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.

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.

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®

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:

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.

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.

In this latest installment of The People Behind KDE, Tink brings us an interview with her very own Waldo Bastian, core developer extraordinaire. "It must have been around the last beta-release before KDE 1.0 that I upgraded my libc only to discover that that broke netscape.

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.

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.

Matthias Elter announced today that KDE has won the Linux Community Award 2000 at LWE in Frankfurt/Germany! Congratulations to all the KDE developers on a job well done and an award well deserved. Pictures are available here, including a nice shot of the KDE team with none other than Linus himself.