KDE Desktop 2.0 Final Release Candidate Available

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RC2, the (hopefully) final release candidate before the scheduled release of KDE 2.0 on October 23, is out, with binary packages available for Mandrake, RedHat (6.2 and 7.0) and SuSE (6.4 and 7.0). The full announcement is below. As the code will be frozen on October 16 for the KDE 2.0 release, here is your last chance to find show-stoppers, or you'll have to live with them for a while <grin>.

KDE Desktop 2.0 Final Release Candidate Available for Linux®

Final Release Candidate of Leading Desktop for Linux®
and Other UNIXes®


Improving KDE Public Relations

There is a general consensus that the KDE project, despite its technical superiority among various desktop environments, has had a poor PR record, especially in North America. Now that the release has been delayed a week or so, let's take this opportunity on dot.kde.org to present and share ideas that will help the KDE PR and marketing efforts. Just to get us started, here's one idea which I mentioned to Mosfet:


Alpha Blending for KDE?

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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.


KDE2 Release Delayed One Week

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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.


Three's Company

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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.


KUPS for KDE2

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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.