KDE.news 

Tink continues the People series with Michael Brade. Michael is one of the younger developers and became involved with KDE fairly recently. His current interests include KNotes and cleaning up the contents of the bug tracking system. Please also take note that Tink has a newsflash on the main people page where she announces her intention to develop a resource for KDE-related job offers and demands. Take a look, and let her know if you're interested. Read More

According to internal email correspondence, TrollTech, makers of the Qt widget set on which KDE is based, has decided to use JavaScript and Mozilla technology as core components in the next versions of their products. The KDE core team appears quite enthusiastic about this novel development. In one of the emails, Matthias Ettrich, KDE founder, explained: "Now we're pushing the envelope, making KDE more flexible and themable than ever before. By replacing C++ with JavaScript and HTML/XML where possible, KDE will become easier to program and to theme, sometimes with the simple editing of a stylesheet!". Most KDE developers agreed. A draft press release is included below. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo is back with another excellent edition of KC KDE. This week, read about Matthias Ettrich advocating the use of CORBA/ORBit as an alternative to ICE for DCOP interprocess communication, IMAP in KMail CVS, new KWin styles and themability improvements, kdeprint updates, offline surfing in Konqueror, and more. Read it all here. Read More

Waldo Bastian, the release manager for KDE 2.2, has posted a revised schedule for the next major release of the KDE core applications (KOffice is on a separate release cycle). The schedule has slipped somewhat to provide time to add some major new features to the next release, including such popular wish-list items as (1) a better printing framework; (2) IMAP support in KMail; and (3) improved database support with KDE-DB. The schedule now contemplates an alpha release on April 16, beta releases on May 14 and June 18, and the final release on July 16 (109 days, but who's counting?). Read More

The other day, I found something rather interesting in the referrer logs: Telsa Gwynne, well-known in Linux and GNOME circles, wrote up a pretty neat report of Sirtaj Singh Kang's talk at Linux.Conf.Au 2001. "One huge thing that helped KDE and would probably benefit other very big projects was that KDE had the KDE Summit which was sponsored by Trolltech. When you get all the people in same place, then magic happens. At the KDE one, Matthias Ettrich and Preston Brown got drunk to the stage of claiming "We could write better than CORBA. Hic. In a day!" The next day, of course, everyone reminded them about this claim, so they had to do something about it. 36 hours later, DCOP emerged. There was a similar effect with KOffice, which came on by leaps and bounds as a result of the summit. So, if you're big enough to get sponsors, get your people all in one place and watch the results pour out." Go read it for some pretty entertaining KDE history and insight. Read More

As everyone has been gleefully pointing out, KDE 2.1.1 is out. The main features of this release over KDE 2.1 are bugfixes, additional language translations, and numerous documentation updates. As an added bonus, you can now also "paste" a URL to Konqueror and have it automatically load the website. I'm also told that KPilot 4.0.1 is in pretty good shape in this release. See the ChangeLog for more details, and the full announcement here. Enjoy! Read More

The KDE community, made up of developers and avid users, has a new project: the KDE Zine. Just a few short weeks ago, discussion about the possibilities of creating a print magazine cropped up on the KDE-promo mailing list. Today, the discussion has spawned its own mailing list, the beginnings of a Web site located at zine.kde.org, and a small group of volunteers who are busy working out myriad details involved in bringing a print publication to life. Here's your chance to get involved. More on Newsforge. Read More

KMail is a central tonality of the KDE harmony. Part of the team of developers who invest work and passion into this interesting project, Michael Häckel hacks away, making great contributions to the KDE Project. Appropriately, Tink has put up this latest interview on the People pages. Dedicated contributers like Michael only help shine a bright light into KDE's future. Read More

Daniel Naber, KDE developer and webmaster for the KMail website, announced that a bug has been discovered in KMail version < 1.0.29.1 which, after September 9, 2001, can cause corruption of your mail folders. Versions 1.0.29.1 and 1.0.29.2 will not corrupt the Mail folders but will display dates incorrectly. This all due to "the passage of one billion seconds since the beginning of the Unix epoch at 00:00 on 1 January 1970." [Ed: Hmmmmm, ...what?] Full details are here. The upshot: upgrade to KDE 2.1, already. And the release later today of KDE 2.1.1 should make it even more compelling. Read More

This week in KC KDE, Aaron J. Seigo summarises 10 threads, including coverage of the new powerful Kant editor in kdebase, Palm Pilot ioslaves, KDE sockssupport, a new font selection widget with font previews, and more. Get your fix here. Read More