KDE.news 

Konqueror's 'Ctrl-Home' keyboard shortcut is usually limited to a single URL -- either the home page or home folder -- and so often does "the wrong thing" for the user. Here is a tutorial on how to override this using KHotKeys and DCOP, make it context sensitive, and how to create keyboard shortcuts for any URL while we are at it.

Some time ago we made a mention of Skype on Linux in one of our short newsflashes called 'Quickies'. We were very pleased by the way it nicely blends itself into the KDE desktop. Now we contacted the Skype people where we came in touch with Jaanus Kase who took time to answer our questions.

KDE-Look.org has started an effort to entice artists to make missing icons for KDE applications. The current icon contest focuses on a new icon for the KDE PDF viewer KPDF. The KPDF developers are looking for a better icon as the current one does not help to describe the program and its function: reading PDF files.

KTurtle has been selected as one of the winners in a Dutch Educational contest! The jury was very pleased with the looks of KTurtle, good configuration options and a very nice manual. "Some renewed attention to LOGO is very much welcome". We congratulate Cies and the KDE Edu team on this achievement. You can read the full announcement hosted on the KDE Edutainment website.

During the KDE Community World Summit 2004 "aKademy" the 'Unix Accessibility Forum' took place which gave possibility for handicapped persons to come in touch with Unix. We talked with Lars Stetten, a partially sighted computer science student from Giessen.

There's an old joke about how a burgler makes a cake. The recipe begins "To bake a cake, first steal two eggs". Of course, if you really don't want to do any baking in the first place, and all you really wanted was a simple pre-packaged cupcake, all this recipe stuff (not to mention hunting down the different ingredients needed) may be more trouble than it's worth. Occasionally, that's been my experience migrating from Windows to Linux. One such occasion has been my recent attempt to upgrade KDE from version 3.1 to 3.3. Only in this case, the instructions were: "To install KDE, first find one recipe". Read more in this month's issue of LinuxGazette.

Among the most exciting things to come out of aKademy, the recent KDE Community World Summit, is a Qt port of Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine. This will give Gecko the full native look and feel of KDE/Qt, and make it available as a KPart, where it can provide an alternative HTML renderer for Konqueror.

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest: Speedups in khtml JavaScript, Kate, KMail and Kcminit. Macros and headers added to compile Kdelibs on win32. UI Recovery ToolKit (uirtk) improved. Support for building Smoke library on Mac OS X.

Hewlett-Packard made quite a splash when they announced that they are offering Linux on the nx5000, one of the latest HP laptop models. HP also sponsored aKademy, the KDE Community World Summit as a Platinum sponsor. This included a loan of 24 laptops for usage in the tutorial rooms as well as a special deal for KDE contributors to buy the nx5000 model at a reduced price. The aKademy press team arranged a meeting with Thomas Schneller, Manager Software R&D and asked him about this venture from HP.

Komposé is an Exposé-like (OS X) full screen task manager for KDE that has just gone to release 0.4.1 in two months. You really have to see it to understand, but imagine that tiny little box in your taskbar that indicates all our running windows blown up and on the entire desktop. Then add a tiny screenshot for each. This kind of task manager is new to Linux desktop users, but has been a staple of OS X users for nigh on a year and a half or so. If you have seen Exposé in action on a OS X machine then you have a good idea of what Komposé is like. Check out our screenshot review to see what it's all about.