KDE Archive

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."

"As the release of KDE 3.5 draws near , work is already underway at the Appeal project to integrate 3.5's major changes into the 4.0 series. Subprojects beneath Appeal's umbrella target simplified usability and progressive adjustments to the graphical user interface: The Tenor and Plasma projects will add functionality, while Oxygen and Coolness will enhance visual freshness."

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.

Oxygen is the new icon theme being created for KDE4. Everything started in March 2005 when a bunch of KDE contributors met in Berlin to form the Appeal Project with the goal to promote KDE related projects and to push the open source desktop to another level. Oxygen aims to bring a modern, cool and very usable and consistent icon theme, in SVG format.

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.

CosmoPOD offers free remote KDE desktops over NX. Anyone can sign up to have their own desktop accessible from any computer with a network connection. CosmoPOP uses KDE's Kioskstyle.html framework to ensure security for their system. To find out more about the service and why KDE was the chosen desktop, KDE Dot News spoke to the man behind CosmoPOD, Stephen Ensor.

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 immediate availability of KDE 3.4.3, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.4.3 ships with a basic desktop and fifteen other packages (PIM, administration, network, edutainment, utilities, multimedia, games, artwork, web development and more)." Here's the changelog, download here.

"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."

"Earlier in the week, I conducted a lengthy phone interview with Aaron Seigo about the Open Source Desktop Workshop being held in San Diego on October 13th and 14th. Fast approaching, we discuss the workshop's inception, target audience and expectations."

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.

"Ten days of presentations, workshops, and chaotic coding sponsored by Trolltech, Novell/SUSE, HP, the local governments of Andalucia, and Malaga can only mean one thing: aKademy 2005, the KDE community's annual conference. Held in Malaga, Spain, aKademy 2005 included a Users and Administrators Conference, a Developer Conference and a Coding Marathon. Users, developers, and local visitors with an interest in open technology were treated to a display of stable desktop software and glimpses of cutting-edge innovations to come."

"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."

The K Desktop Environment was pleased to see its users recently at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. Users were excited to learn about KDE 4.0, some of the hot new stuff in KDE 3.5, and thousands of Linux users got out of the house for a change.