KDE.news 

Avid KDE user and Linux- and Open-Source-advocate Bill Kendrick will be discussing the ways KDE creates a rich, useful and fun user experience for Linux newbies and hackers alike.

Bill Kendrick has become addicted to his KDE 3.2 desktop, recently set up a Konqueror-based kiosk for a local cafe, and even switched his father from an aging Macintosh to Debian Linux running KDE, with success and ease.

This week's TPBK [The People Behind KDE] travels to Laboe in Germany for a chat with one of KDE's more recent additions to the community. He has been an active developer since a year and has already managed to make his mark. He's known among friends for talking too much about too many things, is not very fond of green shorts and keeps his wife on a stable release. It's Till Adam!

The Quanta team has been growing in volunteer developers, but the amount of work to make a world class killer application is daunting. Community support has enabled me to take the next step and sponsor another developer! As it happens we also have the opportunity to bring some killer features to our web development suite, but this will require some help from the community to help some additional developers. So while I want to bring some good news to the community I also need to ask for a vote of support too.

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest: Quanta goes KMDI. KMail's IMAP support is optimized. Konqueror gains type-ahead find. amaroK has a new visualization scheme. Start of KDOM ECMA support. Continued work on certificate handling in KMail. And the usual bugfixes.

54 people from 15 African countries and 16 facilitators/helpers from outside Africa gathered in Okahandja, a small Namibian town, for African Source from 15th of March to 19th of March 2004. African Source was the first all African conference of Free Software/Open Source Software (F/OSS) developers. Vladimir Petkov (GNOME) and Uwe Thiem (KDE) presented the current state of the open source desktop, its strengths and shortcomings.

The Kaffeine development team, lead by Juergen Kofler, is proud to present a new release (0.4.2) of Kaffeine. Kaffeine is a xine-based media player. What sets it apart from other similar players is the fact that it tries to be an all-around solution by exposing xine's capabilities on an easy to use interface. Kaffeine supports all types of video and audio files and also VCDs, DVDs and media URLs. Almost all supported multimedia files can be played by point-and-click. In KDE 3.2, Kaffeine can also be controlled by a remote control. It is lightweight, starts fast and features a nice playlist.

An article on MSDN previewing XAML, a not-so-new idea by Microsoft, prompted me to try implementing the given example using Qt instead. It also prompted me to be a little scornful -- but don't let that fool you -- I'm rather pleased to see the company continuing to make life easier for us developers. Check out my article on how to implement Microsoft's example, using existing technology.

I'm very happy to announce a new document for inspiring KDE hackers, entitled "Common Programming Mistakes". The document aims to combine the experience of many of the top KDE developers about the Qt and KDE frameworks dos and don'ts. The way they were usually passed on to the next generation was by letting the youngsters make the mistakes and then yell at them in public. We will go over things, which are not necessarily bugs, but which make the code either slower or less readable. The document will be expanding as we see the need for it.

Several sources have been reporting on the GPL'ing of YaST, SUSE's system administration and setup tool that is fairly well-integrated into KDE (and reportedly even more so in SUSE 9.1). While this suddenly makes SUSE all the more palatable to the free software community, it could also be quite interesting for KDE. YaST is potentially a starting point for a free cross-distribution, and eventually maybe even cross-platform, KDE-based administration tool.

In a recent two part article, Linux Journal documented the transition of Sisler High School in Manitoba, Canada, to an LTSP-based desktop. In this informative interview, Tom Chance follows-up with Mr C.T. Leung on the ups and downs of the deployment of LTSP and KDE. "The cost saving is huge, in my case. [...] In my lab, I save $1000 for a copy of Windows NT/2000 server, $200 x 30 copies of Windows XP or equivalent, $1000 x 30 1GHz pc, $100 x 30 copies of Office, $100 x 30 C++. The total saving is about $45,000. However, the greatest saving is confidence! We are proud to be the first computer lab in our city doing all kinds of computer teaching without Windows!" Should be inspiring for other institutions considering the switch to a Linux-based desktop.