Shawn Gordon wrote in with the good news that
theKompany.com has contributed the
source code for Kamera (previously
featured on the Dot),
a gPhoto2-based KIO slave for
digital cameras, to the
KDE CVS. He also
has some updates on Kamera developments. Read below to find out more.

To start this new year in a joyous mood, I kindly asked Tink to grant the first interview of the year for our popular People behind KDE section, and she graciously accepted. At this time of celebration we would like to thank and pay tribute to those that, with their patience, support and understanding shown toward their dear ones, KDE contributors, make the KDE project an enjoyable activity and even a family :-). And thank you Tink for all the great work.

In a recent story at Kuro5hin.org, the author considers the implications of some recent developments announced on the dot -- namely, XParts and QGtkWidget. These projects permit non-KDE programs -- particularly Gtk applications -- to be used within KDE applications.

A nice Ask Slashdot article entitled Gnome/KDE Tutorials For Windows Users? was recently posted on Slashdot. The article raises the interesting question: "...

In the last edition for the Year 2000 of the People Behind KDE series, Tink introduces us to Stefan Taferner, co-author of KMail and a main contributor to central technologies in the KDE project. The new, festive appearance of Tink's site greets us with the photo of a happy Konqi.

Bernhard Rosenkraenzer today
announced the initial (experimental) release of
QGtkWidget and
QGtkApplication, "a class that makes it possible to embed
Gtk widgets in
Qt applications (in the
same process space, sharing the same event loop)."
Bernhard hopes that "this will be useful (primarily) in making KDE

Up to now, the KPart component model was limited to embedding in-process parts. XParts is an extension written by Matthias Ettrich, Simon Hausmann and Lars Knoll to extend kparts and make it possible to embed out-of-process components. The approach chosen is toolkit independent, as can be seen by their choice to embed Mozilla. Read on for the full announcement and details.

Torsten Rahn is ebullient about a
KDE program for scanning using
SANE called
Kooka.
"This is a real
nice productivity-app proving that it's easy to create extremely useful
apps for KDE 2 with relatively little work."
Details below.

Kooka

Kooka is a raster image scan program for the KDE2 system.

Our friends at TrollTech have announced Qt 2.2.3. Qt 2.2.3 is a bugfix release. It keeps both forward and backward compatibility (source and binary) with Qt 2.2.2. For details, read the announcement and see the change summary.

The KDE Team today announced the release of KDE 2.1-beta1. KDE 2.1 constitutes the second major
release of the KDE 2 series.

The full announcement is available here.

KDE 2.1-beta1 offers a number of additions, enhancements and fixes over
KDE 2.0.1, the last stable KDE release which shipped on December 5, 2000.
The major additions are: