KDE.news 

KOffice is built on KDE. This advantage brings enormous potential in terms of integration, performance, scalability, and with the coming full support for the OASIS Open Document Format, even portability. All these factors are vital for business deployments. The KOffice team is looking for contributors and developers to significantly increase and utilize the potential of KOffice even further.

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

KDevelop implements KScript interface. KStars adds more device support, scripting and observing lists. digiKam adds superimpose template. KDM adds sessreg support. KDE PIM adds support for custom pages in the incidence editors. KNotes implements search. Kontact adds ability to select default startup part. Kexi adds database forms with record navigation.

Linux Planet features "KMail in Depth" describing KDE's e-mail application as having 'masses of features and no malware'. The article describes converting to KMail, encrypting & signing e-mail and configuring multiple accounts.

LinuxQuestions.org has opened voting for their 2004 Members Choice Awards, make sure you vote for your favourite applications. Various KDE and related applications are in the nominations including Kopete, amaroK, KDevelop, Konqueror and of course KDE itself.

A lot of development has happened since KDE 3.4 Alpha, so we are now happy to publish KDE 3.4 Beta 1 code named Krokodile. For a list of already implemented new features skim over the KDE 3.4 Feature Plan. For sources and packages (only Slackware so far, more have been promised to be released in the next few days), please visit the KDE 3.4 Beta 1 Info Page and browse the KDE 3.4 Requirements List. The Konstruct build toolset has been updated for this release. KDE 3.4 Beta 2 is planned for mid February with a final release due for mid-March.

I recently got a chance to interview George Staikos, the official representative for the KDE project in North America. He addresses some questions on the current status of the KDE project, and about the problems they have faced.

IBM has published a guide to help enterprises migrate their systems from Windows to Linux. It pays a special attention to the users who want to migrate from MS Office to equivalent Linux-based products. The guide also covers the use of Kiosk tool to limit the configurability of the KDE desktop and contains an appendix about desktop automation and scripting talking about KJSEmbed, DCOP, Kommander and other tools. The title of the guide is "A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktops Linux" and may be directly downloaded in PDF.

theKompany.com has announced the 1.2 release of Aethera, a personal information management suite for GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS X. Aethera is commercial Free Software available at no cost under the GNU GPL with some proprietry plugins available to add extra features. Calendaring support is provided by the popular KOrganizer application from KDE. It supports a number of groupware servers including KDE sister project Kolab.

KDE-Look.org's amaroK icon contest received 28 amazing icons for the amaroK developers to choose from. The winner is ...

The winner is Blue Wolf by da-flow.

KDE-Look.org's highest rated amaroK icon is Wolf Howl by euxneks.

This month we present the fabulous Akregator in our series "Application of the Month". As usual we have an interview with the author and a description of this nifty application which allows you to browse through thousands of internet feeds without the hassle of using a web browser. If you want to help us creating this monthly series or you want to translate it to your own language please join the mailing list. Enjoy App of the Month in Dutch, English, French, and German!