KDE.news 

Lately I have been seeing the name of Frank Karlitschek popping up, so I thought I would contact him and ask him about his role in the KDE project. The following is an interview conducted by email.

KOffice 1.3 has been released today. See the release notes, announcement and the complete list of changes.

KOffice 1.3 consists of the following applications:

• KWord - A frame-based word processor (screenshots)
• KSpread - An advanced spreadsheet application (screenshots)
• KPresenter - A full-featured presentation program (screenshots)
• Kivio - A Visio®-style flowcharting application (screenshots)
• Karbon14 - A vector drawing application (screenshots)
• Kugar - A tool for generating business quality reports
• KChart - An integrated graph and chart drawing tool (screenshots)
• KFormula - A powerful formula editor (screenshots)

In this week's KDE-CVS-Digest: KStars adds more telescopic devices. KAddressBook adds custom field support. Krita gets working brush and new patterns. CSS code from Safari added to KHTML.

After months of hard work, the multi-platform email/PIM client Aethera now has integrated support for the Kolab groupware server. Aethera 1.0.2 comes with support for email, calendar and todo using KOrganizer as a plug-in, sticky notes, address book and now Kolab integration. There are optional commercial plug-in modules for an advanced and integrated Jabber client, Whiteboard client and Voice over IP application, all integrated in to the environment. Everything but the VoIP is available on both Linux and Windows. For full details on what else is new, see the change log. Aethera is fully GPL and available on Sourceforge for download. We'd be happy for contributors and comments.

One step closer to all-platform-support. The KDE on Cygwin project announced its KDE 3.1.4 release for Cygwin/XFree. New is native sound support, windows executables are usable in Konqueror, prelimary printing support using Ghostscript and much more. Together with recent Cygwin and Cygwin/XFree releases you will enjoy font and pixmap caching speedups together with a multi-windowed display mode. Beside the basic packages this release contains additional packages like kdevelop 3.0, kdeedu, quanta, kdenetwork (alpha version) and kde-i18n for 45 languages. Packages for kdegames and kdesdk (umbrello) are planned next. See the KDE 3 on Cygwin page for further information.

We noticed that Everaldo, the author of the Crystal icons, is working at Lindows these days. At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo New York, OSDL announced that Trolltech has joined OSDL and will participate in the Lab's new Desktop Linux Working Group. Some news from the development of Krita which has now pressure-sensitivity support. Stewart Hall, principal developer for the European Beagle-2, told Linux Devices that they use the SuSE 8.0 distribution with the KDE desktop and applications like KCalc, KHexEdit and KDevelop in their development and operations. Curious what the upcoming release of KOrganizer will bring? Have a look at its website where all new features of KOrganizer 3.2 are summarized. Also check out those workshops on group scheduling, importing calendar files from Microsoft and the Exchange Plugin in KOrganizer.

kdenonbeta is KDE's source repository for code that is not ready yet to be included in KDE's beta releases. It can be considered a nursing ground for new software. Unfortunately not all software reaches adolescence. Below you find a list of programs that have been removed from kdenonbeta due to lack of development. If you are the author of a program in kdenonbeta that is still there after this cleanup, now is a good time to think about the future of your code.

The LinuxWorld Magazine 2003 Readers' Choice Awards, often referred to as the "Oscars of the Software Industry," recognizes excellence in the solutions provided by the top Linux vendors in the market. We are therefore very proud that KDE 3.1 has won first place in the "Best Linux Desktop Manager" category.

OSNews features an interesting interview with President & COO of Lindows.com, Kevin Carmony. They discuss about LindowsOS 5, ReiserFS 4, their KDE involvement, their OSS sponsorships, the Microsoft competition, community misconceptions about LindowsOS and much more. This interview is a lot of KDE interest as Kevin goes through the increasing Lindows.com involvement in the KDE project and what's coming in the future too. Also, for the first time for a Lindows.com product, LindowsOS 4.5 Developer's Edition will be given for free for the next two days for everyone to try it out. Just use the text coupon mentioned in the interview article to get access to the distro (normally priced at $60 US).

The KDevelop team is happy to announce that KDevelop 3.0 won the Product Excellence Award for Best Development Tool at Linuxworld New York 2004 conference & Expo. This is the first award for the new codebase of KDevelop 3.0, stay tuned for the release :)