The German Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für
Bildung und Forschung, BMB+F) recently sponsored a meeting of 16 KOffice
developers in Erlangen, Germany by paying their travel and lodging costs.
The meeting was held from September 23 - 25 in connection with the
Linux-Kongreß, a technically oriented Linux congress that is jointly
organized by German Unix Users Group (GUUG) and LiVe (Linux-Verband,
a non-profit organisation that fosters commercial use of Linux in
Central Europe). Many of the

Information, screenshots, and source for noatun, a new media player, developed in the hope for release as part of KDE2.1 is available at noatun.derkarl.org. Noatun will be more than capable of competing head-to-head with XMMS, and is already stable, and usable. Comments and help are, as always, welcomed.

KBasic is a programming language which brings a complete BASIC to KDE. It will include a great IDE with a form designer and a complete binding to KDE like controls (CommandButton, TextBox, ComboBox, Image, Html) and the other KDE features. Read on for more.

Eric Bischoff today filed a detailed report on the successful conclusion of "the first meeting of the KDE translation and documentation teams". Some excerpts from the report are included below.

As Eric explains:

The purpose
of the KDE Documentation and Localization Workshop was to give people
involved in KDE's documentation and translation an opportunity to:

Solomon wrote in to tell us that "The Linux MusicStation currently has a feature article on Anthem, a developing KDE2 MIDI sequencer. They will also be doing an interview with the author next month, so get the questions in." Screenshots here.

The preview release for Kaim has just been posted up on the on the Kaim homepage.

Last week we reported on the launch of the KDE Games Center. The site designers continue to build the site and it looks to want to satisfy both gamers and developers. Yesterday they added a news section and today launched a "Top 10 KDE Games" section. Bravo, Martin and Andreas!

Well, this is pretty cool. Bumchul Kim has updated his webpage with patches and details on what's needed to make KDE CVS and Qt 2.2.0 work well with the Korean charset. Includes cool screenshots and a patch for an OnTheSpot implementation in Qt.

The KOffice hack session is over, and Matthias Elter is back with a new KDE2 release schedule. While some of the details are still being discussed (hotly), in essence, RC1 will be released on Monday October 2, and the final tarballs will be created on Monday October 9. The public release will follow on Monday October 16. Note that the next KDE will be named KDE 2.0, contrary to what the announcement says. Woo!

LinuxToday.com.au is running a review of Kaptain, the universal graphical front-end we mentioned a few articles back. They like it a lot. "Sound ground breaking? It sure is. Kaptain uses .kaptn files, which are simple text scripts edited in any way you choose. The script 'describes the possible arguments for a command line program'.