a 0.0.1 increment, including a new KControl module. (3) A new Opera browser is out, based on Qt 2.2.x. I downloaded a remarkably small Debian package for a no-hassle install, and I must say it's really looking good now. Does a decent job of rendering KDE Dot News. Here's to hoping for future KDE integration -- the more browsers the merrier. Read More

A new release of KUPS, designed for KDE2, is available. "KUPS is a powerful and easy-to-use CUPS front-end for KDE. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is a new printing system under UNIX which is completely network transparent and uses the IPP protocol. It supports a large range of printers through various available drivers and ghostscript. This printing system also allows to specify a lot of printing options such as number of copies, page collation, number of pages per sheet, various image options, text syntax coloring, and a set of specific printers options described in a driver file (PPD). Drivers are already available for most common printers." Lots of great screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). Read More

hetz wrote us with the news that Charles Samuels has hacked together a kioslave for the Diamond Rio MP3 player. In other words, you can now reorder songs and soon upload to and download from the Rio, all within Konqueror. Check out the screenshot. Rumor has it Charles' next project is a Napster ioslave! Read More

Curious about what KOrganizer 2.0 has to offer? Cornelius Schumacher has just the thing, with a brand new feature update including shots and all. Amongst other new features, KOrganizer now supports hierarchical To-Do lists, web export and archives. Future plans include group scheduling and synchronization with PDAs. Read More

Over the course of development of a project like KDE, a lot of art gets created. Following, purely for your viewing pleasure, are some examples of art that have not yet made it to KDE CVS, for one reason or another. First off, Martin Kerz offered several suggestions for the KDE2 splash screen: startup1, alternative, krassnagel, colouredk. Sreshth Kumar offered yet another. For the default WM style, Mosfet proposed an interesting hybrid a while back but apparently got outvoted (new proposals are in the works). There is obviously a lot more of such art floating around -- if you have more links, feel free to post them in the comments. Read More

Tink is back with a brand new edition of The People Behind KDE. This week, we learn more about the omnipresent and ever enthusiastic Cristian Tibirna. "I was on the lyx lists when Matthias Ettrich started it in October 1996. His ideas caught me bad. After finishing some exams at beginning of 1997, I got involved with coding (kwm's smart placement and magnetic borders algorithms) and I started to do a lot of user support on the mailing lists." Read More

Björn Sahlström wrote in to inform us of the first stable release of KBear, an easy to use and quite powerful FTP client for KDE2. Amongst other features, it supports extended MDI, includes a flexible site database, and can connect to multiple hosts simultanously. Several screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) are available on the project web page. Read More

Well, this is pretty cool. Bumchul Kim has updated his webpage with patches and details on what's needed to make KDE CVS and Qt 2.2.0 work well with the Korean charset. Includes cool screenshots and a patch for an OnTheSpot implementation in Qt. The good news is that a lot of the KDE patches have already made it to CVS. Read More

The KOffice hack session is over, and Matthias Elter is back with a new KDE2 release schedule. While some of the details are still being discussed (hotly), in essence, RC1 will be released on Monday October 2, and the final tarballs will be created on Monday October 9. The public release will follow on Monday October 16. Note that the next KDE will be named KDE 2.0, contrary to what the announcement says. Woo! Read More

LinuxToday.com.au is running a review of <ahttp://www.hszk.bme.hu/~tz124/kaptain/ href="http://www.hszk.bme.hu/~tz124/kaptain/">Kaptain, the universal graphical front-end we mentioned a few articles back. They like it a lot. "Sound ground breaking? It sure is. Kaptain uses .kaptn files, which are simple text scripts edited in any way you choose. The script 'describes the possible arguments for a command line program'. Kaptain then interprets this script, and puts up into your X-windows display a simple Qt-based window with all of your options detailed." Kaptain can be built with KDE2 support as well. Read More

Nicholas Petreley likes KDE2, he loves Konqueror, and he certainly doesn't hold back his praise for Qt and Trolltech. In this article however, he worries about Trolltech's business model and isn't certain the numbers add up. Personally, I wouldn't worry. Read on for why. Read More

Tink is back, this time with an interview of the venerable Stephan Kulow. Stephan has been with the KDE project, way back when, so we get a free history lesson too. Favorite quote: "But for me a KDE without kpat is no KDE." Read More

Borland is featuring an exciting presentation on Kylix, the upcoming Rapid Application Development environment for Linux. "In our view, the release of Kylix will mark an evolutionary step for the Linux world. Delphi and C++Builder developers will be ready (on the very first day) to start writing applications for Linux using Kylix. [...] Apart from the Delphi developers, Kylix also brings hundreds of thousands of applications, built in Delphi today, ported with Kylix tomorrow. On the first night that Kylix ships, we'll probably see more new Linux applications than we've seen in the past few months..." Kylix is based on Qt and will integrate with KDE. Read More

