KDE.news 

Mosfet took the pre- and circa- KDE2 world by storm not so long ago. His fingerprints are all over many of the styles, themes, window decorations as well as much of the KDE2 we are familiar with today. He churned out thousands of lines of code accompanied by slick screenshot after slick screenshot. Mosfet is now back with a funky new widget-style dubbed MegaGradient (screenshots: 1, 2, 3), currently in KDE CVS. As an aside, those of you wondering where Mosfet has been lately can check out Mosfet.Org for an update. Read More

The KDE Project today announced the highly-anticipated release of KOffice 1.1beta1. KOffice is an integrated office suite for KDE which utilizes open standards for component communication and component embedding. The primary goals of the the release are to provide a preview of KOffice 1.1 and to involve users who wish to request missing features or report problems. Code development is currently focused on stabilizing KOffice 1.1, scheduled for final release this summer. The complete press release is below. Read More

The KDE Project is planning to release kdelibs-2.1.2 early next week. The unscheduled release was prompted by the release today of KOffice 1.1beta1, which has problems with the kdelibs from KDE 2.1.1, as well as a security fix for kdesu, resulting from a security bug reported this week. However, the release will include a number of other bugfixes as well. Stay tuned. Read More

In this week's Kernel Cousin KDE, Aaron J. Seigo covers PGP support in the kdenetwork libraries, message scoring in KMail, some KControl restructuring views, comparisons of QSocket and KSocket, extending the KDE address book, Rik Hemsley's KDE widget styles tutorial, using Mozilla's Gecko as the rendering engine for Konqueror, and which version of Qt to use for compiling from CVS. Read More

This week's installment of Tink's People Behind KDE features Stefan Westerfeld, the creator of KDE's multimedia architecture based on aRts. Besides delving into the usual background, Stefan shares his favorite saying: "Software is like sex, it's better when it's free". Amen. Read More

Last week, we posted a story on a theme tutorial sponsored by IBM developerWorks. The tutorial was targeted at non-programmers who wish to theme window decorations, icons, sounds, colors, etc. However, at the widget level, KDE/Qt also offers a more powerful type of "theming" referred to as widget styles, which must be programmed. Rik Hemsley recently authored a tutorial for programming KDE styles (download the tutorial and sample code here). The tutorial also points to the ability to create theme-based styles; these basically allow you to modify a coded style using pixmaps. More information on theme-based coded styles is available here from mosfet.org. Read More

For those of you who like the cutting edge or want to help the KDE developers continue their phenomenal development pace, but aren't yet ready to compile from CVS, the KDE Project has just released KDE 2.2alpha1. A list of some of the significant additions and improvements versus the recent 2.1 release is below (please add any unlisted significant changes in the comments section), as well as a list of currently available pre-compiled binaries (please read the KDE Binary Packages Policy). Please bear in mind that this is an alpha release and those enjoying a stable desktop should use KDE 2.1.1. Read More

ZDNet has published a review by Jason Brooks of eWeek Labs comparing the Linux desktops. He writes: "eWeek Labs found that KDE (K Desktop Environment) comes much closer to delivering the sort of smooth interface that users have come to expect from the Macintosh and Windows operating systems than does GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment). In tests, KDE delivered snappier and more polished performance than did GNOME on the same hardware." However, he continues, "neither desktop interface has yet reached parity with the established players-pervasive support for features such as cut and paste across the interface can still be unpredictable." Strange to have picked out cut-and-paste, as that should be much improved in Qt-3.0. Read More

The latest edition of the KDE kernel cousin is out, summarising the latest developments and discussions on the KDE mailing lists. This issue covers among other things the creation of a kcontrol module for the new KDM, Andreas Beckermann taking over as KDE games maintainer, and some tidbits about KOffice development. Read More

Richard Moore entered the KDE team at the very beginning, in 1996. He has a useful interest in innovative technologies. His application Keystone is a VNC client. With KTalkEdit, he explores voice synthesis possibilities. Given Richard's life long plans, KDE has nothing to fear about continuity :-) Read Tink's interview at the People section, to find out why and to learn more about Richard and his rich activity with KDE. Read More