KDE.news 

Benjamin Reed wrote in to tell us that he has helped out RedHat's KDE users and put together KDE 2.2.1 RPMs for RedHat 7.0 and 7.1. "Since I got such a great response for my "unofficial" RPMs last time, I thought I'd do it again. After what seems like years of building, I've got everything together." The packages are available via http or ftp. If you can mirror these packages, please let him know. (He adds: "Coming soon: RedHat 6.2 packages -- who needs a life? =)." Read More

The KDE Edutainment team today announced the official launch of the KDE Edutainment Project. The project's goal is to create educational software based around KDE, and not just for children. I have been watching this project grow momentum over the past two months and the team has achieved great enthusiasm, organization and, hence, promise. The press release follows; and there is of course a lot more information available on the project's web site, including information on how to join and help this worthy project. Read More

ZDNet reviews KDE 2.2.1, saying it provides a seamless migration from Microsoft platforms for business users and a comprehensive set of productivity applications, internet software and user management programs. They also mention, that "since KDE is merely running on top of the X Window System, you can perform remote administration of any KDE-enabled system by redirecting application output to another X server on the network." Read More

I was recently hired by SuSE to focus on optimizing KDE, and as part of my work, I have written an analysis of KDE memory usage based on Waldo Bastian's previous paper concerning GNU/Linux linker issues and KDE startup-performance. As it turns out, the linker issues examined by Waldo do indeed have an effect on the memory usage of C++ applications compiled and linked under GNU/Linux. The most important number from this paper: About 650KB of memory wasted per KDE application not launched via KDE Init. I have contacted the GCC/binutils developers with this information along with some suggestions, and there has already been one response from Jakub Jelinek (of Red Hat), developer of the prelinker tool. Another mail has been sent to kde-core-devel with a suggestion as to how we could probably deal with the issue until a full GCC/binutils-based solution is available. Read More

The KDE Project has just released KDE 2.2.1. Though a week and a few days late, I am happy to report that the delay made this (perhaps the last stable release of the KDE 2 series) better. Read the announcement or go straight to the source. Please note that some of the packages -- RedHat and Yellow Dog spring to mind -- were uploaded late and may take some time to sync to the mirrors. Also, there were some problems identified with some i18n packages late yesterday; these problems are being corrected, so if the i18n package you want is missing or broken, please check back in a few days. Update, Wednesday September 19, @08:22PM: Mandrake has advised its users to (i) update to "cooker", the development version of Mandrake 8.1, which has KDE-2.2.1 packages here; (ii) update to the release candidate of Mandrake 8.1 (please visit here for more info); or (iii) wait for the official packages, which should be available next week. Also, for those who have not read the announcement, I should highlight that TurboLinux has announced that they have made KDE the default desktop in the next TurboLinux Workstation release. Read More

Rob Valliere has written a success story in which he (partially) converted a small office (25 computers) from a Windows-only environment to a mixed Windows-Linux/KDE environment. The review includes useful tables listing commonly-used Windows 2000 applications and their Linux counterparts; hardware requirements for both types of systems; a cost savings analysis; a software comparison guide (including the good, the bad and the ugly); and a migration guide. The analysis shows that even if a small business needs to retain some Windows boxes because of the lack of comparable Linux software, significant cost savings can be achieved (in this case $5,000 for the mixed network versus $15,000 for a Windows-only network). Now if I could only find the time to write up what I learned during my visit to the City of Largo (which, as we reported a few weeks ago, switched a much larger network to KDE 2). Read More

Klaus Stärk has submitted an interview he recently conducted with Charles Samuels about Noatun. Noatun is KDE's powerful multimedia (video/audio) player. Klaus tells us that Noatun will be the "Application of the Month October 2001" on the German KDE-webpage, so the interview will be translated into German at that time. Read More

Frank was the first of many to write in to tell us that IBM developerWorks has announced the winners of the KDE theme contest. The top prize (along with a $3,000 donation) goes to Matthias Fenner of Germany for the Winning theme (download), second prize (along with a $2,000 donation) goes to Gregory Brubaker of the United States for the Happy People theme (download), and third prize (along with a $1,000 donation) goes to Vadim Plessky of Russia for the Egypt Office theme (download). Each winner now needs to choose a non-profit, Open Source organization to which developerWorks will make a donation on his behalf. Congratulations to the winners, and thanks to IBM developerWorks for their sponsorship of this rewarding project! Read More

ZDNet has published a review of KOffice^TM. Titled "KOffice falls short of Microsoft Office standard: Updated Linux alternative to Office not ready for corporate big leagues", the lengthy review takes a close and, perhaps surprisingly, fair look at the strengths and weaknesses of KOffice. While generally lauding KOffice, its design, stablity and capabilities, the review identifies four factors which, in the reviewers' opinion, makes KOffice currently unsuitable for corporate use: (1) shortcomings of the MS Office^® import filters; (2) lack of MS Office export filters; (3) the lack of some KWord features, such as a thesaurus, automatic spell-checking and (uggghh) grammar checking; and (4) some missing features in KSpread, some easy to fix (such as case sensitivity) and some not so easy to fix (such as the ability to import VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) scripts). All in all, surprisingly similar to my own review. Read More

I have written a small article that demonstrates the use of KParts. You can find the article here. The tutorial demonstrates the ease with which KParts can be embedded in applications, and discusses their use in KOffice. This article should also be a great way for developers to get up to speed with this powerful KDE technology. Read More