KDE.news 

Months after the previous beta version and a lot of framework changes later, the Kexi Team is pleased to announce Beta 2 of Kexi, the integrated data management environment for KDE. This is a preview release for interested developers and experienced users; changes from the previous beta include an integrated kexisql engine and an improved user interface. Kexi source packages and MS Windows binaries are available at download.kde.org. Kexi is slated for a standalone release later this year and will be in KOffice after the 1.3 release. Read More

After over a year of development we're ready to announce the release of the first (and hopefully last) release candidate for KDE 3.2.0. Get it from download.kde.org or use Konstruct if you don't feel like calling configure by yourself. Due to the time constraints, don't expect distribution binaries, but they may pop up at download.kde.org URL too. Read More

FOSDEM will take place February 21 and 22, 2004 in Brussels, Belgium. This two-day summit will bring together leading developers in the Open Source community. Gunnar Schmi Dt will be the main KDE speaker at FOSDEM 2004 and will talk about the KDE Accessibility Project. We also have a dedicated KDE Developers room available for development talks as well as presentations. We are looking for developers who want to join and perhaps do a talk and/or presentation at the "KDE Developers Room". This is your chance to let us know what kind of talks you would like to see in the KDE Developers Room. Several developers already confirmed for this event: David Faure, Ralf Nolden, Gunnar Schmi Dt, Scott Wheeler, Christophe Devriese, Andy Goossens, Olivier Goffart and Dominique Devriese. Read More

In this week's KDE-CVS-Digest: amaroK adds graphic sonograms. KolourPaint can be used as an icon editor. KPilot PIM integration improves. KMail folder code is refactored. KWord adds import of text boxes from OOWriter. And the last bugfixes before release. Read More

Rahul Gaitonde has written a fairly comprehensive review of KDE 3.2 Beta 2 for OSNews based on his 3 week trial. "The target machine - my only computer - is a Pentium II 266 MHz with 384 MB RAM, with an Intel i810E chipset. [...] The first thing you notice when you start up a few apps is - 'Boy, this is Fast!'. KDE 3.2 is significantly faster than 3.1, and certainly way faster than Gnome 2.4 on my machine. It reminds me of the kind of responsiveness that Windows 98 used to give me on this same configuration few years ago (minus the crashes). Konsole opens up almost instantaneously, and Konqueror takes only about 3 seconds the first time. I was afraid that the increase in bloat with every release of KDE since the 1.x series would one day prevent me from using this computer at all with KDE. I'm glad the guys over at KDE have so splendidly allayed my fears." The review has a lot of screenshots and other information on the release. As usual, Plastik gets huge props. Read More

The preparations for the KDE presence at the upcoming LinuxWorld NYC are now complete. It should be a blast! We have ten KDE volunteers staffing the booth, some great demo hardware (generously provided by SUSE), a seven-foot banner, Kolab Server/KDE Groupware demos on a 21" LCD (provided by Ian Reinhart Geiser), and a laptop we will give away to one lucky booth visitor. It is also worth a mention that KDE has been named finalist in two categories of the LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards: Best Open Source Project and Best Development Tool (KDevelop). Read More

In his blog over at the KDE Developer Journals, Ian Reinhart Geiser reveals the new KDE banner to be used at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo this year. The recently launched KDE-Apps.org has been seeing a flurry of activity from the community, including a nice submission of 2 new GPL applications: K ISDN Watch and K ADSL Watch by AVM, a manufacturer of PC ISDN-Controllers and ISDN application software. It's very nice to see KDE support from a hardware vendor -- some of you might also be interested to know that ATI Technologies Inc also provides a relatively KDE-friendly Qt3 configuration application with their proprietary Linux driver for XFree86. Finally, a note that KuickShow is the current App of the Month (de) for January 2004 at KDE.de. Like always this is accompanied with a nice interview (de) and some screenshots. Read More

Dirk Mueller released today KDE 3.1.5, the latest and final release in the KDE 3.1 series. The release was triggered by a security issue that was discovered in the VCF file information reader. The ChangeLog lists the other fixes contained in this release. KDE 3.2 is expected to be released early February. Read More

As mentioned on KDE development mailing lists, Lindows.com is offering all their major versions of LindowsOS for free download to all KDE developers. This is the result of some talks between the Linux vendor and the KDE project. If you want to apply for the LindowsOS please read on. The KDE project would like to thank Lindows.com for this program. Read More

Last year in January, Intevation invited the KDE PIM team to a meeting for a hackfest to their offices at Osnabrueck. This was such a great success, that everyone was glad Intevation invited several European KDE PIM team members a second time exactly one year later to polish and fix up Kontact and its components for the upcoming KDE 3.2 release. Last year the big decision was to make Kontact the successor to KolabClient. This year the plan was to make a a roadmap for future KDE-PIM Development. The developers took the opportunity to discuss complicated issues in detail and sit together for brainstorming or in order to fight evil bugs. Read More