KDE.news 

Jan-Oliver Wagner writes: "We are happy to announce that the German Federal Agency for IT Security, BSI, has contracted us (Intevation, Klarälvdalens Datakonsult and g10 Code) to ensure Free Software support for their email security standard, Sphinx. Sphinx basically consists of S/MIME, a PKIX compatible X.509 profile, together with certificate revocation lists (CRLs) based on LDAP. The code developed will be modular allowing inclusion in several MUAs released under the GNU GPL." Sphinx-enabling KMail and Mutt are essential goals, see gnupg/aegypten/ for more information. Read More

Are you looking for icons, backgrounds, color schemes, window decorations, system sounds, or entire themes? KDE-Look.org ("EyeCandy for your KDE Desktop") provides exactly that. While relatively low on quantity, quality is very high. The layout and interactive nature of this site indicates that it may very well wind up being a central resource for the kind of user who likes to change his colors, icons and look every hour. It also has sections for skins for Noatun and other KDE apps. Read More

The KDE Project has just announced the release of KDE 3.0Alpha1, the inaugural release of the KDE 3 series. This release is targeted at developers, though experimental users might want to check it out (be sure to read the instructions for installing KDE 3 alongside your KDE 2 desktop). The principal changes from the recently-released KDE 2.2.1 stem from the switch to Qt 3. However, that switch does bring with it an impressive array of feature enhancements, including new database classes, new data-aware widgets, improved RAD development with a much-enhanced Qt Designer, a new powerful regular expression class (with full Unicode support), improved internationalization support (including the ability to mix different character sets in the same text), bi-directional language support (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew), multi-monitor (Xinerama and multi-screen) support, better integration of pure Qt applications into KDE, and hardware-accelerated alpha blending. With the Qt port out of the way, the KDE developers can now focus on the planned KDE improvements. Read the full announcement here, or go straight to the source (alternative link). Read More

In a commendable flurry of submissions, Anonymous wrote in with a link to an announcement from China-based Dynasoft on a "sophisticated Chinese KDE desktop environment, hybridly-licensed, and based on Red Hat Linux 7.1". Looks promising (English, Chinese), although the screenshot section is a bit wack. Andreas Beckermann wrote in with an announcement for KGame -- the short is that KGame is part of libkdegames and provides a sweet API to make the life of the game designer that much easier. Jono Bacon wrote in to tell us about the first interview on enterprise.kde.org; it's with Shawn Gordon of theKompany. Moritz Moeller-Herrmann pointed us to an indepth perspective on CDE, KDE, GNOME featured on ZDNet. Naturally, they like KDE. Finally, George Russell wrote in with the latest updates on all of two (2) upcoming KDE releases: "The developer site has a preliminary release schedule for a 2.2.2 release - incremental bug fixes over 2.2.1 - details are here on the KDE site. The KDE 3 Alpha 1 release will be on Friday. Release coordinator spells out the reasons for the 1 week delay in this email on the core development lists." Thar you go, thanks to all. Read More

Linuxlookup.com is running a nice interview with Andreas Pour, Chairman of the KDE League, Dot editor ("Dre") and KDE evangelist, about the latest KDE release, the KDE developers' attitude towards Open Source and business use of KDE and KOffice. Andreas points out some reasons why businesses might consider switching to Linux/KDE instead of migrating to Windows XP and reveals some interesting facts about the City of Largo's KDE installation: apparently it only requires half a person to provide user and technical support for all 800 KDE Users in an office environment. TCO - no problem for KDE. You can read the full interview here. Read More

Normally a new beta wouldn't be dot news, but the new Qt 3.0.0 beta6 release is notable for one reason: QCom is gone. In a mail sent to qt-interest, Trolltech explains, "The feedback we received on this module during the 3.0 beta phase has been mixed. Many users think this module lacks the intuitiveness and compactness that they have learned to expect from a Qt API. Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to withdraw the QCom API from the Qt 3.0 release. We will continue to develop this API until it is evolved enough for our customers, and will include the improved version in a later release.". They also note that the new Qt3 plugin functionality is still available under a much simplified API, see the changelog for full details. IMHO, this is all quite reasonable and is probably for the best -- even on the dot, people turned out to be quite opinionated about QCom, although most of the heat seemed to be directed towards COM itself. As a final aside, theKompany is pushing its Korelib as an alternative option. Read More

DCOP is KDE's interprocess communication (IPC)/remote procedure call (RPC) technology. DCOP provides a simple protocol with authentication over TCP/IP or Unix domain sockets. Two new complementary tutorials on DCOP have just been made available at the KDE developer site. The first one, written by Richard Moore and entitled Creating a DCOP Interface, explains how to add a DCOP interface to a simple KDE application, and illustrates how it can be used. According to Richard, "Adding the interface is easy. The example defines a number of methods of different types, and as you'll see all these methods can be quickly used via DCOP." The second one, written by Olaf Zanger and entitled Automation of KDE2, introduces DCOP as an automation interface (e.g., using scripts to access another application's DCOP interface). According to Olaf, the tutorial is useful to "learn how to access features you used to tackle with your mouse or key-combinations with your favourite scripting environment." Read More

Jono Bacon, perhaps best known for his work on Kafka and the KDE Usability Study, has announced the launch of his most recent endeavor: KDE::Enterprise. Since KDE is probably best suited for deployment in enterprises and educational institutions at this juncture, it is at once wonderful and very exciting to see this useful initiative come to light shortly after the KDE Edutainment project, announced a few days ago. The press release follows. Read More

Peter-Paul Koch, maintainer of a JavaScript/DOM/CSS testing site, recently updated his browser section. In it he reviews Konqueror, together with the other Version 5 browsers, Mozilla and IE. He concludes, "In short, the few remaining bugs in Konqueror are details that no doubt will be solved soon. The development team has succeeded in building an excellent, standards compliant browser from scratch. Therefore I expect Konqueror to become a real competitor for Netscape 6 on Linux: it has made an excellent start and can only become better." Read More