To help celebrate the release of KDE2 and Linux-Mandrake 7.2 (which now offers KDE2 as the default desktop), a new set of pages have been posted on the Mandrake website which offer a beginner's tutorial of the KDE2 desktop.
Hope you stop by, your comments and suggestions are always welcome.
Hallelujah! The KDE site has quite a new
look! It's been completely redesigned and I like it, thank you very much!
But judge for yourself... Is the new layout better? Is
the new art better? Are things easier to find? We want to know what you think! I asked Kurt
Granroth, the KDE core developer behind the changes, a few questions you might have as well. Read what he had to say below.
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 :-)
It seems many users have not been overly thrilled with the way the task
bars are arranged in the KDE 2 desktop. As is typical, the KDE developers have quickly responded.
Matthias Elter wrote
in to tell us he has made some nice modifications. Details -- and
screenshots -- below.
Matthias writes:
I have implemented the kicker extension framework I've been talking about.
It comes with two demo extensions, an external taskbar and a child panel
extension.
On Monday, October the 30th, the real-time, multiplayer strategy game Boson
will be released in its newest version, 0.5. Although the game's playability
is still quite limited, this release represents a major milestone since it now is based on QT 2.2.1 & KDE 2.0 and features many
enhancements plus new graphics. The Boson Team hereby invites you to our IRC release party on the
date mentioned above at around 1800 GMT on channel #boson in the Open Projects
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.
KDE2.1 Multimedia Plan (draft)
We will be releasing an update of Kivio early next week that also includes the source. We have been getting a lot of requests for packages for systems that we just don't have access to. We will be creating RPM's for RH 6.2 and 7.0 as well as a DEB by using Alien (DEB packagers are welcome). We will also supply tarballs for Slackware 7.1.
A book called KDE 2.0
Development will be available online and in print starting in
early November. Until then you can find prerelease versions of a KParts
chapter by David Faure and an abridged KDE API
reference on Andamooka.
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.