KDE.news 

Many of you have been waiting for this one. Carsten Pfeiffer wrote in to tell us about the first release of KuickShow since KDE 1.1.2 in July 1999. KuickShow is a nice image viewer based on Rasterman's Imlib, and in case you don't remember, the killer feature of KuickShow was its blazing speed. You won't be disappointed by the latest release for KDE 2.1 -- I was blown away. It's even noticeably faster than the venerable XV (hint: command line geeks should use KDE Init for that extra speed boost, others benefit automatically). You can get KuickShow here, view a couple screenshots (1, 2, 3), or view the ChangeLog. Depending on your feedback, binary RPMs may soon be made available. Read on for the details from Carsten. Read More

LinuxPlanet recently published an article which contains a tutorial on how to set up anti-aliased fonts on your KDE 2 box. This article complements the tutorial posted some time ago by Lars Knoll. Read More

As the Dot has been getting more and more successful, and more and more popular, we've been attracting script kiddies and trolls like flies. As Dre previously reported: "On March 13, 2001, at 1:33 am EST, someone using the anonymizer.com service succeeded in putting malicious Javascript code into one of the posts. While the code was relatively harmless -- it changed all links on the page to point to a shockingly disgusting porno site -- we feel this security lapse requires us to disable all posting until the problem in the Squishdot code is solved." This news has been out for a while in all the wrong places (1, 2) and is attracting attention. Read on to see what we're doing about it. Read More

Many KDE Developers will converge the week of March 22-28 in Hannover, Germany for CeBIT (English). CeBIT is Europe's largest computer trade show with over 8,000 companies representing 60 countries in attendance. Torsten Rahn wrote in with details of what's going on there with KDE: "The KDE Project will be presenting a snapshot of the upcoming KDE 2.2 release at CeBIT 2001 in Hannover, Germany. There will be a permanent demo point at the SuSE booth (Hall 3/E45) and live presentations on the SuSE video wall. On Saturday, KDevelop developer Ralf Nolden will have a talk about KDevelop 1.4 at the SuSE booth. In addition, Ralf Nolden and Martin Konold will give separate KDE-related talks on Saturday at the Rheinland-Pfalz-Stand (Hall 16/B43). On Sunday, KDE developer Chris Schläger will give a presentation about the upcoming KDE 2.2 release at the SuSE booth. Other developers will be present as well." Update: 03/22 22:35 AM by N: A schedule for the KDE presentations is available. Read More

Martin Heni, the reigning master of games.kde.org, sent this note for our readers interested in game development: "Josef Spillner has arranged the opening of a new KDE mailing list called kde-games-devel@kde.org which has its mailman webpage here. It is intended for all discussions related to games development under KDE/Qt." They are looking for ideas and developers regarding current as well as new KDE games. Artists are also needed. Further information is available at games.kde.org. Read More

Charles Samuels is this week's subject for the popular series of questions from Tink in the not less famous People... series of interviews. Here is your chance to learn a bit about the author of the multimedia swiss army knife that comes with KDE-2.x, popularly known as Noatun. Charles notes that Jason Katz-Brown knows how to pronounce this unforgettable name. Read More

Last week, Michael Matz contributed some code to the audiocd:/ IO slave in KDE CVS to make ripping audio CDs child's play. When you browse an audio CD with this new code (using, for example, 'audiocd:/' in Konqueror), you will find two subdirectories: MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. Each subdirectory will list all the tracks on the audio CD with the appropriate extension (.mp3 and .ogg). Each track can then be dragged to any KDE drop location and be converted automatically into the MP3 or OGG compressed formats. In addition, if the track has a CDDB entry, the file is automatically named for you and the .MP3/.OGG tags are set appropriately. The obligatory screenies are linked in the text above. Expect rollout for KDE 2.2, currently scheduled for beta release on April 2. How's that for simplicity? A more complete explanation from Michael is available below. Read More

Aaron J. Seigo has started a KDE version of the Kernel Cousin series at Kernel Traffic. Given the number of Cousins already active, he asked, "Why not for KDE?". The result is one of the first projects to flow from the recently-announced kde-promo mailing list. Read the first edition of KC KDE for all of 11 topics covering the new KDE printing system, Caldera's work on Samba and kio_smb, AA, KWrite, KDE on HPUX and Solaris, and more. Our congratulations and thanks go to Aaron for this initiative that will greatly benefit the KDE community! For more details and to learn how to get involved, read below. Read More

Various release schedules have been announced over the past week. First, Waldo Bastian, the release dude for KDE 2.2, announced the KDE 2.2 release plan. Incidentally, many more improvements than those mentioned in the schedule have already gone into CVS. David Faure, the release dude for KOffice 1.1, followed with a KOffice release plan. Finally, Ralf Nolden announced the KDevelop Roadmap for 2001. Included are plans for versions 2.0 and 3.0. Those interested in helping with KDevelop 3.0 should also read this note by Omid Givi. Read More

Trolltech has announced the release of Qt 2.3.0, the much-anticipated version of Qt that supports anti-aliased fonts (assuming your X server is up-to-date). "KDE 2.1 automatically takes advantage of Qt's support of anti-aliased fonts. The result is one of the nicest looking user interfaces in the world." Along with anti-aliasing, Qt 2.3.0 offers True Type and Type 1 font support for printing, and a few other improvements. The release was accompanied by an amusing soundtrack. Finally, of note to those of you struggling with fonts, is the Qt font HOWTO, made available by Lars Knoll. Read More