KDE.news 

Aaron J. Seigo delivers again with Kernel Cousin KDE #32. This week's summary includes talk about DCOP for C programs, bleeding edge adventures, a XSLT KOffice filter, fixes for IRIX, the aRts CVS module and changes to make KDE comply to the Thumbnail Managing Standard. Read More

Flood is a simple web interface plugin for Noatun. It allows the user to control the basic features of Noatun from anywhere on the web, using a dynamically generated XHTML/CSS interface. Flood also generates an RDF file of recently played songs readable by news tickers such as KNewsTicker. Check out the homepage for more details, the Noatun news item, or just look at these webshots (1, 2, 3). Read More

After a short reprieve, Tink is back with a new interview. Dwayne Bailey, a KDE friend who bears an amazing resemblance to a fetus' ultrasound image, is involved in translating KDE into the many languages spoken in South Africa. Dwayne's work recently drew high praise from a South African official organization. Great work, Mr. Bailey. Read More

Those of you following the US antitrust proceedings against Microsoft might be interested to note that the US DoJ Antitrust Division has selected 47 "major" comments from the 30,000+ comments submitted under the Tunney Act. Included amongst those are comments from the KDE League, Inc. (nice PDF version, website) as well as Red Hat, Inc. (website). After a brief review, other comments making significant references to Open Source include John A. Carroll, Steven Waldman, Ralph Nader and James Love, The American Antitrust Institute and the U.S. Senate (mainly Red Hat's testimony), and comments making some reference to Open Source include Consumers for Computing Choice and Open Platform Working Group, Paul Johnson, Dan Kegel, Mason Thomas and SBC Communications Inc.. Hopefully this volume of comments will ensure that the district court will pay adequate attention to the issues confronting Open Source developers in particular when reviewing the proposed settlement. Read More

KDE 3.0 Beta2 was announced today after a delay due to a variety of problems. This new release should provide a great opportunity for those interested in helping hunt down bugs or simply seeing where the future of KDE is headed. Read the full announcement for details. "One of the major improvements brought by KDE 3.0 over KDE 2.2 is the Javascript/DHTML support in Konqueror. The DOM 2 model, used to render an HTML page, is now mostly implemented, and changes to the DOM tree are handled much better. The Javascript bindings and support is almost complete, faster and more stable than in KDE 2. These changes result in a much-improved rendering of dynamic websites and is something users will immediately appreciate." Read More

As many people will have noticed, things haven't been too rosy in the KDE world for the last few days. Virtually all of our critical services have been broken, including cvs, mailing lists, kde.org mail addresses and a number of web sites (such as developer.kde.org). Unsurprisingly, this has meant that KDE 3.0 Beta 2 (originally scheduled for Monday) has been delayed. Read More

I have added another interview to KDE::Enterprise, this time with Adam Wiggins from TrustCommerce. Adam recently wrote a report on their use of Open Source and KDE, and this interview was a chance to further explore the issue. "It's simple: KDE makes the UNIX desktop usable for non-IT workers. If it wasn't for KDE, we'd have to pay a lot of money for proprietary hardware (Apple) or software (Microsoft). More importantly, the machines are more stable and easier for our sysadmin to maintain. [...] I'd like to see a distribution that is entirely based around KDE. All configuration is done through the KDE control panel, and the system is designed from the ground up to never, ever need to access it at the shell level." Read More

While we wait for KDE CVS and KDE mail to be resurrected, Hetz wrote in with a pointer to .dep's impressions of a pre-beta2 version of KDE3. It's actually quite positive (he finds KDE3 stable already), with screenshots, but also not without some criticism of KMail changes and a good point about the difficult-to-kill KOrganizer alarm daemon. Read More

Klaus Stärk has written in with two stories of interest from Germany. In the first, the German KDE website has announced the February 2002 App of the Month: KOrganizer. As usual, the useful (German) review includes a description of KOrganizer, as well as a note by, and an interview with, its maintainer, Cornelius Schumacher (People of KDE, dot story). In the second story, many of you know that the German BundesTag (parliament) is considering making KDE/GNU/Linux the pricipal OS/Desktop in the parliament. Klaus points to an online petition called BundesTux (english), "where people can subscribe in order to say "Yes, it would be good to have Linux on the servers and desktops in the german Bundestag". So when Linux becomes the desktop OS there, what could be the desktop environment, then?" Even if you do not plan to endorse the petition, I suggest that you head over there anyway, the petition is quite the great read. Read More

The South African National Advisory Council on Innovation (NACI) recently published a document (pdf version) with far reaching recommendations about open source and open standards.
The paper contains a narrative on the South African translation project translate.org.za which is translating KDE into all 11 official languages of South Africa. "KDE itself is sensitive to language issues and is currently translated into 42 languages, far in excess of any of the popular commercial packages. It took Translate six weeks of work to translate enough of KDE into Xhosa to make it ready for release. Another six weeks were spent for other minor components and documentation. It was so easy to include Xhosa in KDE because there is a spirit of co-operation and collaboration in open software projects. As a result it enjoys some of the richest translation tools and is multi-lingual from the ground up. Information is freely discussed and shared, which means that KDE, like most other open software, is rapidly being enhanced by thousands of volunteer programmers around the world." Read More