KDE.news 

Benjamin C. Meyer wrote in with the news that Kinkatta has been ported to Qt/Embedded. Kinkatta-Lite has been tested on Sharp's new Zaurus as well as the iPAQ. Ben will be demo'ing Kinkatta-Lite on the Zaurus at CES Las Vegas, courtesy of Sharp, and will release source and binaries when he gets back. Until then we will have to content ourselves with the screenshots. Jono Bacon is currently organising the KDE presence for Linux Expo Birmingham, UK on May 29th + 30th. Jono is scheduled to talk on KDE in business, while Richard Moore will be giving a talk on XMLGUI. Get involved. Finally, Someone wrote in to point us to this article at DebianPlanet. Sadly it appears that the long time maintainer of KDE Debian packages, Ivan E. Moore, has stepped down. Ivan has been responsible for some of the best KDE packages around, and his work will be missed. Other Debian developers have stepped up to fill in his shoes. Read More

According to a story at ZDNet (earlier story at heise online), SuSE has been enjoined by a German court from distributing its distribution in Germany, apparently because the court decided that the KOffice painting program Krayon violates the anonymous plaintiff's trademark (the article says copyright) in Crayon. Fortunately, boxes already shipped to stores appear not to be affected. One cannot know for sure who is behind this, but the rumour mill is placing bets on CRAYON, a German website which sells CDs with cartoons and other images. This follows not long after another Germany-centered dispute over the KOffice application Kontour (f/k/a KIllustrator), which an Adobe lawyer claimed violated Adobe's trademark in Illustrator. Any German lawyer care to explain why an anonymous plaintiff is permitted to get an injunction, and how trademark law can be violated when it is quite difficult to see any potential for confusion? Update, Wednesday January 09, @10:23AM: A more recent heise online story reveals that the trademark holder is Seidel Softwareservice, which recently spun off the CRAYON website, and while Krayon in fact was not included on the SuSE 7.3 CDs, apparently its menu entry was. It also raises the obvious point about the chilling effect actions like this might have on the desire of Linux distributions to include a large number of software packages on a CD. Update, Thursday January 10, @01:10AM: SuSE has announced that the injunction has been removed (see also the heise online story), apparently without having to pay any license fees to the plaintiff. Read More

Christian Couder is a contributor to the KDevelop project. He is working on integrating Eiffel language development support into the third iteration of KDevelop (codename: Gideon). Christian answers Tink's questions in this week's edition of the People Behind KDE. Read More

Kernel Cousin KDE is back with Issue 29. Aaron J. Seigo, Rob Kaper and Timothy R. Butler once again summarize discussions from the development mailing-lists. This issue covers a new Kate export, KBugBuster, KOffice filters, and Emacs-style keybindings amongst other new goodies! Read More

KDE.de (KDE's German-only site) has selected KNotes as the Anwendung des Monats for this January, 2002. Along with a screenshot-rich description of KNotes (basically, it's a desktop "sticky-note" taker which has been very nicely integrated into KDE), the honor features a nice interview (Fishy English translation) with KNotes maintainer Michael Brade. Nice work, Michael! Read More

PC World.com is running a story about the technologies to watch for 2002. Besides predicting consolidation in the Linux distros (particularly that RedHat will swallow up another distro), the article opines that "[t]he arrival of Sun Microsystem's StarOffice 6.0 and continued work on the KDE desktop graphical interface could make Linux a more viable alternative on the desktop". Nice to see KDE get the recognition it deserves in the mainstream press. Read More

Many in the KDE community are aware of some rocky history between KDE hacker Mosfet and other KDE developers. Fortunately, it looks like things have taken a great turn for the better: Mosfet wrote in to tell us that "I've decided to donate 20 effects I ported to KDE/Qt for PixiePlus to KDE3". Waldo Bastian promptly added them to CVS. The new effects include normalize, equalize, solarize, threshold, emboss, despeckle, charcoal, rotate, sample, addNoise, blur, edge, implode, oil paint, sharpen, spread, shade, swirl, wave, and contrastHSV. All will be available under a BSD-type license in the KImageEffect class in kdelibs. According to Mosfet, these effects will be useful not only for image viewers and editors, but also for things like style engines. Except for the simple rotate, Mosfet ported the effects from ImageMagick to work directly on QImages and Qt scanlines. Nice job, Mosfet! (For those who have not yet heard the news, PixiePlus is the successor to Pixie; more information is available here.) Read More

Good news for many FreeBSD and Sun Solaris users: you can now get a precompiled KDE 2.2.2 from the normal locations. The FreeBSD packages are said to work only with 4.4 Stable on Intel and compatible platforms. The Sun packages come in two flavors: Sparc packages, which reportedly have been tested only on Solaris 8, and Intel and compatible packages, which presumably is only for Solaris 8. FreeBSD users may also want to check out the new FreeBSD.KDE.org website. The KDE 2.x Systems page has been updated with these latest releases; if you are aware of any omissions, please follow the instructions on the page for notifying the maintainer. Read More

Meni Livne, who lives in Israel, is KDE's Hebrew localization coordinator and the maintainer of the KDE Israel website. You can read all about him in this weeks episode of People behind KDE. On a snownote, Tink and Konqi have made a cute snowman this week for the snow-challenged among us. Read More

The KDE Project today (OK, yesterday now) announced the release of KDE 3.0Beta1. The announcements contains the typical package locations and summary of changes (visit the developer's website for a more detailed list of planned feature additions for KDE 3.0 and the current progress). Since beta releases always provide an ideal opportunity for newcomers to get involved and make a difference, the release also provides intriguing suggestions to those of you who may in the past have pondered, "I really want to contribute to KDE and help make my favorite desktop even better, but what can I possibly do?". Read More