KDE.news 

A group of KDE hackers went to the FOSDEM event to represent KDE. FOSDEM is a two-day summit were leading developers in the Free Software community come together. It is an event held by developers, for developers where you can attend many interesting presentations, mingle and hold discussions with other projects.

Ars Technica features an article "Deep inside the K Desktop Environment 3.2" written by Datschge and Henrique Pinto. After introducing KDE and the project's structure the authors present some new applications of KDE 3.2. After that they explain the key KDE technologies KParts, DCOP, KIO, Kiosk and KXMLGUI and give examples for code reusage and an overview of efforts to integrate non-KDE applications. For developers Umbrello, Cervisia and Valgrind with KCachegrind are introduced and of course KDevelop 3.0. An examination of licenses is preceding the positive conclusion.

The People Behind KDE series is back from a long vacation thanks to overwhelming popular demand. In this first interview, KDE's ever so charming Tink gets back with Matthias Ettrich to see what has changed since the previous interview now more than three years ago.

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest: Valgrind gets a heap profiler. KStars can show the sky objects' distance from earth. Kopete has refactored password and KWalletManager code. Many bugfixes in khtml, Kopete and KMail.

Skolelinux is an ambitious project that aims to provide schools with a flexible and low-cost IT solution based on Linux and KDE. I interviewed Bart Cornelis, Kurt Gramlich, Conrad Newton and Knut Yrvin to learn more about Skolelinux and the role that KDE plays in it. You can meet developers from Skolelinux at FOSDEM and the FreeEDEM-conference in Brussels, Belgium this weekend (February 21-22, 2004) and later this year at the Chemnitzer Linux-Tag in Germany (March 6-7, 2004).

LinuxCult has published an interview with Everaldo, discussing career, graphic tools, creation process, Linux and KDE. Everaldo is not one of the most communicative guys in the open source community. But not many words are necessary, his work speaks well for him. He started creating the Crystal Iconset, and improved it constantly over the years. Today we have not only a polished Crystal iconset but also the Kids Iconset and the Crystal based Outline Iconset. So thanks to him and to the many artists in our community, we now have not only one, but many quality iconsets.

OSNews is featuring a detailed guide written by Carlos Leonhard Woelz on how to use CVS, a version control system also used for developing KDE, using KDE's CVS client Cervisia. It is a seven page long well-described article with many screenshots useful to both newbies and experienced users.

With the release of Qt 3.3 some days ago, IT Manager's Journal recently featured an interesting article on Trolltech. "How's this for a backhanded yet powerful endorsement of a company's products? Pixar Animation Studios, creator of such movie hits as "Finding Nemo," "Toy Story," and "Monsters Inc.", uses Trolltech's software throughout its operation but won't talk about it publicly because it thinks it would be giving away a competitive advantage." Commemorating the same occasion, OfB.biz also featured an interview with Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord. "With the potential for a substantial performance improvement, Qt 4 could be coming out about the time Nord estimates that GNU/Linux desktop adoption will start to become more mainstream. He remarked that there has been a shift in Qt purchasing [to Linux] over the past few years." Just a couple of articles you might find interesting.

As the leading Open Source desktop, many from the private and public sectors have expressed interest in KDE and are currently using it on a daily basis. A message consistently received from those users has been that KDE's usability could be better. While the need for greater usability is not unique to KDE, what is unique is our ability to directly and positively affect the usability processes in KDE via the same Open Source methods that have been at the core of its success.

In a TechDOT.com interview, MEPIS Linux founder Warren Woodford explains their choice of desktop and toolkit: "The bottom line is that I believe KDE gives a better user experience and that Qt is a better application building framework." No arguing with that. Take a gander over to their photo gallery and project sections to see some of the desktop tools they are working on.