KDE.news 

Cristian Tibirna writes, "David Faure and I will be present in the name of KDE at the LinuxExpo in Toronto from 30 October to 1 November 2000. [...] If you will be in the Toronto area in this period and you will be available for helping us present KDE in the booth kindly lended to us by the organizers or you want to meet us, let me know ASAP." More information on LinuxExpo Toronto can be found at http://www.linuxexpocanada.com/EN/. If you're in the area and have some time to spare, consider making an appearance and giving them a hand!

The latest edition of LWN has a nice editorial on PR in free software projects. Worth a read. "An often-heard sentiment among KDE developers is that they may have a better desktop, but that the project has taken a number of hits on the public relations front. This idea was made more explicit this week with this KDE Dot News editorial on how to improve KDE's public image." Item 2: We've received word from Victor Röder that KSourcerer.org, a cool developer website dedicated to KDE, has been down lately and will remain unavailable until late October/early November when the switch to a new service provider is complete.

RC2, the (hopefully) final release candidate before the scheduled release of KDE 2.0 on October 23, is out, with binary packages available for Mandrake, RedHat (6.2 and 7.0) and SuSE (6.4 and 7.0). The full announcement is below. As the code will be frozen on October 16 for the KDE 2.0 release, here is your last chance to find show-stoppers, or you'll have to live with them for a while <grin>.

From Rik Hemsley: "I hacked KIconLoader to allow me to get a QImage instead of a QPixmap, which was quite easy, because it uses QImage internally and only converts to QPixmap just before returning a processed pic. I also wrote a very fast blend function that takes 2 QImages and blends the first over the second, honouring the alpha channel. I couldn't find anything in Qt or KDE to do this, so I had to hand-roll it. In tests on my Celeron 600 it can blend 65 million pixels (about 1/2 of which have alpha != 0) in 5 seconds. That's about 5ms for a 256x256 image, so approximately 0.17ms for our largest icons (48x48). [...] Anyway, enough talk. I'm tired and I'm sure a screenshot is in order. ;) Apologies for the hideous background tile, but I needed something to illustrate the point." Good stuff for KDE 2.1.

There is a general consensus that the KDE project, despite its technical superiority among various desktop environments, has had a poor PR record, especially in North America. Now that the release has been delayed a week or so, let's take this opportunity on dot.kde.org to present and share ideas that will help the KDE PR and marketing efforts. Just to get us started, here's one idea which I mentioned to Mosfet:

Due to the popular sentiment that KDE 2.0 is not quite ready for prime time, Matthias Elter, the release coordinator, has announced that a second release candidate is being prepared. RC2 will undergo scrutiny and testing by developers and packagers alike so that those final showstoppers can be found and squashed. KDE 2.0 final tarballs have been delayed one week and are now scheduled to be released to packagers on the 16th, with a public release of the packages on October 23rd. Update 10/9 3:15 PM by D: We've received word from Matthias that the RC2 tarballs will be released tomorrow, Oct. 10, on the KDE ftp servers, most likely here. Stay tuned -- we'll give you the details when we get them.

In this latest installment of The People Behind KDE, Tink brings us an interview with her very own Waldo Bastian, core developer extraordinaire. "It must have been around the last beta-release before KDE 1.0 that I upgraded my libc only to discover that that broke netscape. In search for a working browser I came across KFM, the file manager of KDE, and was surprised to see that it could show quite some web-pages and was faster than netscape. Unfortunately it crashed a lot as well."

Three quick news items for the sake of completeness and because they were submitted: (1) Trolltech has released Qt 2.2.1, a bugfix release with minor enhancements. KDE 2.0 will be based on this one. (2) Version 0.0.2 of KDB, the database APIs being developed by theKompany, is out. There seem to be quite a few improvements for a 0.0.1 increment, including a new KControl module. (3) A new Opera browser is out, based on Qt 2.2.x. I downloaded a remarkably small Debian package for a no-hassle install, and I must say it's really looking good now. Does a decent job of rendering KDE Dot News. Here's to hoping for future KDE integration -- the more browsers the merrier.

Matthias Elter announced today that KDE has won the Linux Community Award 2000 at LWE in Frankfurt/Germany! Congratulations to all the KDE developers on a job well done and an award well deserved. Pictures are available here, including a nice shot of the KDE team with none other than Linus himself.

A new release of KUPS, designed for KDE2, is available. "KUPS is a powerful and easy-to-use CUPS front-end for KDE. CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is a new printing system under UNIX which is completely network transparent and uses the IPP protocol. It supports a large range of printers through various available drivers and ghostscript. This printing system also allows to specify a lot of printing options such as number of copies, page collation, number of pages per sheet, various image options, text syntax coloring, and a set of specific printers options described in a driver file (PPD). Drivers are already available for most common printers." Lots of great screenshots (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9).