KDE.news 

KDE Dot News recently spoke with some prominent people from the Kontact and Kolab projects. We talked about how both projects got started and how they have evolved. Enjoy the first part of this two-part interview.

Solutions Linux is the annual Parisian Linux and Open Source exhibition. The event runs in the Cnit exhibition center in La Défense from February 1 to February 3. The KDE Team will have a booth in the Pavillon des associations. Come to meet developers, translators and other KDE fellows and watch the upcoming KDE 3.4 demonstrations.

Trolltech has announced the release of Qt 3.3.4 which is a maintenance release including many bug fixes and optimizations. The final Qt 4.0 release is now anticipated for late second quarter of 2005 with two interim beta versions to be released in March and May.

KDE 3.4 Beta 1, christened Krokodile, was released not too long ago. For those of you who have not yet taken the plunge, Eudpytula Minor has announced some Krokodile screenshots for your viewing pleasure.

In this week's issue of KDE CVS-Digest (experimental layout):

Ruby kdebindings now support .kcfg files. KDevelop adds source navigation history. KChart adds print support. KWin adds translucency support. A new HighContrast style added for partially sighted users.

The KDE SVG Wallpaper contest has been finalized. It was not an easy task as there was so much incredible artwork. The judges sorted through all 86 entries and choose the top four and the winners are...

Three security advisories have been issued this week. The first two are due to a vulnerability that was discovered in xpdf. Both KPDF and the KOffice PDF import filter include their own version of xpdf and as a result they too will require some updating. The third advisory involves Konversation in which several security issues where discovered.

For the third time, the town of Osnabrück was the place for a lot of KDE PIM hackers to hold their annual meeting, kindly hosted by Intevation. While the participants were primarily focused on fixing bugs and getting the various PIM applications in shape for the KDE 3.4 release, some discussions also targeted post-3.4 development.

In "Bitten By the aKregator" George Staikos reviews KDE's new RSS feed reader aKregator: "The power of KDE strikes again! aKregator is little more than a repackaging of KHTML and KDE's RSS parser in a more convenient form for reading news, and that's what makes it so nice."

Being a guy with an accent on one of the letters of his name, you can imagine that I probably spend a lot of time entering so-called "special characters" in my documents and e-mails. Short of keeping a document with these letters already written, then copying, and pasting them, entering an é can be amazingly time consuming. Worst of all, while OpenOffice.org lets me click Insert, Special Character to select from a list, not all applications have a handy list of characters to choose from. For everyone out there who routinely has to enter special characters or letters with accents, I'm going to give you a great KDE trick to use that will ease the pain.