KDE.news 

Today the KDE Project proudly announces the release of KDE 3.0 (fully mirrored below), a release which marks a new era of choice on the desktop. Every advance opens the door to a group of new adopters, and KDE 3 is set to tear the doors asunder. In celebration of the release, the KDE League has posted the text KDE: The Complete Enterprise Desktop Solution, a work-in-progress but already something useful to show those who are considering the migration to freedom. Enough talk, time to download.

In this week's episode of The People Behind KDE, we travel to Leopoldsburg in La Belgique where we meet Kristof Borrey. Although unknown to many, Kristof is an exceptional talented graphic artist and is author of the iKons icon theme. When Kristof doesn't spend his time drawing, he works on his thesis about the use of Linux in E-business. Read more about Kristof here.

The toolkit we know and love has finally been ported to the text console. The Qt-Console project reports having reached the point of successfully running ports of Konsole, KMail and even Konqueror on the console. The project takes KDE portability to a whole new level -- think running KDE apps on your cellphone -- and ranks right up there with the Textmode Quake hack in terms of coolness. Just don't expect High-Performance Liquid to work.

After a brief hiatus that seemed closer to an eternity, I'm pleased to report that the dot is back and all is good. A big "Thank You!" goes out to Chris McDonough and Jim Fulton of Zope Corporation, Chris Withers of Squishdot fame, and the wonderful Zope community at #zope for their excellent support throughout this matter.

In this hectic week before the KDE 3.0 release, Tink found time to interview Eva Brucherseifer for this week's episode of The People Behind KDE. Eva is an electrical engineer from Germany and a driving force behind the KDE-Women and KDE-Edu projects and the KDE-Solaris mailing list. Read more about Eva in her interview, and don't forget to check out her favourite URL!

Kernel Cousin KDE #36 is out and as the KDE developers are working on polishing up the project for a new major release, there is lots of news from the mailing lists. This issue covers media streams, wallpapers, KOffice and of course the nearing KDE 3.0 release.

Frank Schwanz, the developer of Komba, a popular Samba share browser, today announced a security release. All versions of Komba2 prior to today's release are affected by a flaw which permits other users easily to learn a share password whenever the share is mounted. All Komba users are encouraged to upgrade to version 0.73 and to discontinue use of Komba on multi-user machines in the meantime.

Lo and behold Tink's latest community undertaking, the KDE Cafe mailing-list. In her own words: "KDE-Cafe is the virtual chill-out zone of KDE, a cross between Slashdot and IRC, a cross between the local pub and the opinions page of your newspaper. Specially designed for KDE addicts like you." So there. More details ahead.

The KDE Project has announced the release of KDE 3.0RC3 (on this, the first day of Spring). The release comes a month after the release of KDE 3.0beta2, with two (semi-public) release candidates, as well as a well-attended 1-week hacking session for fixing problems, appearing in the interim. KDE 3.0rc3 can be downloaded through KDE's load-balancing system (source code, RedHat packages (only partially uploaded at this time), and SuSE packages). Additional packages should become available in the coming days, both on KDE's and some distributions' servers. Other than for show-stopper fixes, this release candidate will be released early next month as KDE 3.0. Personal impression: love at first sight, it simply rocks!

Richard Moore has been working diligently on a rewrite of KWinTV, the KDE TV-card application. The "new" KWinTV (screenshots: Channel Wizard; Channel Wizard - Scanning; Channel Scanner; Device Selection; and Main window) will be based on QtVision, a Qt/Embedded TV application written by George Staikos. He has some really great ideas for future development, such as a panel applet to display a small TV, a TV screensaver, a TV desktop background and teletext/videotex support. Even better, he has asked the community for feedback on where to focus his efforts.