KDE.news 

This weekend, ten KOffice hackers congregated once again in the hospitable Berlin KDAB headquarters. KOffice has come a long way in six months: all the groundwork has been laid for the new version, KOffice 2.0. From Krita to KPresenter, KWord to KSpread, KChart to Karbon, KPlato to Kexi, and from KFormula to Kivio, the big underlying frameworks are ready. This meeting was called to decide on common look & feel issues and a release plan and schedule. Read More

"Born last millenium", KDE and openSUSE's very own Stephan Binner gets interviewed for this week's People of openSUSE. Stephan talks about his beginnings starting with a Commodore 64 with Ghostbusters, to today's hacking on KDE and openSUSE. "During my studies I maintained the KDE installation on the faculty’s Solaris network (most played day-time game then was XBlast) and started in 2001 to directly contribute to KDE (C++ programming and other stuff)." Read More

The Radio Amarok Team is looking for a new design, and they have decided to leave it up to you on how it should look. *** Bruce Byfield, of Datamation has written a several page article titled, 12 Tips for KDE Users. Bruce covers the KDE Printer Dialogue to using Klipper and configuring virtual desktops. *** Asustek Computer Inc's KDE based low-cost laptop, the Eee PC, nearly sold out its first day on sale in Taipei according to the article Eee PC posts hot sales on first day in Taipei. *** Need a new book for the holidays? Look no further than Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt: The Definitive Guide to PyQt Programming, by Mark Summerfield. This book is aimed at a much broader audience than the author's C++/Qt books and is also a great introduction to GUI programming and the Qt 4 libraries in general. This book is now available on Amazon. *** Rudd-O looks at KDE 4 Beta 3 and has a cursory look into Dolphin. Read More

As part of our KDE and Distributions series (1, 2, 3, 4) KDE Dot News spoke to representatives from Alt Linux. Russia recently announced plans to include GNU/Linux in every school in the country, and ALT Linux hopes to be the chosen distribution. Below CEO Alexey Smirnov and Andrey Cherepanov answer our questions about their relationship with KDE. Read More

Within the past couple of weeks two Linux distributions came out with new releases, featuring the K Desktop Environment. On October 9th, Mandriva Linux 2008 released their latest version to the masses. KDE 3.5.7 and Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 are just a couple of the updates with this latest release. Head on over and take a Mandriva Linux 2008 Tour. On October 18th, Kubuntu 7.10 was released, marking its 6th major release. Kubuntu includes the last KDE 3.5.8, making it the first distribution to release the 8th maintenance update to the KDE 3.5 branch. There were many other updates in this latest release as well. Mandriva is the first distribution to include QtJambi, while Kubuntu adds Qyoto C# bindings. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Fortune-teller and Keyboard Layout applets for Plasma, KNewsTicker resurrected for KDE 4.0 as a Plasmoid. Rewrite of <canvas> tag support in KHTML. Various new language syntax highlighting in Kate. Internal database storage work in Digikam. More playlist handling work, and support for Magnatune "streaming membership" in Amarok 2. OpenDocument loading of charts in KChart for KOffice 2. Various graphics fixes and a user handbook for the Bovo game. Kolourpaint is now fully ported to Qt4. Continued work on the Eigen 2 library. Further porting away from KDEPrint to the printing facilities provided by Qt4. Read More

The KDE Community is happy to release the third beta for KDE 4.0. This beta, aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase, also marks the freeze of the KDE Development Platform. We are joined in this release by the KOffice project which releases its 4th alpha release, bringing many improvements in OpenDocument support, a KChart Flake shape and much more to those willing to test. Read on for more. Read More

The KDE community today released KDE 3.5.8. While the developers' main focus lies on finishing KDE 4.0, the stable 3.5 series remains the desktop of choice for the time being. It is proven, stable and well supported. The 3.5.8 release with its literally hundreds of bugfixes has again improved the users' experience. The 3.5.8 info page lists how to get the sources and distribution packages. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Replacement of the "toolbox", and a new KRunner in Plasma, with many applets moving from playground into extragear in KDE SVN. SuperKaramba is now fully integrated into Plasma. A move away from KDEPrint facilities, towards more basic functionality for KDE 4.0. More work on restoring the functionality of the Klipper applet. Basic sound support in Parley. General work on KHTML, with more specific work on image loading and testcases. More work on KDE colour scheme handling. A rethink of device handling for Amarok 2.0. Generic style saving work in KOffice. Various optimisation work across KDE. Kaider moves to extragear-sdk. Kicker is removed from KDE SVN. KDE 3.5.8 and KDE 4.0 Beta 3 (with Kickoff included as the menu option) have been tagged for release. Read More

LinuxWorld.com.au spoke with our very own Sebastian Kügler, and is reporting about the future of porting KDE 4 and its applications to Windows in an article titled KDE's Windows Weapon: KOffice 2.0. "With OpenOffice.org receiving a lion's share of commercial support and market awareness for a free office suite, KOffice 2.0 has the potential to challenge its dominance with innovative features and a leaner code base." The article discusses the pros and cons of porting free software to proprietary platforms noting, "there is a community building around KDE on Windows and KDE e.V. sponsored a meeting to help people get the port to Windows going." Read More