BestLinux have announced Release 3 of their distribution, proudly featuring KDE 2.0.

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.

KDE 2.0 final is now available from the ports tree. Use cvsup to sync your ports tree with the master site, and then enjoy KDE 2 with
cd /usr/ports/x11/kde2 ; make install
as root. Finally, a KDE more recent than 1.94. Only thing that seems missing is kdepim. Hopefully this also fixes the compilation problem leading to an unusable khtml on FreeBSD. See
FreshPorts for more details. Enjoy. ;-)

The CodeWeb tool, now GPL'ed, provides guidance in porting applications from KDE 1.1.2
to KDE 2. It works by data mining the
differences in core library usage among
applications that come in the main distribution.
In addition, CodeWeb continues to demonstrate
typical library usage much like
KDE tutorials using "reuse patterns" and real-life code as examples of those patterns. See the CodeWeb page at SourceForge for a demo and documentation.

Trolltech has released a preview version of Qt Linguist - an application translation system under the open source BSD license.

"Qt Linguist, localization tool, allows users to seamlessly convert Qt-based programs from one language to another, simply and intelligently. Qt Linguist helps with the translation of all visible text in a program, to and from any language supported by Unicode and the target platforms. A key feature in Qt Linguist is a specialized editing tool, with many features to help the translators be more productive and get better results."

It's official! KDE 2.0 has been released! Run, don't walk, to your nearest mirror or go directly to the source.
The full press release is below.

DATELINE OCTOBER 23, 2000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New KDE Release Is a Major Advance for Linux®
Desktop

Next Generation of Leading Desktop for Linux®
and Other UNIXes® Ships

This week's edition of The People Behind KDE features an interview with Claudiu Costin of the Romanian translation team. "In March 1999, I obtained KDE-1.1.1 and I hugely liked it, especially the idea that I had the code and I was able to change it to my will. When I saw how easy I could modify visible strings thus being able to do translations, I started to translate KPackage 1.2.

theKompany.com is pleased to announce the release of VeePee v1.0 and SIP/PyQt/PyKDE version 2.1. VeePee is the Python-based scripting environment for KDE, and SIP/PyQt/PyKDE are the Python bindings for Qt and KDE. These updates are to support Python 2.0 as well as numerous feature additions and some bug fixes.

VoteZone is running an interesting review of KDE2 and this comment on Konqueror. The review is fairly positive and has several good points, including the criticism levelled at the current Control Center layout.

The organization Norsk Målungdom, which works with promoting the Norwegian (Nynorsk) language, asks Norwegian schools to boycott Microsoft products and use KDE instead. MS Windows and Office only exist in the Norwegian (Bokmål) language, but Norwegian law states that pupils have the right to books and equipment in their own language.

So far, Microsoft has claimed that a translation to Nynorsk will be too expensive. Virtually all schools in Norway use MS software, and that means all applications are in Bokmål.