News Archive for March 1999

Note: many thanks to the few people who noticed us about this feature, you know who you are :-)

Says Uwe: "The KDE Office Suite, though still in its alpha stage, is rapidly steam-rolling ahead and promises the Open Source community nothing short of a certifiable killer app. Learn about the KOffice Suite, its data models and its current status in an article by Reginald Stadlbauer, one of the developers working on the KOffice office suite. The article has been translated into English and edited and is now available..."

"Following the Unix and Free Software Day(JULL) of May, 1998, Strasbourg's Linux Users Group is happy to announce the "Journées du Libre, seconde édition" (n.ed. The Days of "Libre" Software), from March 26 to March 27 1999, in Illkirch, near Strasbourg (France). The main purpose of this event is to present Free Software in general and Linux in particular to a large audience."

Eric indicates that the official language used for the lectures, demonstrations and exchanges will be French (with English ). Many companies announced their presence.

KDE will be represented by Matthias Ettrich who will give a talk about "KDE - Applications, Technology and Latest Developments"

See http://tux.u-strasbg.fr/JL2 for more information.

NOTE: Other details and similar information is present on the Events page.

Lately, Matthias Hölzer-Klüpfel announced:

"I am happy to announce that

    Lehmanns Fachbuchhandlung (Germany)
    Tel 0130 - 4372
    bestellung@lehmanns.de
    

Thanks a lot!"

Martin Konold lets us know that many booths in the exposition are displaying copies of the "KDE - Innovation of the year" poster, offered to KDE by the organizers at the award granting ceremony. The booths of Stardivision, IBM, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Linux International (among others) have it.

Matthias Elter pointed us to the URL of a video presented by Tagesthemen on March 17. Tagesthemen is a german TV news service. The video, among others, clearly shows KDE in action.

Thanks to Chris Kuethe, who built and made available these packages, you can now download them from KDE's FTP site

Note: news bit reported by Martin Konold

According to an article published by Ziff-Davis, sponsor of the award, the criterion for granting this award of technical excellence was not commercial success but creativity behind the product's design, an exceptional solution for a specific problem or a completely new concept. The other two finalists for the award were Lotus eSuite and Microtest Virtual CD.

Read the press-release

On related news, Virgil King was the first to notice us that the newest Red Hat Linux release, 5.9, includes KDE-1.1. Thank you, Red Hat.

"I wonder if you will do a simple program that [would en]able me to read in .wav files and raw data, displaying the data in waveform in the the scope in Qt and play it through sound devices. Also, editing on the waveform is required and I am willing to pay a fee for it. I hope you will consider my offer and if [somebody at] KDE is interested in earning some money , please let me know the price too for the above project. The program will be in Linux environment and I just need it for a project which afterwards will be upload[ed] to KDE for others who are interested to improve it".

Please, contact Leong Mervin directly or write to KDE's How-To-Help Dept..

For example page 500 reads: "As if kernel 2.2 wasn't good enough news, KDE 1.1 is now out. Adding polish to a decent desktop environment, KDE is just what the 'luckily Linux is a server OS and can't touch Win98' crowd have been dreading. Go start downloading at www.kde.org"

On pages 695-697 (monthly Linux column), you can find: "KDE 1.1 is an incremental improvement over the last version, and it's acquiring a sheen of usability that indicates a really solid piece of software. It's themable; you too, can have windows that whistle and make lewd suggestions when you move them, or a desktop that looks like a nest in which the hive queen from Aliens would have been right at home. The key bindings and mouse actions are a lot more configurable and you can have a single context sensitive menu bar at the top of the screen (like a Mac) if you dislike the usual one-menu-per-window layout".

Thank you Richard, for sharing with us.

Note: Thanks to Uwe Thiem for noticing this.

http://www.oreilly.de/catalog/prowqt/

Written in English, but only available in the German-speaking countries for the moment, the book can be ordered right now, and it will become also available elsewhere soon. The book has two different ISBNs in different parts of the world: 1-56592-588-2 and 3-89721-130-0.

This book offers a good insight and help for the ever growing group of Qt programmers.

Note: Thanks to Arnt Gulbrandsen for the announce

After much work, KDevelop-0.3 is released. Please get it, test it, use it.

KDevelop is a new C++ development environment for Unix/X11. It makes creation and development of GNU Standard applications an easy task even for beginners. Points of excellence: project management, integrated syntax-highlighting editor, generation of frame applications for KDE, Qt and terminal, class browser and integrated help system with class reference. KDevelop Homepage: http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~smeier/kdevelop/

Says Preston: "Attendance was nothing short of phenomenal. It was like a mini-Comdex. I think that I heard that there were 12,000 attendees, although it may have been more like 10,000. No matter, it was A LOT. The range was from your typical Linux geeks all the way up to the corporate CEOs and CTOs of small and large companies alike who have heard of Linux and are interested in getting into the scene. Most were keenly interested in how KDE could offer a much improved Linux experience for the more average user... "

Our gratitude, Preston, for your great report.

The French Linux Magazine (a "marvelous fantastic French magazine" Pascal says) published, in its March issue, a poll on the topic of which window manager/desktop environment is most used on Linux. The (supposedly mostly french) readers chosen KDE with a crushing majority of 49.49%, way above the next contender, AfterStep (21.88%).

This is food for souls and egos for the hard-working KDE developers. Thank you very much to you, the nice users of KDE. Due to you, KDE is what it came up to until now. And will become even better.

Citing from the announcement: "Free software hat on - It looks on first reading very very good. I think I'm more than happy with this. was the first reaction from Alan Cox, well known Linux kernel hacker".

KDE Free Qt Foundation, which has veto rights on any license changes, has unanimously accepted QPL-1.0 as the new license of the new Qt Free Edition.

The current Qt 2.0 pre-release snapshot is covered by the QPL 1.

TOTALS FOR SUMMARY PERIOD Thu Feb 25 1999 TO Wed Mar 3 1999

Files Transmitted During Summary Period 349848
Bytes Transmitted During Summary Period 214935085501

An average of 40Gb data per day were downloaded (with a maximum of 48Gb on 26 February)

The international spreading of the sites recorded is very impressive. However, .com, .org, .net and .edu domains are the better represented. Commercial organizations seem to make a large use of KDE.

The full report is also available here.

This would be in the interest of all those involved. As an older project KDE might have a larger code base, and many common issues of a desktop environment could already have a solution in this code base. A better collaboration would also help to solve problems (if they exist) like those indicated by Gnome developer Miguel de Icaza in an interview to VNUNet: "KDE has technical deficiencies," and not only uses up too much memory, but also does not include many features that developers want.

Christian Esken worked on a security fix for a bug signaled by the HERT organism. The patch is available and the distributors have started to issue fixed kdelibs packages. Caldera already announced the corresponding package for OpenLinux-1.3.

This achievement is spectacular given the large amount of modifications required by the excellent improvements of Qt-2.0 compared to Qt-1.42. We praise the dedication of our friends. Many thanks.

There still are problems to be ironed out and Qt-2.0 is still in beta stage, but this evolution is very helpful and will assure a fast achievement of a Qt-2.0 based KDE.

I am happy to announce a very generous donation to the KDE project from

Mr Dumas, who is a software developer, and Mrs Dumas, who runs a web design business at locutus.kingwoodcable.com/~kldumas

donated $500 to the KDE project.

Say Mrs and Mr Dumas: "The ordinary users make up the majority of the market and make or break computing platforms and applications by supporting them or ignoring them. I believe KDE has the potential for a great future."

Thank you, Mr and Mrs Dumas!