KDE Archive

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!

"The KDE Project today announced the release of KOffice 1.4.2 for Linux and Unix operating systems. Support for the OpenDocument format, recently adopted by Massachusetts state in the USA, has been greatly improved, especially in KWord, KSpread and KPresenter. Karbon, a vector-based drawing program, has also seen a lot of development lately, and many fixes have gone into it."

"As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how works."

This simple guide will go over the basics of setting up and running KDE on MacOSX. You'll need at least Mac OS 10.3, Fink, and some experience with the command-line.

KDE 3.5 Beta 1 can be downloaded over the Internet by visiting KDE's download page. Source code and vendor supplied binary packages are available. For additional information on package availability and to read further release notes, please visit the KDE 3.5 Beta 1 information page.

One of the most anticipated presentations at this year's KDE World Summit, better known as aKademy, was Zack Rusin's intriguing 'Beauty and Magic for KDE developers'. Zack is a long-time KDE developer who has recently been hired to work full time at Trolltech. As the developer conference continued, more and more people heard of the amazing visual effects (.avi) that Zack was going to demonstrate. Here is an interview with him.

"RuDI is an architectural approach whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software components instead of linking to libraries. A service is a unit of work of the desktop done by a service provider to achieve desired end results for a 3rd party service consumer. How does RuDI achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents? It does so by employing two architectural constraints: An extensible XML schema allows new versions of services to be introduced without breaking existing services. Second we send messages over a protocol instead of calling explicit individual member functions."

"Seigo has been working with the KDE project for some time, and is now working on the KDE Plasma project, a new direction in the way that users will work with the desktop. We asked Seigo if he'd spend a little time talking about the new project, and the direction of KDE, and he kindly obliged. Read on for an interesting look at what's going on with KDE."

Just over a year ago, Tim Butler wrote an article which outlined why he thought the GNOME Project was clearly the free software desktop project with the best vision of the future. KDE’s Appeal Project, which has been brewing for some time now, looks to a different set of issues that need solving and has some very smart minds at work on solving those problems. In a few words, KDE’s got some of “that vision thing” too, according to Tim.

"It looks like the first part of my KDE 3.5 previews was extremely popular. Much more than I could ever anticipated. I even got Slashdotted. Anyway, here is the second part of the look into KDE's near future. Enjoy the tour!"

KDE 3.5 Alpha source tarballs are up on the FTP servers. This release is "really alpha quality", so no big announcement is planned. To get this release, you can either use Konstruct, or download the Klax KDE 3.5 Alpha Live-CD. Update: Here's a screenshot gallery of this release.