KDE.news 

This week we see more large merges from Safari, the switch to VFolder-based KDE menus, the KOffice developers improve the filters and add useful templates, KDevelop and Quanta receive new templates and yet more. Get your CVS fix here.

The "Linux in the Workplace" book by SSC, publisher of Linux Journal, introduces Linux users to the desktop capabilities of Linux with the KDE 3 desktop. It includes information on how to use email and surf the Internet, perform general office-related tasks, work with the command line and much more. While being available for purchase in traditional printed version, all 400 pages have been released under the GNU Free Documentation License and the full text of the book is available online in HTML and PDF versions. Editor's note: the HTML version is rather less than ideal, but the PDF version is pretty much identical to the printed book.

The KDE Promo Team and kernel concepts are bringing you more shirts featuring your favourite desktop. The shirts are dark blue and feature an embroidered 4-color blue KDE gear about 5.5cm in size. They are available in polo shirt, t-shirt and girlie shirt versions. Polo shirts are especially targeted at KDE members who do public promotional work at expos and so on. We have prepared a form for preorders with full details on price, size and shipping costs.

This week's edition of KDE-CVS-Digest highlights the larger merges of Safari code, Xinerama support, msword filters, KMail bugfixes, Kopete developments, along with continuing work on aRts and much more.

One of the oft-recurring debates on KDE mailing lists is, how configurable should the KDE desktop be? With recent indications that GNOME seems to be heading in the "less is better" direction, independent KDE developer Mosfet has written an editorial (related article) urging why KDE should not follow suit. Anyone else have an opinion on this? <grin>

The KOffice developers have been making outstanding progress towards their goal of creating a useful, powerful and reliable KDE office suite. But whereas the technology in KOffice has been steadily improving, its visual appearance has not been keeping pace. To address this issue, the KOffice development team is pleased to announce the KOffice Icon Contest. This contest is being held to ensure that KOffice 1.3 not only works better but also looks better than any previous release.

In a recent article featured on LinuxPlanet, senior technology consultant Rob Reilly ran KDE 3.1 through its paces using a low-end 133MHz PC with 128 MB RAM. According to the story, despite a number of new features and aesthetic improvements, KDE 3.1 reverses the general desktop trend of increased resource usage:
"Even though KDE took about two and 1/2 minutes to load, most of the programs, menus, icons and animations seemed to appear almost instantly and ran without a hitch. [. . .] For the average office or home user, the combination of an older PC and KDE 3.1 would work perfectly well for their needs."

KDE-France held a booth at the Solutions Linux 2003 show in Paris recently. For an account of our activities as well as some pictures, be sure to check out our report. Interesting items include: details of the team, promoting KDE with a remastered version of Knoppix, Richard Stallman's hour-long visit to the booth and test-drive of KDE 3.1, an analysis of our userbase and more.

This week, in the latest KDE-CVS-Digest read about the many improvements in the development tools. In KDevelop, work continues on code completion and new code templates. Quanta gets ktips and finishing polishes. Kate, Cervisia, KBabel and Umbrello continue to get better. Support for new XFree86 features are being implemented. And nothing like a gathering of developers (report) to improve the games.

After the public release of KDE 3.1 it was only a matter of time to see a Knoppix based Live CD using this version. The KDE Promo team worked on several custom versions, one of which was then used at Solutions Linux in Paris. The forum for Knoppix customizations, Knoppix.net, then went ahead and offered a custom Knoppix KDE edition containing KDE 3.1 and many more KDE applications. Vinod Kumar, one of the editors of Ammai.com and also a Microsoft Certified Professional in VB 6.0 Desktop Applications, chose the above mentioned Knoppix KDE edition for trying Linux for the first time ever. He gives 4.5 out of 5 and concludes: "Being the first time I used Linux, I was highly satisfied. (...) the entire experience was wonderful. (...) What is even more amazing is that because of Knoppix, Linux is closer to anyone who wants to try it risk-free. I plan on using Knoppix more and more until I get completely familiar with it, then I will most likely install Linux on my hard drive."