KDE.news 

There have been rumours recently about the financial situation of the KDE League, as well as criticism of its apparent inactivity. With KDE e.V., the KDE developers' organisational body which controls the KDE League, being recently resurrected, we will now be able to blow new life into the KDE League. [Ed: Matthias Kalle Dalheimer was recently elected a KDE e.V. board member and the KDE e.V. President.]

Several recent unfortunate incidents, including a security breach, have meant that a number of KDE web sites such as printing.kde.org, edu.kde.org, enterprise.kde.org, and worldwide.kde.org, have been forced to move to a new host. Previously these were hosted by Bernhard "Bero" Rosenkraenzer on his server, with bandwidth provided by Red Hat Germany. We would like to express our gratitude to Bero for all the time and effort he put into administering the server to allow the hosting, and to Red Hat for for supplying the bandwidth.

After two release candidates and 5 months after KVim 6.0, the KVim team is pleased to announce the release of the best version of KVim ever. It provides many new features and improvements: a new GUI for Qtopia systems, a new KDE toolbar, full DCOP support, much improved support for internationalisation and encodings, and improved portability. Read the full announcement here and check the screenshots.

Yesterday the KDE Project announced the release of KDE 3.1beta2, the third (and final) development release of the KDE 3.1 branch. On top of the large number of improvements over KDE 3.0 which have already been announced, this release offers a number of significant improvements, such as a new Exchange 2000^® plugin for KOrganizer and a KVim plugin for KDevelop (screenshot). In addition, release coordinator Dirk Mueller notes that over 1,000 bugreports on bugs.kde.org have been fixed in the last 4 weeks. Please run this release through its paces so that KDE 3.1 will be the best we can make it! Thanks to all for the hard work in getting this release out.

It has been a long time dream of the KDE PIM team to be able to integrate the different PIM applications into one common interface shell that would permit the creation of an Outlook-like application and provide a fully integrated personal information management system. Development of such an application is in fact rapidly picking up steam. In particular, the Kroupware Project, part of a full-blown open-source groupware solution for KDE and commissioned by the German government, was pre-announced and has already generated a flow of ideas and code. Karl-Heinz Zimmer showed a prototype of KOrganizer embedded in KMail: kroupware1, kroupware2.

We have recently switched our entire Bug Tracking System to Bugzilla. Unlike the old system, Bugzilla is based on MySQL and thus enables advanced search functions and offers many other features such as email notification and voting. However, for access to the more advanced features and for bug and comment submission, users will need an account. Fortunately, the bug wizard will automatically create an account when used for the first time. All existing bugs from the old system have been migrated to the new system thanks to the efforts of Stephan Kulow.

The PerlQt project is pleased to announce today the first public release of PerlQt 3, a full-featured object-oriented Perl interface to the Qt3 toolkit.

Key features include

support for nearly all Qt classes through SMOKE, a language-neutral binding library brought to you by Ashley Winters and David Faure (and Richard Dale's kalyptus), unlimited slots and signals, virtual function overloading, and Rapid Application Development (RAD) through puic, a Qt Designer compatible user interface compiler. Here is a screenshot of some PerlQt applications. There is also a tutorial available to help you get started. Enjoy!

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KOffice 1.2. David Faure, KOffice release coordinator and developer, noted that the release features "an incredible number of improvements". What with a truly great new (English-only) thesaurus, enhanced scriptability of suite components, WYSIWYG on-screen display, bi-di text, KWord mail-merge and footnotes, and KSpread database connectivity, enhanced printing and new sorting functionality, who's to argue? And let's not overlook the constant improvements in the filters, though the HTML import took a step back to take full advantage of KHTML's powerful HTML parsing in the next release. Karbon14, the extremely promising vector-graphics program (with SVG support!), is not officially in this release but many of the packagers have packaged it as well. 'Nuff said, read the announcement or head straight to the servers and check it out yourself.

The KDE Project released two security advisories today. The first advisory is about a vulnerability in handling secure cookies, which has been fixed already in the KDE 3.0.3 release. Another vulnerability was discovered last week on Bugtraq, which is related to the cross site scripting protection in Konqueror. A patch and an updated kdelibs package was released today to fix both problems. The KDE 3.0.3 Info page was updated as well. It is recommended to upgrade immediately.

The Quanta Plus development team is currently churning out more code than at any time in its history. So to keep you in the loop, the Quanta Plus site has been revamped, we've put up some new screenshots and implemented new site features such as a publicly accessible developer todo list. So what's new with Quanta? Well, we've released 3.0 PR2, so you're encouraged to check it out for yourself! You'll find auto-completion for HTML and tag attributes, PHP built-in function auto-completion, a revised document structure tree that recurses PHP structures and embedded HTML, and more. One exciting bit of work in progress is the ability to set different DTDs as well as offer tagging functionality in the form of pseudo DTDs to script languages. There are other fixes and enhancements and more on the way. We're also appealing to the community to help us flesh out the templates as well as other tagging and scripting languages. You only need to be a web developer to help here. Check out the full story (page2, page3, page4, page5) in our News and Articles section. Exciting things are happening.