KDE.news 

With the KDE development and user communities flourishing more than ever, some people are anxious to drum up panic and drama surrounding corporate plays such as the acquisition of SUSE by Novell. As you might know, SUSE has thus far been a huge KDE believer and by using KDE has benefited from a loyal and enthusiastic Linux desktop userbase of its own. Last year, Richard Seibt CEO of SUSE confirmed this sentiment and pledged to maintain SUSE's strong support for KDE. A recent investigation by TechCentral reveals the same: "SuSE will continue (to operate) as a business unit of its own." said John Phillips, Novell's corporate technology strategist for the Asia Pacific region. "We don't expect to make Ximian the default user interface, and for the medium term KDE will remain the default GUI on SuSE Linux." Read More

I'm pleased to announce that the dot-stories and dot-headlines mailing lists are finally back online. For those of you who don't know, dot-stories is the list to be on if you wish to receive the latest KDE Dot News in your inbox, and dot-headlines is the list you should subscribe to if you wish to receive the headlines only. Read More

KDE won the Award for Desktop Environment of the Year in the 2003 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards with a convincing 55% of the votes. Quanta also won an award in the Web Development Editor of the Year category with 49% of the votes. Congratulations go to everyone who has helped to make this software such a success and a big "Thank You" goes to all of our users who have taken the time to vote for their favourite desktop. With KDE 3.2 coming out soon we hope that we can make 2004 an even bigger success for KDE than 2003 has proven to be! Read More

According to a recent news item at DesktopLinux.com, Walmart.com now offers a "1.3 Ghz AMD processor, host 128 MB of RAM, 30 GB of hard-drive space, ethernet interface, keyboard, mouse and speaker" PC for a mere $US 199.95. The system is "fully loaded with Linare's Linux, based on KDE" and "the system comes with access to Linare's 24-hour, seven-day-a-week technical support phone line." A more detailed description of the hardware is available on the website of Linare, the software is described here. The PCs are also available from Amazon.com. Earlier last year,
CNET News.com reported on the plans of the PC maker to offer an e-mail service as well. Read More

Integration of GTK+ applications in KDE has taken another leap forward. This has historically been a bit of a problem; the fact that Qt and GTK+ rely on different event loops was making it impossible to, for example, use dialogs from one toolkit while building the GUI in another. QtGTK is a library which integrates the Qt event loop in the Glib event loop. This makes it possible to freely use KDE dialogs, DCOP, KDE IO and other KDE technology in any GTK+ application just like they would be native. From now on, every GTK+ application can easily integrate with KDE. Read More

In this week's KDE-CVS-Digest: Many changes in KDE-PIM; gpgme now used in KMail. KNode integration in Kontact completed. A KPilot plugin for Kontact. IMAP addressbook resources, used in Kolab, is complete. And an initial version of a PIM configuration wizard. In Kexi, read-write queries are supported and dragging relations together now works. A KJSEmbed envelope maker example is available. Filelight can be used in Konqueror. And the usual bugfixes. Read More

Tired of long, carefully crafted tutorials trying to show you the quickest way to write a program? Here I take another approach. I just went and did a program and the tutorial while checking the clock. So here you have all three in one: the app, the tutorial, and the timeline. :-) Read More

The GTK-Qt theme engine is a nifty hack for GTK+ applications that uses the currently selected KDE/Qt style to do its drawing in a very similar fashion to the recently announced KDE Native Widget Framework for OpenOffice.org. Basically, what this means is that it will make your GTK apps look just like KDE/Qt ones and hence integrate better into your desktop (screenshot). I contacted the author David Sansome; it resulted in the following small interview. Read More

eWEEK is currently featuring an article in their 'Enterprise Apps' section about the KDE on Darwin/Mac OS X project which now offers KOffice and Konqueror as binaries for Mac OS X. And Quanta Plus is apparently running on Mac OS X as well now. Read More

A development version of the OOo KDE Native Widget Framework is now available for download. So far, it can draw KDE-styled push buttons, radio buttons, check boxes and list boxes (screenshot1, screenshot2, Plastik). The OOo Native Widget Framework is a way to get the look of the host platform in OpenOffice.org. It does not affect the feel, because real KDE widgets are not used; the framework simply uses the QStyle API to draw its widgets the same way KDE/Qt would. It is currently developed for OOo 1.1, but it will be used in 2.0 as well. Read More