KDE Archive

Vendors working to parlay the server room successes of Linux into a spot on the mainstream corporate desktop have a powerful ally in KDE Project developers, who've been hard at work extending the performance, polish and functionality of KDE. Read the mini-review at eWeek. Update: Ammai just published their own review about KDE 3.1 under Knoppix.

An effort has been started for closer cooperation between the KDE and GNOME usability teams. Additionally, you can read this long article about the corporate KDE. Also, several companies have joined to launch a consortium to promote Linux for desktop computers. The consortium's goal will be to raise awareness of desktop Linux and to speed its adoption, the organization plans to announce today.

"As the second victim in the TinyMinds interview series we have picked the SlicKer project as our target. SlicKer aims to someday replace Kicker in KDE with its own more task-oriented approach. Today we talk to one of it's developers; keyboard cowboy Shamyl Zakarika." Read the interview here. Our Take: I worked with Shamyl back in the early BeUnited days, just right after Deej and myself founded it (the goals for BU were different back then), and Shamyl was one of the very few developers (a total of 130+) who actually delivered what he said he would. I have faith on Shamyl's ability to deliver great apps.

A creative team has posted some concept art and mockups about the creation of an alternative to Kicker, the KDE desktop and taskbar, named Slicker. In the meantime, KDE 3.0.5a was released, incorporating the latest security fixes.

The much-anticipated release of KDE 3.1, originally scheduled for this week, has been delayed, most likely until early next month. In the meantime, what was to have been KDE 3.1 (with some of the security audit completed) has been re-tagged as KDE 3.1 RC5 and is now available for testing.

The KDE Project just released KDE 3.0.5. According to the SuSE README file for KDE 3.0.5, this is not exactly a full release of its own, as only the kdebase and kdelibs packages were affected from the (mostly security) updates (the rest of the packages have very minor changes). Users who already have 3.0.4 installed, will only need to re-install these two packages, while users using older versions, will have to do a complete installation.

As announced at The Dot, KDE 3.1 RC2 is now "Ready For A Hammering." Well, okay, so I decided to hammer away and here is my preview.

The KDE project have just unleashed KDE 3.1 RC-2 for testing. This version only has bugfixes from last week's RC-1 and (so far), it is only distributed in source form.

"KDE has announced a project that will produce a unified groupware product for the KDE desktop. In keeping with the usual KDE naming convention – it has been dubbed, inelegantly, "Kroupware." I'm hoping that this name gets changed at some point – if you've got a better alternative, post it in the forum and maybe we'll pass it onto the KDE folks as a suggestion. The other issue: "cloning" Microsoft software. Should Linux developers mimick the interface for products like Outlook? Is that really the right direction? Evolution is obviously a clone of Outlook." Read the editorial at ExtremeTech.

X Resize and Rotate is an extension to X which allows resizing, rotating, reflecting, and changing the refresh rate of each screen of an X display on the fly. The extension has recently been committed to XFree86; the next version, 4.3 is planned for release this year. Hamish Rodda commited a user interface for this extension to kdenonbeta/kcmrandr. Screenshots here, discussion here.

The KDE project just released KDE 3.0.4 for Mandrake (8.2, 9.0 and Cooker), Debian, SuSE (7.3, 8.0 and 8.1), Slackware (under the contribution dir) and TurboLinux. Read the ChangeLog here, however it is important to note that this is bugfix release. Update: Read regarding the recent KDE League issue.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1 beta2, the third development release of a significant feature upgrade for KDE 3. KDE 3 is the third generation of KDE's free, Internet-enabled desktop for Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.1, scheduled for final release in October 2002, will provide substantial improvements to the KDE desktop experience. As the KDE 3 API is frozen for binary compatibility, KDE 3.1 will be binary compatible with KDE 3.0.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1 beta1, the second development release of KDE 3.1, which follows 6 weeks after the release of KDE 3.1 alpha1, a significant feature upgrade for KDE 3. KDE 3.1, scheduled for final release in October 2002, will provide substantial improvements to the KDE desktop experience.

Andreas Pour is well known to most everyone in the KDE community. Considering that KDE is the leading desktop for Linux, if you are investigating GNU/Linux workstations, you are sure to run into Pour's work. He graciously agreed to participate in a series of exclusive interviews with Open for Business' Timothy R. Butler. In other KDE news, the KDE Project opens the doors to 3rd party developers with the "Extra Gear" initiative.