KDE.news 

Dave Richards, Systems Administrator for the City of Largo, Florida, has just announced that the City of Largo has switched to KDE 2.1.1 as their production system. According to Dave, "The City of Largo is a thin client/X shop [which supports] 400 thin client devices that support X, 800 total users, and run about 230 concurrently during the heaviest part of the day." Dave shares his experiences and problems in getting the system working below, and happily concludes that "the cutover has gone really well". Update: 07/25 8:25 PM by N: Dave answers your questions in this article. You can also check out his old presentation at SCO Forum 99.

Thomas Zander has announced that the KOffice API docs are now on-line. Feel free to see this as invitation to join the KOffice team and make future versions of the office suite even better than the upcoming 1.1 release.

While we anxiously await the release of KDE 2.2 in two weeks, Waldo Bastian, the current KDE release coordinator, has posted the proposed schedule for the release of KDE 3. The upshot: KDE 2.2.1 is scheduled for September 2001 and KDE 3.0 for January 2002. The full schedule is available below.

c't magazine has just published an English translation of an IOSlave tutorial written by Carsten Pfeiffer and Stephan Kulow. The article tells you everything you need to know to add support for new protocols to KDE. Examples covered include slaves that generate HTML and an ioslave for audio CDs. This is a great tutorial, so check it out and start coding!

TheKompany.com has contributed several apps to KDE such as Kivio and Kamera. In this Slashdot interview, Shawn Gordon gives us more insight and details on his company. One of the things that has come out is that theKompany.com is moving products towards the Qt strategy, so that more platforms (including Windows and Mac) can be easily targeted.

If you thought news here was a tad slow lately, you'd be right. Most of our editors are either on vacation or have taken some time off, and we haven't really gotten all that many submissions from you either. Fortunately, Neil Stevens comes to the rescue with his brainchild freekde.org, a dedicated KDE news site with an editorial slant towards Free Software and whether to use tabs or spaces for indentation. They already have a few articles and reviews of interest on the site, so go check it out. While it's about time that KDE had more than one news site dedicated to it, I admit I'm keeping a jealous eye out on the new competition in town. Oh, and if you're still lacking for desktop news, you might want to check out GUI-Lords.org as well. And if you're still bored, please submit some content to the dot!

Lately, we've been spending some time improving the dot and implementing new features. While our efforts are far from over, we thought we'd announce a few of the things we've done so far. Dre has finally implemented one of the most requested features of the dot: You can now receive timely email notification of dot-headlines, or, depending on your preference, you can receive the full text of the dot-stories. As if that wasn't enough, I went ahead and implemented Flat Forty. Flat Forty can be thought of as a poor man's flat mode with a twist: You can now view the 40 most recent stories and comments globally. While mostly useful as an administrative trollbuster, we think you might enjoy it too. We hope to optimize Flat Forty eventually so that we can provide an efficient timely dynamic generation of the page. Read on for some dot fixes...

After some debate last week over whether KDE 2.2 HEAD BRANCH was ready for a stable release, Waldo Bastian, the KDE 2.2 release coordinator, has posted a revised release schedule (also available if you Read More). The release has been delayed two weeks from Monday, July 16 to August 6. Though KDE excels at sticking to published release schedules, it seems to me that stability and security are the developers' primary concerns. And That's A Good Thing^TM.

KC KDE is back this week with a double issue spanning the last 14 days. Read about video embedding in Konqi, KOffice news and plans, a new proxy configuration GUI (complete with screenshots), and much more. Thanks, Aaron.

The weekly Apps Roundup column has turned out to be not-so-weekly this far, but in the second installment I go much further in-depth and take a closer look at Bibletime, a scripture-study program for those of the Judaeo-Christian faiths. Because I went crazy with the screenshots, the review is available here. Enjoy!