KDE.news 

If you're using klipper, the enhanced KDE clipboard manager, or if you have noticed Konqueror's excellent history support, then you already know a bit of who Carsten Pfeiffer is and what he does for KDE. He answers the questions this week in Tink's popular interviews series with the People of KDE. Enjoy! Read More

Kapital is our personal finance manager package for KDE and Linux. It is meant to be in the spirit of Intuit Quicken or Microsoft Money, but without the bloat associated with those packages from years of justifying upgrades. Kapital has everything you need for managing all your personal finances. Kapital has been tested with various other window managers including GNOME, and will work with them, however our area of focus and support is currently KDE. [Ed: This is commercial software, see below for price info.] Read More

With the KDE 2.1 release nearing, major code changes are prohibited. Despite this restriction, we started thinking about how to make KDE 2.1 (or future releases) even more appealing. Carsten Pfeiffer, devoted KDE developer, remarked that while people are hard at work polishing the visual aspects, KDE suffers from a marked lack of sounds and sound effects. [Update: 02/18 23:25 PM by N: See also this mail for more details.] Read More

Ian Geiser alerted us that our friends over at ResExcellence have a very nice article about running KDE 2.1 on your PPC. When you are finished with this one, you might want to click Up to read some of the other interesting stories about KDE and Linux PPC that you can find on this site. A big thanks goes to Ian for his hard work on the KDE packages for PPC. Read More

For the last couple days, I've been working on making things transparent in KDE. This is pretty easy to do, but time consuming. Most notable success so far is with Konqueror. Next up, ksirc, and hopefully kicker. This code cannot go into 2.1, since we are in a feature freeze, but the following version of KDE should be quite transparent! [Ed: Also check out the transparency screenshots for Kasbar TNG. There's some other slick stuff there too.] Read More

As some of you may have noticed, lately we've been getting more and more postings at KDE Dot News. With the increasing number of comments, we've also been getting more and more complaints about the fact that KDE Dot News automatically switches to threading when the number of articles in a forum goes over our global threshold. We've been trying to tweak this global threshold to satisfy everyone, but that seems to have been a lost cause: Forums with too many nested articles take a while to download for people with slow net connections and aren't convenient for a bird's eye view of the responses, while forums which have switched to threading are painful for people who want to read each and every response. As of now, the default threshold has been set to 40, but I'm pleased announce that I've also implemented configurable thread thresholds. Just look to the right of this article or any other, and you should see a more or less self-explicit config box -- your preferred settings should be stored more or less permanently in a cookie. If you find any bugs, or have any comments or feedback just use the forum or, failing that, email me. Enjoy. Read More

There have been countless requests from KDE users, on the dot, on the lists, and even elsewhere, for a KDE Installer and Updater. Nick Betcher (aka Error403) has stepped up to the challenge and now needs your help to make this project really happen. His current code is in CVS and the project is in active development. The install starts off with an intro/detection screen, prompts the user for the type of installation, prompts for the destination of the KDE installation, and then prompts for the packages to install (see all the screenshots here). The project is based on pure Qt, so that the statically linked binary will be small, and as of now the network code to download RPMs is in CVS. So why does Nick need your help? It's important to him that users get their input in for this project and that he has a better understanding of what to aim for regarding look & feel as well as packaging issues. He also needs other developers to get involved, as he is relatively new to C++/OO programming. Nick has provided a convenient forum for people to voice their opinion. Read More

What do we do when one of our own, a company with long-time roots in the Open Source community, rejects our code of ethics and resorts to deceitful tactics for the express purpose of undermining an Open Source project? It appears that the newly-named Ximian is doing exactly that. This open letter (authored by Kurt Granroth and Andreas Pour) describes how Ximian is hoping to create and capitalize on a new user's confusion for the express purpose of "tricking" them into buying Ximian products over downloading KDE. Is this what we are reduced to? Unethical (and potentially illegal) tactics so that we can win at all costs? Update: 02/13 03:36 AM by Andreas Pour: I am happy to report that this dispute has been put to rest. After discussions between Nat Friedman, CEO of Ximian, and me, Ximian has resolved to revise its advertisements on Google to eliminate the possibility of confusion, and not to create new advertising campaigns based on KDE-related keyword searches. The full details are available here. Thanks to Ximian for helping to resolve this issue amicably and promptly. Read More

Back in November, Reginald Stadlbauer announced a new rich text widget for Qt. That widget could provide, he said, a very stable base for KWord. So a rich text branch of KWord was started and became the focal point of KWord development... The problem was that the new widget was only slated to appear in Qt3. Recently, Thomas Zander reasoned that a stable Qt3 was too far off and considering that current users needed more support right now, came to the conclusion that it might be best to drop the coolness-enhanced branch. Fortunately, David Faure valiantly tackled the task of backporting the Qt3 rich text widget to Qt2 and succeeded! This could be a big boost to rapid KWord development. Read More

Cervisia, an advanced graphical frontend for CVS, has finally been released as a 1.0 version. This release compiles either with KDE1 or KDE2 and contains complete documentation. Also available now is the 1.1 release, which contains a pile of new features and usability enhancements. Read on for a few highlights. Read More