KDE.news 

While the KDE project continues to research and develop the ideal desktop environment, now the KDE community and development processes themselves have been studied and researched by at least two different efforts: Christian Reinhardt of University of Innsbruck chose to study KDE for his "Collaborative Knowledge Creation in Virtual Communities of Practice" Master's thesis. Christian would be very grateful for feedback in his discussion forum. Meanwhile, Dipl. Soz. Andreas Brand of Johann W. v. Goethe University also chose to study KDE in "The structure, entrance, production, motivation and control in an Open Source project" which he has already presented at this year's LinuxTag as well as at the KDE Conference (English slides available). You can read an English summary of his German paper below as translated by the KDE i18n German team.

This month we interview Jason Harris, the original author and current maintainer of KStars. Jason Harris is a postdoctoral Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He talks about KStars' history, what's coming in KDE 3.2, and the future. Read on to find out more!

I would like to let you know about a new project which I have started, which is based on an idea by Ante Wessels: a Wiki for KDE. The 'working draft' name for this project is "KDE Community Wiki Site" (KDE CWS) and you can find the site which is more than just a Wiki at kde.ground.cz.

The KDE Web Team has set up a public poll to determine the new logo for KDE.org. The poll is open for two weeks, starting September 28th, 2003. Please be sure to test the logos with different styles before voting.

In this week's CVS digest: Quanta's visual editor makes progress. KHTML gets text selection optimizations and immediate repaint from Safari. Kontact, KMail and KAddressBook get work on settings, time cards, drag and drop. Plus many bug fixes.

As the first beta has been delayed to finish more PIM features, we're proud to present the second alpha release of KDE 3.2. The first alpha was already seen as a very strong release and the second one is even better with 1374 bugs closed in the last 31 days. The major changes are the import of KSVG and KPDF into the KDE distribution, along with a major rewrite of the window manager. You can download the new release here. The are currently no binary packages, but you can of course use Konstruct to build it. Please give this one a good testing as we'll be moving to the beta phase next.

On September 25th 2003, the KDE Project released the fourth beta version of KOffice 1.3. This release sports tons of bugfixes made during the KDE developers' conference in Nové Hrady, Czech Republic (see KOffice Developers' Meeting Report). It is the last beta in the 1.3 series according to the revised KOffice 1.3 release schedule which plans the final release now for November 12, 2003. Read more in the KOffice 1.3 Beta 4 release notes and in the KOffice 1.3 Beta 4 changelog. For now you can only grab the source. Binaries, if any will be provided, will appear one directory above.

eWEEK's senior analyst Jason Brooks installed the first KDE 3.2 alpha release from source to review its current state. Although he obviously missed the KDE requirements and ended with a build without Xft2 support, he was impressed: "KDE 3.2 impressed us with improvements to its Konqueror Web browser and file manager and with the addition of a handful of new applications, including Kopete, a multiprotocol instant messaging client." He also had a look at Kontact, new wireless networking tools, the improved remote desktop connection and the accessiblity tools. Some crashes he encountered may be already solved in the second alpha expected to be released this week.

For the first time ever, KDE is available for SPARC Solaris compiled with Sun's own Forte compilers. Thanks to the hard work of Stefan Teleman you can download Solaris packages here. Read on for details as to how the Sun Forte port began and how KDE finally managed to get a maintainer for its Solaris packages. Those of you with an interest in Solaris and KDE may also wish to subscribe to the kde-solaris mailing list.

Open for Business announced the winners of the "Open Choice Awards 2003". KDE 3.1 won in the "Best Desktop Environment" category and Konqueror 3.1 succeeded in the "Best Web Browser" category. The editors liked KDE for being the most polished desktop environment and best replacement for Windows and MacOS users and honored the time spent for making KDE applications' look and feel unified and integrated into the desktop. Konqueror scored with integration too besides responsiveness and better rendering of pages intended for Internet Explorer.