KDE Archive

"Recently at a Linux show, John Littler saw a preview of a new version of KDE running on a KDE developer's laptop. The interface looked cleaner than before, and apparently there was a whole raft of new stuff under the hood. John recently interviewed KDE developer Aaron J. Seigo about the forthcoming KDE 4 (due in the fall) and also a little about the recent controversy surrounding the porting of KDE to operating systems other than Linux."

KDE developer George Staikos recently announced that now KHTML uses a version of KJS that is nearly 100% in sync with Apple's JavaScriptCore. Other portions of KHTML will be shared with Apple's WebCore in the near future. This comes after a long and heated debate.

"Rex Dieter has been making the unofficial KDE Red Hat packages for some years now. Since this is a service depended upon by thousands of Red Hat users to get their required latest build of KDE, KDE Dot News interviewed Rex to find out how he got started, why the need for the project exists and how he makes the packages. Read on for the interview.

SUSE developer Stephan Binner has released a VMware image of SUSE 10 with KDE 3.5 installed, enabling people to run KDE 3.5 inside any platform supported by the freeware VMware player. "I created an image which contains a standard KDE desktop installation of SUSE Linux 10.0 OSS, upgraded to KDE 3.5 including KOffice 1.4.2 excluding non-KDE applications. It's a fully working installation so don't forget to install and try some additional KDE applications - and to run the security update when you're asked to."

Zack Rusin of KDE has said KDE4 will have full support for widgets from OS X's Dashboard. "I finally got most the implementation of the HTML Canvas element for KHTML finished. It's in the kdelibs-js branch in SVN. After George/Maks merge their other changes we'll merge it to HEAD. I'm planning to add full OSX Dashboard compatibility layer for Plasma (hence why I've spent most of the day yesterday on implementing the Canvas element)."

"KOffice development is currently going on at a tremendous pace. Version 1.5, with Open Document as the default file format, will be released in March 2006 , and it is time to start collecting ideas for version 2. KOffice has received a donation of $1000 to be used as the prize in a GUI and Functionality Design competition. So whip out the RAD tools and your imagination and design the next big thing in office automation! Submissions to the competition should be GUI mockups accompanied with a written description of the intended workflow with ideas for the design of KOffice 2. See the KOffice 2 competition page for an example of how this could be done."

According to these blog posts from SUSE/Novell KDE developers that include bootcharts showing KDE startup, recent performance improvements in fontconfig and KDE/Qt have a noticeable effect on startup times. KDE can even match Xfce startup time (both 5 seconds on a 900MHz laptop) when some KDE features are turned off to match Xfce more closely in terms of functionality.

The 'People Behind KDE' interviews the people resposible for Qt and KDE packages in the Debian project. "More work needs to go into a definitive set of new and improved hardware configuration tools. Work is being done, fortunately, so I'm optimistic."

"On the weekend of December 10th and 11th, a small group of nine KDE contributors met in Hamburg to work on quality assurance checks for KDE's code base. This not only covered C++ sourcecode but also other aspects such as checking the state of the API documentation, looking for common errors in KDE's manuals and evaluating the usability of KDE applications. Read on for the full report."

The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE 3.5 the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available. For a quick look at some of the new features see the visual guide to KDE 3.5. Packages are available now for ArchLinux, Kubuntu, Slackware and SuSE or try Konstruct to build it yourself.

The KDE community is happy to announce KDE 3.5 release candidate 1. More info here.

The KDE Marketing Working Group has formed, after being proposed by the KDE community at aKademy 2005, with the aim of improving KDE's marketing and promotion efforts. Martijn Klingens, Sebastian Kügler and Wade Olson will be taking the lead in coordinating and implementing new practices, such as promoting releases more widely and running more exciting events booths.

Jes Hall, credible supporter of the KDE community has set up this months new SVN report which primarily targets the mature KOffice suite for KDE.

KDE 3.5 Beta 2 will be released later today has been released. The Klax live-CD has already been updated to ship with this new beta release. You can download this beta's source code yourself from the KDE download page. Updated by AS: Screenshots!