News Archive for November 1998

What happened in the last 4 days:

• KIllustrator - Kai-Uwe Sattler improved the integration in KOffice
• KFM - history (Up/Down buttons) supports frames; "Find" window goes away when the frame responsible for it is closed; "Tree View" syncronize with browsing now
• KPager - 'To Desktop' menu; wallpaper directory support (from kbgndwm); fixes for windows resize
• KLyX - Rocher made a nice facelift (new, nice crispy icons); a few new keybindings; new cli options: --width, --height, --no-splash (no more Martin looking up to you :-)
• Shaman - moves a lot (thanks to T. Fisher)
• KWM - now move/resize actions are opaque by default
• Klipper - key shortcut (defaults to Ctrl-Alt-V and it's configurable); the menu pops up at the mouse pointer
• khtmlw - a nice speedup by not loading mime icons at startup but rather on demand; caching of images works correctly again; these modifications should be of great benefit for kfm, which is supposed to list file-lists much faster now
• KMid - version number increased at 1.6; documentation updates
• KWord and KPresenter - try them! Will make you go "Woooow!"
• new spiffy logo - the big prise for the commit of the year (315 CVS commits :-) goes to the new logo of KDE. Go see it on the web pages at www.kde.org and in the documentation - you can't miss it :-). Many thanks to Torsten Rahn for his nice work. He's also "responsible" for the new, excellent, K button in KPanel.

Antonio Larrosa announces that he finally was able to trace and fix a severe problem with KMid's temporization during play. The author thanks all the reporters for their patience. The correction took long because the bug was not evident for him until a recent upgrade to a new version of his Linux distribution.

Consequent to a very successful poll, comp.windows.x.kde passed with a rate of 739:30 (YES:NO) votes. Make sure you push the right buttons to have it loaded in your nearest news server. Many thanks go to Matthias Hoelzer who took the task to follow and sustain the necessary formalities.

It rains with code over the CVS:

• korganizer - printing improvements; Preston Brown says: "... Nice" :-)
• KPager - windows resize in the pager
• Shaman - this code package, based on an original concept about easy coding projects generation, gets improved at a high pace
• KPanel - Pietro Iglio added "build menu on-demand" feature; he says this should dramatically improve kpanel's speed especially on slow machines
• KWrite - if you didn't check this nice new editor, you surely want to do it. Now with python syntax colorization added
• KWM - window regions definitions improvements, shaped decorations fixes plus a nice surprize, thanks to Sven Radej and Matthias Ettrich. Don't ask :-)
• Kppp - Mario Weilguni and Harri Porten have been very busy lately with many improvements and an important security auditing
• Klipper - this is a shiny new little applet added to the kdeutils module. It provides layered clipoard maintainance, with docking into the panel
• KDEHelp - cleanup and maintainance of the last additions, thanks to Alex Garbanzo
• kcheckpass - the secure password checker got PAM related fixes
• khtmlw - David Fauré introduced keyboard navigation. In kfm, just type the first letters of a file name to have the cursor positioned on it. Beware, this introduces binary incompatibility to kdelibs
• new icons - Stephan Kulow dispatched new and updated icons, provided by Mark Donohoe, in the whole KDE CVS tree

The lastest mentions of KDE in the press appear in C't - where you'll read about a Linux facelift - and in InfoWorld's report on OpenLinux 1.3 using KDE

Wrapped in few words, the latest enhancements to the CVS are:

• KFM and core libraries - more charsets support
• kbgndwm - the old style configuration is now accounted for, at a first installation; wallpaper cache size configuration UI
• korganizer - interface polishing and optimization; features additions
• kticker - new tickers: ITN, Central Europe News, Freshmeat
• KWM, KPanel, khtmlw, kdehelp and many others - bug fixes

Troll Tech announced today that the next version of their excellent widget toolkit, Qt Free Edition, will be released under an Open Source compliant license, named QPL. Thank you very much Troll Tech.

Few (36) hours ago, a report was sent to the Bugtraq mailing list describing possible security exploits using the klock program from the official KDE-1.0 distribution. The warning was reiterated today. Thanks to the careful and hard work of Christian Esken this problem is already solved. Read Christian's description of the problem and of the solution. Patches are available at KDE's ftp site. Please, read this page often for updates on the security issue.

Sven Radej and David Fauré added new improvements to KFM's ability to save per-URL displaying properties. Most visible is a new menu entry under "Options" menu allowing punctual properties saving as opposed to a continual/consistent off-defaulted strategy (as initially implemented).

Lars Knoll made enhancements to the charset support of kfm, notably in what concerns forms. Knowleadgeble users say that now KFM becomes better that Netscape in this respect. Adding the speed issues to this comparison, as well as the rumors about the great improvements in the forthcoming KFM III, it can be said that KDE happily provides - will provide - one of the nicest file managers/web browsers in the Linux world.

Martin Jones added rman support to kdehelp. RosettaMan (author Thomas Phelps) is a filter able to convert formatted man pages of most UNIX platforms to other formats: HTML, ASCII, troff/nroff, LaTeX, RTF a.o. This excellent addition greatly improves the quality and functionality of man pages displaying in kdehelp.

Preston Brown just commited to the CVS the last modifications leading to the 0.9.17 version of KOrganizer. Expect to see this new version of the excellent personal information organizer in the usual distribution places too very soon.

