Quickies: KDE Unrealness, Qt Bits, FreeBSD Packages

Joup notes that the KDE on FreeBSD team is busy
readying KDE 3.0.1 packages and is in need
of serious testers.

Evan Leibovitch points us to his Banks 'n' Browsers webpage. He surveys 300 banks in 30 countries but needs updates for KDE3. We also reported on this issue a while back.

Guillaume Laurent wrote in some time ago
to plug the new site design of the Rosegarden project -- the MIDI, audio
sequencer and music notation editor for X. The website looks great and so does the project -- developers welcome.

On a Qt-related note, check out Guillaume's interesting article on Qt vs gtkmm. If you want to see Qt Unicode in action, Martin Gruner points us to BibleTime's awesome gallery. Finally, Mark Cox brings the
Serious Weird QRegExp tutorial to our attention.

Fulgore wrote in to point out that the UnitedLinux
partnership involving SuSE, Caldera, TurboLinux and Conectiva,
has specified KDE 3.0 as part of the distribution base, guaranteeing
KDE3 core availability to developers targeting UnitedLinux-based distributions.

We failed to trumpet it at the time, but it seems that KDE has been awarded the prestigious title of "Open Source Project of the Year" and KDevelop was named "Best Development Tool" by Linux Format Magazine. Check out the scans: award1.jpg & award0.jpg. I dare say KDE3, too, has been extremely well received so far.

Finally, for something seriously cool, Oblom points out this screenshot of Unreal II which brings a glimpse of KDE
to millions of Windows users.

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Comments

by Urugern (not verified)

Please don't take this is as destructive criticism, but....

whenever I've tried KDE FreeBSD packages, they have always required higher version numbers of everything than are in the ports or packages collection. Releasing KDE FreeBSD packages is cool and everything, but what's the point if we'll need to compile everything else manually to get it to work? Just a thought.

by ac (not verified)

Are you sure you are using the STABLE packages instead of the CURRENT packages? I know, it can be confusing...

by blashyrkh (not verified)

I'm not sure what you are talking about? With the kde 3 releases, packages for Every dependency were publicly available on ftp.kde.org.
So you could just remove your old stuff and install the new ones without any problems...

by Lauri Watts (not verified)

All the dependencies are also on mango.firepipe.net. If you follow the instructions, i.e. setenv PACKAGESITE to the right place, and then "pkg_add -r kde", all your dependencies would be updated along with all of KDE.

You don't need to compile *anything* manually, we use a currently cvsup'ed copy of the ports tree, the only thing newer in this set than you would normally have, is KDE itself.

by Per (not verified)

The awards page (http://www.kde.org/awards.html) hasn't been updated for some time.

by wilco (not verified)

What is the recommended Unicode font for KDE? The BibleTime people have CODE2000 linked, but it's not free or Free. Any hints?

by ac (not verified)

CODE2000 is free for download.

by Chris Little (not verified)

Indeed, Code 2000 is freeware. The only other reasonably complete Unicode fonts are Arial Unicode MS (which is from MS and is only available as a Win32 self-installer, though you can copy it from an existing Win32 install over to Linux) and Bitstream Cyberbit (which is commercial, albeit free to download).

Fonts are a tough issue in free software. Good fonts cost money. Free fonts tend to be of very poor quality (often just bitmap fonts) or very incomplete from a Unicode perspective (though it's certainly not a requirement that Unicode fonts should contain the whole BMP like some of these attempt to do).

I think in the future, you will find BibleTime supporting different fonts for different modules so that, e.g., a Syriac module only needs a font with good Syriac support and a Tamil module only needs a font with Tamil codepoints. This should solve some of the problem since there are a number of good free fonts that cover smaller ranges at least.

IHS,
Chris

by Martin Gruner (not verified)

Try http://www.ccss.de/slovo/unifonts.htm for a list of more or less free Unicode fonts.

Regards,
Martin

by dob (not verified)

Are you sure it's kde? it looks more like gnome to me...and we can easily recognize wmaker and mc

by Bert (not verified)

There are two screens shown on this screenshot
the left one uses windowmaker(see the clip?)
the right kde, look at the panel at the bottom, the leftmost icons are
K, Home, KDE-Kontrol-Center, search

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

You have to remember it is a game. It definitly does have Kicker with the K button, but I think there may be elements of other GUIs as well.

A similar example would be in the (hilarious) movie Office Space the computer shots are mostly Mac, but at one point he quits to a dos prompt and another point (while in the Mac GUI) he downloads a virsus from the floppy A:\ drive.

by fault (not verified)

soundgarden looks very nice now.. is is almost done now?

by Guillaume Laurent (not verified)

I suppose you mean "Rosegarden", if so thanks for your appreciation, and no, although it's already useable for basic composition, it's far from done. You're very much welcome to try it, though.

by fault (not verified)

> I suppose you mean "Rosegarden",

Oops.. this is what happens when you type things while you are half-awake :)

Guillaume wrote on his page regarding Signals and Slots:"Why do you think all newly created languages like Java or C# have this same kind of flexibility ?"

What I am missing until now in Java is something as nice as Qt Signals and Slot. Maybe I missed it, when I learned Java. I normally register Listeners (which always have to be of a certain type) and then I have to generate Events (or catch them).
Qts Signals and Slots are much easier. Anybody here to tell me what their Java equivalent is?

I assume when you write Java that you mean AWT/Swing. AFAIK there is no Slot/Signal analog in AWT/Swing. However, there is a nice Java wrapper for QT/KDE written/maintained by Richard Dale, which of course mirrors the C++ QT/KDE APIs. It is part of the kdebindings module.

by Guillaume Laurent (not verified)

Actually I was referring to the type-unsafety of the slot and signals (as opposed to libsig++ type-safety). Java doesn't have the equivalent of slot and signals, also implementing them would be quite doable.

by Praveenkumar Begur (not verified)

The closest java equivalent would be the JMS Messaging API provided in J2EE.