Stefan Westerfeld has a neat document up summarizing the status of aRts in the KDE 2.0 final beta preview. Most of the work of the past year has been focussed on integrating aRts into KDE. The result of those efforts is a new multimedia middleware known as MCOP, a brand new notification system, a brand new optimized sound server, kaiman, Brahms, and more. Read More

Buried under hundreds of emails on the Konqueror mailing list, was this little gem from Ming Poon of Corel. Apparently, Corel has been working for months on a Qt port of Mozilla. The results are reportedly impressive with QtMozilla turning out to be more stable than the official Linux GTK version. Corel plans to port QtMozilla to KParts so it won't be long before you can embed even that in Konqueror. Honorable mention goes to Roberto Alsina who had begun his own Mozilla port the weekend before. Read More

The KDE Desktop Environment project is pleased to announce the launch of KDE Dot News, a news and discussion site dedicated to KDE and supported by the KDE community. KDE Dot News is the response to a large and growing demand for a KDE-specific news site. Read More

The first developer release of KVim is out, thanks to Thomas Capricelli. In case you've been living under a rock, VIM is one of the most popular Vi variants out there, and KVim is evidently the KDE port of that worthy editor. A screenshot or two are available. KVim will shortly be ported to KParts, so it won't be long before you can embed it in Konqi... (As an aside, rumor has it that progress on a KDE/Qt port of XEmacs may not be too far off either.) Read More

Phil Thompson announced updated Python bindings for Qt 2.2.0, including pyuic which compiles Qt Designer files to PyQt code, and even Windows support. The bindings for KDE1 have been updated as well, although a port to KDE2 is still in the works. Project website here. Read More

LinuxToday is running an article on recent KDE/Qt events. The author rants a little about licensing, marvels about what KDE has accomplished so far but then worries that the Linux desktop is becoming too much like Windows. Yup. It's all here. Read More

theKompany.com have announced KDB, an API for browsing and manipulating databases. KDB is LGPL, modular and even includes an I/O slave that enables SQL capabilities in Konqueror. KDB will be used as the backend for Rekall, a light weight personal DBMS system ala MS Access. More details here. Read More

Debian Weekly News confirms it: "KDE packages are pouring into Debian. All of the core of KDE is already present in unstable, and more packages are sure to follow. This unexpected turn of events is due to a change in the license of Qt 2.2 -- Troll Tech released it dual-licensed under the GPL -- the KDE licensing issue is finally resolved." They have a lot of catching up to do if the ~700 KDE apps catalogued by apps.kde.com are any indication. Read More

Readers have been writing in that ZDNet is currently reporting on a rumoured KDE League that will go head-to-head with the GNOME Foundation. LinuxToday has picked up the story, including a link to a statement by Kurt Granroth. Well, it's nice to see that the press is so interested in KDE that they'll even report rumours or "the skinny" if they think they have it. ;-) Read More

Trolltech and Qt have been getting some good press and support lately. The latest good news includes a strategic alliance with Loki to develop Linux applications. The LinuxToday article is here and the full announce here. KDE is also potentially a big winner because it is quite easy for application developers to provide a KDE-enhanced version of a Qt app. Trolltech themselves have designed Qt Designer in this manner and have some clever ideas to offer in this department. In other Qt news, the much talked about Qt 2.2, including of course Qt Designer, has been released. Read More

Dennis E. Powell at LinuxPlanet has a new article out. This time he writes about the recent events in KDE history, and also includes a bit about the guys from Helix Code. It's all good. Read More

Evan Leibovitch @ZDNet writes an entertaining piece summing up the recent KDE/GNOME events in "It's the apps, stupid". Stephen Shankland @CNET writes about the Qt GPL announcement in "Barrier lowered between Linux interfaces". Rick Lehrbaum @ZDNet reports on the same in "Good news for KDE". Last, but certainly not least, the KDE 2.0 release schedule has been announced. Read More

ITworld.com is currently running an interesting web interview by Joe Barr with core KDE developer, Kurt Granroth. Kurt talks about KDE2 vs KDE1, KOffice 1.0, KMail, and much more. Read More

Trolltech has announced that Qt 2.2 will be released under the GPL! Read what LinuxPlanet/LinuxToday has to say about this here, ZDNet also reports, and an editorial by Matthias Ettrich and Eirik Eng here. Read More

A new release of VisKProg, a visual programming language for KDE, was recently announced. Here are some sample screenshots. Seems pretty interesting, hope they port it to KDE 2.0 soon! Read More

The KDE Core Team took a break from coding and wrote up an official response to the whole GNOME foundation thing. It wouldn't have been necessary if not for the endless questions and misinformation about the project ever since the original announcement. Read More

theKompany.com recently announced the Kivio project, an attempt to build a Visio clone. Kivio will be based on KDE2 technology such as KParts and so it will be fully interoperable with KOffice. Read More