Sven Radej added to the CVS-ed KFM the ability to save configuration options on a per-URL basis. This new feature (defaulting to "off" and configurable through Browser's Configuration dialog) permits to save Tree/File listing options, window size and some others.

On a parallel note, it is to underline the nice achievements in terms of stability granted lately to KFM and the khtml widget thanks to the work of Torben Weis, Sven Radej, David Fauré, Lars Knoll, Waldo Bastian and Kurt Granroth

Antonio Larrosa made in the last days many useful improvements to his KPager, a highly graphical pager module for KWM. Thanks to fruitful discussions on kde-devel mailing list, Antonio managed to improve mouse actions, UI fonctionality and overall stability. Saturday cookie: to hide/show the menu of kpager, it's enough to hit the <Space> key.

l i n u x p o w e r . o r g carries a very kind and nicely done review on KDE-1.0. Many thanks to Emissary (Erik Levy) for his good appreciation.

Markt&Technik, the official German Red Hat distributor, includes KDE-1.0 in its RedHat Linux 5.1 and RedHat Linux 5.2 software packages. Thus, Red Hat Linux joins the growing group of Linux distributions shipped with KDE.

The vote to decide whether to create a new "comp.windows.x.kde" newsgroup is still in progress. Anyone with an opinion is entitled and encouraged to vote; there are no special qualifications, it's not difficult, and you don't have to be a computer expert.

If you have an opinion on this issue, please find the article with "Subject: 2nd CFV: comp.windows.x.kde unmoderated" in news.groups or news.announce.newgroups (try this link in your WWW browser if necessary). Then follow the directions in that article to cast your vote. If you have trouble finding that article, email me and I'll gladly tell you how to get a ballot by email. ONLY votes which use the official ballot and follow the directions count.

In order to be created, a new group needs at least 100 more YES votes than NO votes, and at least 2/3 of the votes cast must be YES.

Christian Esken announces: KMix 1.0 is now available in the current CVS version of KDE (kdemultimedia package). Changes against KMix 0.9 (shipped with KDE1.0):

• Native ALSA support, thanks to Nick Lopez
• Multiple set support. You can save and restore the complete mixer layout, including volume, shown/hidden channels, "split" option of each channel.
• New command line options: -devnum, -r and -R num allow to set the mixer number and to start the mixer with a specific set.
• Session management will restore the mixer as specified in the command line.

Christian Esken announces: kplayaudio plays back audio files by using the regular KDE sound system. This small program ( <8KB ) is a very easy way to play "notification" sounds like in ktalk. kplayaudio is shipped in current kdebase versions of kaudio from CVS.

David Fauré improved the geometry management (by adding layouts) to the KFM's properties dialogs. This improvement will make happy the non-english users of KDE (David says french names are better layed out inthere now :-)

Mario Weilguni added a little dockable utility to kpm (the process viewer/manager from kdeutils). It is called kpmdocked and provides a xload-like applet to run in the docking tray of kpanel without the overhead of a full kpm running in the background.

Matej Koss greatly improved the functionality and the configurability of the root-window image displayer kbgndwm. Most important additions are:

• Choice for one common background configuration for all desktops
• Random bacground image changing
• much more modes for root window filling (similar now to 'xv')
• dockable widget for kbgndwm; the docked part provides:
  • a fast menu for accessing configuration
  • a way to drop images from kfm directly into kbgndwm and have them instantly displayed on the root window
  • instant changing of the background image (with a single click on the docked icon) if random changing is enabled

The latest and greatest version of Star Division's Star Office for Linux contains optional KDE support.

Users which will choose a "Custom installation" will be able to select a "KDE integration" feature which provides:

• Star Office kdelnk's added to the K Panel's main menu
• Star Office icons
• Star Office documents mimetypes
• The Star Desktop is aware of the KDE's panel position (and tries hard not to cover it)
• The KDE Control Center is integrated in the Settings menu of Star Office
• One-way Drag'n'Drop between Star Office's desktop and KDE applications

Since a few days kwm (in its version from the CVS) supports:

• window title font selection (configurable through kcmdisplay)
• window title alignment (also supported by kcmkwm in the "Titlebar" tab)
• filter for specifying windows to be made sticky on startup
• gui configurability for CtrlTab, TraverseAll, AltTabMode, Button3Grab, filters lists for tiny/no-Decoration-Titles/Classes, noFocus-Titles/Classes, sticky-Titles/Classe, session management proxyignore (from kcmkwm's new "Advanced" tab)

L i n u x p o w e r . o r g published an exclusive interview with KDE developer Kalle Dalheimer. You will find there interesting first hand information about what KDE is in the present as well as what it is thought to become both in the near and in the far future.

The vote to decide whether to create a new "comp.windows.x.kde" newsgroup is now in progress. Anyone with an opinion is entitled and encouraged to vote; there are no special qualifications, it's not difficult, and you don't have to be a computer expert.

If you have an opinion on this issue, please find the article with "Subject: CFV: comp.windows.x.kde unmoderated" in news.groups or news.announce.newgroups (try this link in your WWW browser if necessary). Then follow the directions in that article to cast your vote. If you have trouble finding that article, email me and I'll gladly tell you how to get a ballot by email. ONLY votes which use the official ballot and follow the directions count.

In order to be created, a new group needs at least 100 more YES votes than NO votes, and at least 2/3 of the votes cast must be YES.