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.

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."