KDE.news 

Matthias Ettrich's talk on Universal Components at LinuxForum (also given at LinuxTag) is finally now online. You can view the slides as you watch in Real Video format (part 1, part 2) or listen in ogg format. Matthias covers everything from basic concepts of components to CORBA, COM, Universal Objects, and UCOM in Qt3. Particularly notable is the coverage of Universal Objects, which is apparently a concept that originated from a Borland/Kylix developer, and the promise of future component interoperability between the likes of Qt, KDE, Kylix, Phoenix Basic, Python, GTK+ and what not. Read More

Benjamin Meyer, author of Kinkatta (the app formerly known as Kaim, renamed at the kind suggestion of AOL), is ready to present his next project, Sondra. Sondra is an on-the-fly MP3 playlist generator that is really quite original in its concept. You can rank a song while listening to it, and this personal ranking, along with some other pertinent information such as the number of times you have listened to the song, is written to the MP3 using the new ID3 format. Sondra uses this information to generate the playlist on the fly, creating the amazing feeling that one is listening to a radio station but one that is particularly geared towards one's preferences. Sondra has a KDE-interface, a command-line interface, and the backend is implemented as a library, so anyone can use it with maximum flexibility. Read More

George Russell wrote in to inform us of the KHTML port to AtheOS. "The main focus for V0.3.5 [of AtheOS] however has been on the KHTML-based web browser. I have ported the HTML parser/renderer used in the Konqueror web browser (KHTML) to AtheOS. KHTML is a very capable HTML parser and renderer that supports both CSS and javascript, and so does the AtheOS web browser. Finally, a high-quality web browser for AtheOS! The browser is part of the 0.3.5 base install and the 0.3.4->0.3.5 upgrade archive." Now that the dust from the slashdotting has settled, you can actually check out the screenshot (dot mirror). This has not been the first, and undoubtably, it is not the last port of KHTML to strange new platforms. So huge kudos go out to the Konqueror/KHTML developers, and all those people out there who helped shape this resource. Read More

The two venerable KDE mailing lists, kde and kde-user, both hosted at lists.netcentral.net, are being phased out in favor of two new mailing lists, kde and kde-linux, hosted at the KDE.org domain. Current subscribers to the existing mailing lists will need to subscribe to the new mailing lists. Administration of the old mailing lists will cease August 15 and they will be shut down altogether on August 31. A big shout-out to NetCentral for providing excellent hosting services to KDE users for many years! Update: 08/02 5:25 AM by N: By popular demand, a kde-nonlinux list has been created as well. Read More

Sorry guys, the dot went down again this weekend after 51 days of uptime on the new server. We suspect that the problem is an overworked harddrive. Bero is on it (bonus: woo, we have ext3 now), but you can expect minor flakiness as we fully work out the issues. Read More

KOffice RC1 has descended onto the well-known KDE ftp servers. Your best bet is to use it with KDE 2.2beta1 and Qt 2.3.1, but KDE 2.1.1 and Qt 2.2.4 will work (though not as well). The next release, scheduled for mid-August, will be 1.1 final, so this is your last chance to give KOffice a whirl and help find any remaining bugs before we are stuck with them until the 1.2 release <grin>. SuSE gets the binary-build over-achievement award. You can read the press release, complete with an incremental ChangeLog and other interesting stuff, if you Read More. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo is back with much appreciated KDE development news. This week read about the app currently known as Kontour, XIM support for KOffice, and more. "The self-imposed lull in new features and the looming inevitability of starting work on the next version of KDE has given many developers some time to consider the future of KDE. As a result several large threads regarding which direction to take things in the near future have occurred on several of the KDE development lists, some of which are covered in this issue." Go get it here. Read More

As a follow-up to Waldo Bastian's analysis of KDE startup times, Leon Bottou has implemented an inspired hack to improve the startup of C++ programs under GNU/Intel systems. "Waldo Bastian's document demonstrates that the current g++ implementation generates lots of expensive run-time relocations. This translates into the slow startup of large C++ applications (KDE, StarOffice, etc.). The attached program "objprelink.c" is designed to reduce the problem. Expect startup times 30-50% faster." Update: 08/01 4:52 AM by N: Consult Leon's objprelink page for some great details and up-to-date information on this hack as well as on the prelinker mentioned by Bero. Thanks to freekde for the tip-off. Read More

"If you've ever wanted to get into programming for either KDE or Qt but weren't sure where to begin, theKompany's DocBrowser is a pretty good place to start. It features a truly hyper-linked set of documentation for KDE and Qt's API, flow diagrams for how code relates, and easy to understand documentation of the calls you want to use." Get the rest of the review here. [Ed: This is closed-source commercial software.] Read More

In the second part of his review (mirror), Kent Nguyen walks us through the KSpread component (mirror) of KOffice 1.1 Beta 3. As usual, the review is complete with screenshots, and edits are courtesy Tina Gasperson of Newsforge. Read More