KDE Archive

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.

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.

After a few months of quiet activity, the Appeal desktop project has rolled out a new project website that documents what everyone has been up to and discussing. Since the the last public announcement many things have occurred, including another Appeal meeting being held in Germany. The project is looking forward to sharing its experiences and gathering input from the general KDE developer community at aKademy 2005 later this month.

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.

In the last few days, KDE developers have been actively discussing usability issues for KDE 4. Here are some thoughts, and some more are here. What do you think?

A blog entry by Jure Repinc tells us about some of the new features in KDE 3.5 which according to this schedule isn't quite finished yet. Amongs other things, there will be a Storage Media Notification dialog and some more eye candy in Kicker.

KDE 3.4.1 is the first modern desktop environment being compiled, packaged and working fully on the OpenSolaris platform. While KDE is known to compile out of the box on Solaris with GCC, using the Sun ONE Studio 10 Compiler still presents a challenge which requires a lot of patches. Dot.KDE has an interview with the Kde on Solaris team leader.

The People Behind KDE interviews are back with a new series. First in the hot seat is aKademy organiser Antonio Larrosa. The People Behind KDE interviews take a look at the human side of KDE development by asking the important questions to our team of coders, artists, translators and everyone else who helps KDE.

The KDE Project and Google announce the 24 KDE projects selected for the "Summer of Code" project. The lucky students and the KDE e.V. will receive a total of $120,000 if they can complete their projects in the allotted two months.

A few screenshots of an early build of the upcoming KDE 3.5 release. Among notable features, Konqueror gets Adblock, and KDE gets some usability features that were introduced in GNOME 2.10. This will be the final release of KDE in the 3 series.

KHTML Developer Allan Sandfeld announced that KDE's browser Konqueror now passes the ACID2 test from webstandards.org. While some patches were taken from the Safari fixes, a good part of the fixes have been written from scratch. Konqueror is the second browser to actually tackle the hard test.