KDE Archive

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".

"KDE 3.5 is a vivid platform. We looked at some reasons why three weeks ago and also last week. Today, we look at the photo-manager digiKam, the plotting application QtiPlot, the LaTeX-dreamteam Kile and KBibTeX and the upcoming KDE 3.5.3 release."

Andy Updegrove interviews Inge Wallin, KOffice's promotions lead, about how KOffice is different from the other major office productivity releases that support ODF, which users may find it most appropriate to their needs, in what directions future development will proceed, and much more. Meanwhile, FreeSoftwareMagazine takes a look at the three major OpenDocument capable office suites/word processors.

"Try KDE is a new resource listing ways that you can try out KDE without commiting to a full GNU/Linux or BSD install. It includes links to live cds, VMware player images and Klik bundles as well as links to KDE desktops available over NX, with explanations of these technologies. It is linked to from the KDE frontpage and will be updated regularly as more resources are discovered. You the community can help us out, by sending your comments and suggestions to the email address listed at the foot of the Try KDE page."

"The KOffice team is proud to announce KOffice version 1.5. With this release, KOffice starts its ascent into the office suite hall of fame. This version sports OpenDocument as the default file format, accessibility, a new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. You can read more about it in the press release and the full announcement. Packages are available for Kubuntu and SUSE."

The KDE Look and Feel Project is a GPL-licenced Swing pluggable look and feel which uses Qt and KDE for the drawing of widgets. KDE Look and Feel implements most of the Java Look and Feel API including dialogs (ColorChooser, FileChooser, etc.).

The KOffice team is proud to announce the release candidate of KOffice 1.5. Read the full announcement, the changelog, and download the release. In this release, the OASIS OpenDocument support is improved even more, especially in KChart. Krita has gotten faster and more stable and KFormula has a new maintainer who has really come up to speed quickly. Across the board all applications have been improved and polished. Or so they say, in any case.

Better late than never: "With more than 1500 improvements since the first beta release of the 1.5 series, the KOffice developers invite the user community for the final round of testing of KOffice 1.5 before the first release candidate. Read the full announcement, the changelog, download the release, and give it some real world testing for us!"

"Tonight's People Behind KDE interview is with the author of the most active program in KDE, Krita. Not only has he made the premier free software painting application he has also added the vital vertical-maximise feature to KWin. Find out what the most inspirational thing is for a hacker fixing his bugs in our interview with Boudewijn Rempt."

Last weekend, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting took place in Brussels. KDE was present there with a lot of developers, a devroom and several interesting talks. Among the speakers were Jonathan Riddell from the Kubuntu distribution, Sebastian Kuegler from KDE's Marketing Working Group, Bart Coppens from the Krita development team, and Raphael Langerhorst and Sander Koning from the KOffice teams.

"The KDE desktop of SUSE Linux 10.1 (and the future enterprise products built on it) will contain a KDE frontend for Beagle called Kerry. For this Beagle has been split into non-GUI and GUI parts, some backends are now in sub-packages (Evolution, Firefox) and the libbeagle API has been improved in parts. Besides generic file indexing Beagle already contains backends written by Debajyoti Bera and others for KMail, Kopete, and Konqueror's web history cache."