KDE Archive

This is a response to the article yesterday on the progress of GNOME and KDE. Aaron Seigo, a lead KDE developer, sets out the current state of progress with KDE 4, pointing out that KDE 4 is on track for a release in mid 2007. "Thom points to a quote from me that our goal is to have a 4.0 ready sometime in the first half of next year. That gives us until sometime in June and I'm still thinking we can make it."

"On Friday, Lars Knoll and George Staikos from the KHTML project visited Yahoo! to give a talk on the history of KHTML and Konqueror and the connection between those projects and Apple's open-source WebKit." Here is a short summary.

Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software. Note: I'd like to congratulate KDE with their 10 year anniversary. Here's to another 10 years!

The KDE team has released KDE 3.5.5, a maintenance release. Main changes: "Version 0.12.3 of Kopete replaces 0.11.3 in KDE 3.5.5, it includes support for Adium themes, performance improvements and better support for the Yahoo! and Jabber protocols; support for sudo in kdesu; support for input shape from XShape1.1 in KWin (KDE window manager); lots of speed improvements and fixes in Konqueror's HTML engine, KHTML; CUPS 1.2 support in KDEPrint; big improvements in the number of translated interface elements in Chinese Traditional, Farsi, Khmer, Low Saxon and Slovak translations."

"It has hardly been a few weeks since the release of KDE v3.5.4, one of the most popular desktop environments for Unix/Linux/FreeBSD operating systems, and the KDE development team is already hard at work. They have a dream of revolutionizing the concept of desktop by providing an array of innovative features aimed at improving both the looks of the desktop environment as well as the productivity of end users. In this article, we will look at one such component called Plasma that promises to change the look and feel of a conventional desktop."

Packages for the first KDE 4 developers snapshot "Krash" have started appearing. Most exciting is packages for a whole new platform, Mac OS X. More details are on Benjamin Reed's blog. For the traditionalists packages are available from openSUSE and Kubuntu. If you are a KDE application developer, this is the easiest way to start porting your application to KDE 4. Meanwhile work is continuing on KDE on Windows where developers have successfully got all of kdelibs compiling. Finally the KDE Women project has a new tutorial to get you started in KDE4 development.

"Many KDE users tend to take the Konqueror Web browser for granted, but that's a mistake. Konqueror may not be able to replace Firefox as a Web browser for every site, but it does a lot more than just simple browsing."

KDE has released a development snapshot of KDE 4, ironically named "Krash". Nothing much to see for users, but should help kickstart porting and development.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.4, a maintenance release. Significant enhancements include improved support for removable devices. Multiple holidays can now start on the same date in KOrganizer. Lots of fixes have been applied to Konqueror's HTML engine, KHTML. The dialog for sending client-side SSL certificates is now more usable, the StartCom SSL certificate was added and KNetworkConf now supports Fedora Core 5 and handles WEP better.

The new KDE://radio podcast site keeps you informed and on the leading edge of KDE4 development. It holds at the moment 7 interviews which were recorded at the KDE Four Core developer meeting and deal with the new liveui framework, Akonadi PIM Storage Service, the Human Interface Guidelines, and more.

KDE is ditching the GNU autotools for development and building of their next version, KDE 4. Its replacement is CMake, developed by Kitware. Alexander Neundorf explains the choice in favor of CMake was mainly due to its support for all platforms KDE4 is meant to run on: Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Solaris, and even Windows. CMake generates specific command files for each of the 'native' build tools from one common source: Makefiles (for GNU make) or project files (for XCode on OS X, for MS Visual Studio, for KDevelop3). Current KDE 4 modules already build (with CMake) on more platforms than KDE 3 with autotools ever did, with full configure checking on all platforms and all compilers/IDEs. Scribus is now also moving to CMake.

This is the 3rd installment in my series on deficiencies in common desktop environments. After GNOME and the Mac/MacOS, it is now KDE's turn. As with the other installments, this is a rant. Beware.

The KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.3. Unusually for a maintenance release, new features were implemented due to the long release cycle of the eagerly-awaited KDE 4. Significant enhancements include an improved startup time, speedups in KHTML, over 800 minor issues fixed, small new features and new translations.

Thiago Macieira says in his blog: "With commit 546830, KDE says good-bye to one of its longest friends: DCOP. The technology has served us well for 6 years, to the point that has become one of our most proeminent features." From now on, the KDE 4 tree will use DBUS. Due to the very extensive use of DCOP in KDE, this is a big jump for DBUS, "probably bring more applications into D-BUS in one go than there currently are".