KDE.news 

As reported at CNet Asia, China has announced a new policy mandating homegrown software solutions throughout government agencies. Redflag Linux, a Linux distribution backed by the Chinese government, seems to be well situated to to fill their OS needs. And along with Redflag Linux Desktop 3.2 comes none other than our favorite desktop. Read More

Adding WhatsThis Help To KDE Applications is the first installment in the Non-Programmer's Guide to Participating in KDE tutorial series. This series is designed to aid those who would like to participate in the KDE project, but for one reason or another can't do so by contributing source code. Fortunately, there are many tasks in KDE that don't involve writing code, and many of them don't require much investment in the way of time, either. Adding WhatsThis help in KDE is one such task. Read More

After using Kopete 0.7 for a while, I decided to write a brief review of this instant messenger and its features (Spanish and Catalan editions also available). The article has even been updated now that Kopete 0.7.1 has been released. Thanks to Jason Keirstead for correcting mistakes in the article. Hope you enjoy it! Read More

Now that the patches to make KDE build on Mac OS X are, for the most part, in KDE 3.2 CVS, it's time to move on to more drastic measures. I'm looking for help working on making KDE compile using native Qt/Mac rather than X11. We're still organizing, but if you'd like to help out, please join the discussion list and say "hi". Read More

In this week's KDE-CVS-Digest: Kooka, the KDE scanning application, now supports ocrad, a GPL OCR engine. JuK gets a history playlist feature, along with some serious optimizations. KMenu, the KMail address selection dialog, KOrganizer and KSnapshot get usability improvements. KStars gains the capability of generating skymaps from the commandline. And many bugfixes in KOffice, Kate and Kopete. Read More

On August 14th 2003, the KDE Project released the third beta version of KOffice 1.3. It brings a lot of bugfixes and a couple of new features compared to KOffice 1.3 Beta 2. This release is the last beta in the 1.3 series. There will be only one more release candidate and the final version is expected to be released in September after the KDE Contributor Conference during which hopefully many of the remaining bugs will be fixed. Read more in the KOffice 1.3 Beta 3 release notes and in the detailed KOffice 1.3 Beta 3 changelog. Binary packages are expected to be available soon, for now you can only grab the source. Read More

KDE Traffic #61 has been released, with news about KGhostview, KCalc, KRandr inclusion, Qt 3.2 requirement, KMail, KProcess, KOrganizer L&F changes (before, after2, after1) and more. Now let's just wait for everything but the kitchensync. Anyway, get it here, if you dare. Muahaha. Read More

German-based relevantive AG, specialized in software and web usability, have released the English version (executive summary) of their Linux Usability Report today. The GNU/Linux setup was a SuSE 8.2 Professional with KDE 3.1.2 desktop and OpenOffice.org preconfigured by the experts of basysKom to resemble a typical corporate setup. The study is based on a broad test conducted with 60 people who had previous Windows knowledge but had never used Windows XP. For comparison, 20 other people were asked to try Windows XP for the first time. Both are possible migration scenarios as support for Windows NT is being dropped. The study is independent, as it was conducted without a client order. Read More

In lovely weather-schizophrenic San Francisco, KDE once again had a presence this year. The show itself had the distributions like SuSE, Gentoo, Debian, Redhat. Oddly, SCO was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps due to a lack of product? Also present were the big-name regulars like IBM, Sun, and HP. Little blood was lost between any Gnome-KDE strife. Read More

In an interview over at LinMagAu, George Staikos talks with John Knight about the state of video and audio drivers for Linux, particularly the question of open vs closed drivers and when more hardware manufacturers will come around to supporting OSS development. "In KDE we try to make the software completely driver and hardware independent, so adding driver features would work against that goal. We do add special features for hardware from time to time though. KDE 3.2 will include support for special hardware keys such as brightness/volume/etc. on certain laptop models, for instance." Read More