KDE Archive

"The KDE contributors conference part of aKademy 2006 in Dublin kicked off Saturday morning bright and early, much to the dismay of those who had been out late the evening before at the registration desk, conveniently located in a pub. Read on for a full report."

"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."

This article is about KDE's memory usage, but there are comparisons with other solutions for your desktop. Lubos Lunak concludes there is still work to do and there is some lowhanging fruit, but KDE does already a nice job on keeping its memory usage low.

"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."

"KDevelop is the premier Free integrated development environment. The project is currently working towards KDevelop 3.4 with a bunch of new features and a major new version KDevelop 4. To find out what's coming up in one of KDE's most important projects KDE Dot News spoke to three of the authors about their current work and future plans."

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 KOffice team is announced KOffice version 1.5.2. This is mainly a bugfix release but also contains numerous translation updates. Especially KWord, KSpread and Kexi have received critical bug fixes."

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.

KOffice is working on its future, one based on KDE4. KOffice is starting new initiatives with libraries like Flake and Pigment that are going to be used for all KOffice applications. For the users of KOffice those changes are invisible until the 2.0 previews actually start to appear some months from now. Therefore the KOffice crew wants to show you their goals of what KOffice 2 is going to look like.

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.

"The KOffice team today released the first bug-fix release in their 1.5 series. Critical bugs in KSpread, KWord and Krita were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs. You can read more about it in the press release and the full announcement. A full changelog is also available."

"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."

With Phonon, KDE developers will be able to write applications with multimedia functionality in a fraction of the time needed with one of the above mentioned media frameworks and libraries. This will facilitate the usage of media capabilities in the KDE desktop and applications.

"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."