KDE.news 

For what has seemed like an eternity, but really was closer to a week, our beloved dot, as well as the kde.com sites, were down. Now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Dre and MieTerra, the server has been moved across the country and is again up and ready to serve. Many thanks to all those who made generous offers to host or help us in the meanwhile. In particular, thanks go to Dave Belfer-Shevett of Stonekeep Consulting, Joshua D. Drake of the Linux Documentation Project and Guido Bakker of Synnergy Networks. Over the next few days, while the DNS updates, we will be attempting to catch up on all the KDE news. Meanwhile, we have reposted the news items previously featured on the mother site during our downtime. Read More

This week on The People Behind KDE, our beloved Tink interviews KDE perfectionist Dirk Mueller, one of the people you can thank for how well Konqueror, and KDE in general, work these days. "Right now I'm mainly working on the Konqueror HTML engine of KDE 2.x, it's very interesting and challenging work so I spend most of my time on this. In general I like improving KDE overall, fixing performance and usability issues or bugs. I try to keep an eye on the development and take a look at whatever is interesting to me at the moment. Especially, I like working on the nasty little details that make things perfect, hence my addiction to KHTML." Read More

The illustrious C++ Users Journal has a comprehensive comparison of Open Source IDEs in its March issue. Although not currently online, the article covers 18 IDEs and then concludes "KDevelop is exemplary as an all around open source IDE and is suitable for both commercial and Open Source development...". The story also mentions KDE Studio along with VDK Builder, Source-Navigator and Code Crusader/Medic as products that are "almost as good" as KDevelop. The article's author is Ptr Sorfa, SCO's alternate member of the ANSI C++ Committee. Those of you just starting out in KDE/Qt development may be interested in this nice KDevelop and Qt Designer tutorial by Anne-Marie Mahfouf. KDE Studio Gold users may be interested to know that a new beta is out featuring improvements to the debugger as well as enhanced support for non-KDE projects. Read More

KDE developer Michael Goffioul today announced that he is actively addressing an area in KDE that warrants improvement: printing. He has committed source code to KDE CVS for a new KDE printing system to replace the limited Qt printing framework. Support for LPR, CUPS and PDQ printing systems is already there. Special emphasis is put on CUPS (Common Unix Printing System). The API is identical to the Qt API to enable developers to make use of it easily, but is significantly more flexible and configurable. For example, developers can easily add additional configuration pages to the print dialog to configure application-specific printing options, and can add filters to the printing structure to process the output. It also aims to provide a friendly user interface, including a print dialog, a KControl configuration module, a job viewer applet for the panel and a preview feature. People interested in supporting other systems should contact Michael and get involved now. His announcement is included below. Read More

Waldo Bastian has just announced the proposed new release plan for the next official stable release: KDE-2.1.1.
This release is in line with the KDE Project's recently adopted policy of issuing a bug fix release shortly after any major official release to fix any critical bugs quickly and to let translators and documentation catch up. Read more in the official release plan, which is reproduced below. Read More

One of the most fascinating aspects of KDE is the speed with which new developments occur after each release. KDE 2.1 came out yesterday, and was celebrated in the traditional manner by adding lots of new features to the KDE development tree in CVS. For me, one of the most exciting things to arrive was a very large commit to the kdebindings module (used for bindings between KDE's C++ code and other programing languages) which added bindings for the KDE and Qt libraries to the well known Java language. The author of the code, Richard Dale, has kindly agreed to answer some questions so that readers of the Dot can get up to speed with this new addition to KDE. Read More

KDE 2.1 is officially out! This is a solid release with major improvements to Konqueror and KMail, the addition of the excellent IDE KDevelop, as well as the modular new multimedia player noatun. It has a whole slew of improvements over 2.0; you can find the change log here. The full press release is attached. Enjoy -- I already installed it and it rules! Read More

Harri Porten has been very busy during the last few months with JavaScript in KDE. Despite all the hard work to get things ready for KDE 2.1 he found some time to do this interview with Tink on The People Behind KDE. [As previously featured on the mother site during our unscheduled network downtime.] Read More

Michael Coyle wrote in point us to a simple set of tile buttons and panel backgrounds that ResExcellence has made available for Kicker. These actually look pretty cool. Also of potential interest are a couple of recent screenshots (1, 2) of the Kcd applet. In developer news, Philippe Fremy wrote in to point us to an interesting little analysis involving GTK+, Qt and PyQt. This may be of some interest to developers considering porting a GTK+ app to KDE/Qt. Users might want to go straight to the Klotski homepage. Finally, in laugh-it's-funny news, Segfault.org reports that the Bacon keyword has been googled. Poor Jono. Read More

Just a few weeks ago we announced the launch of the KDE Promo mailing list. Today we are launching a website, promo.kde.org, to go along with it. The site is dedicated to the promotion of KDE, and is for anyone who wishes to contribute to KDE other than coding (for which we have developer.kde.org) or translating (for which we have i18n.kde.org). A suggestion for an easy way to contribute today follows. Read More