News Archive for June 1999

• ultramode backend. This is a text-only brief of the regular news page, much like the similar services offered by SlashDot.org and FreshMeat.
• RSS-style news. This popular ticker format is widely used on the Internet and a notable example is its use at my.netscape.com

Many thanks to Kurt Granroth for the RSS mode engine and to Martin Konold for very useful tips and encouragement.

Also, Kenny signals that he have put on-line a new poll about the usage of KDE in the Linux world. It's on the front page.

Thanks, Kenny.

    Hi friends,

    welcome to the next stage in our release journey!

Status:

    1. Start of release                Week 1
==>  2. Application Freeze                   4
    3. Translations                         6
    4. Source release                       8
    5. Final release                        9

TODO: FREEZE THE KDE_1_1_BRANCH
Please consider the libraries in the KDE_1_1_BRANCH to be
frozen from now! The KDE core applications are also frozen
now.

This means that changes to the code are only allowed if

- they fix critical bugs
- they have been approved by at least two developers

Changes that do not match these criteria will be reverted.

Exceptions from this rule are only translations,
documentations and additions by the artists team.

TODO: Test the KDE_1_1_BRANCH
Now that the code is frozen, please check it out and test it
on as many machines and OSes as possible to ensure everything
is working.
 
CRITICAL:
 
- Output of the team currently know as the "Artist Team"
  The HiColor-Icons are somewhere between 50-70% finished.
 
- Security bugs
  Are there any open security related bugs that have to be fixed?
 
Bye,
Matthias.
    

http://www.troll.no/announce/qt-200.html has the announcement, http://www.troll.no/qt/ has the new API documentation, and you can get the source from ftp://ftp.troll.no/qt/source/qt-2.00.tar.gz and presumably soon from a hundred other sites.

Qt 2.0 introduces a wide range of major new features as well as substantial improvements over the 1.x series. The documentation has been significally extended and improved. This file will only give an overview of the main changes since version 1.44. A complete list would simply be too large to be useful. For more detail see the online documentation which is included in this distribution, and also available on http://www.troll.no/qt/

The Qt version 2.x series is not binary compatible with the 1.x series. This means programs compiled with Qt version 1.x must be recompiled to work with Qt 2.0.

Qt 2.0 is mostly, but not completely, source compatible with Qt 1.x. See the document "Porting from Qt 1.x to Qt 2.0" in the Online Reference Documentation for information on how to port an existing Qt 1.x-based program to Qt 2.0. Note in particular the automatic porting script included - it does a lot of the work for you.

As for 1.x, the API and functionality of Qt is completely portable between Microsoft Windows and X11. And between Windows 95, 98 and NT: Unlike most toolkits, Qt lets a single executable work on all three.

You can find the list of API changes at Troll Tech's site.

Related to this, for KDE-2.0 development (dubbed HEAD in the CVS) our team already relied on Qt-2.0 beta releases for a long time now. Hence, KDE-2.0 branch is fully prepared for this last Qt release and development will only increase in speed very much.

We thank very much to our friends at Troll Tech for their excellent work.

• a new list, kde-core-devel@kde.org is created
• the old read-only list kde-devel@kde org becomes read-write by default (that meaning that all subscribers can post)
• the new list, kde-core-devel@kde.org is read-only for all subscribers
• the writing rights from the kde-devel@kde.org list are automatically transfered to kde-core-devel@kde.org
• according to its charter kde-devel@kde.org is used for discussions on KDE development, both regarding the applications from the main packages and the contributed applications
• according to its charter, kde-core-devel@kde.org is used for discussions on development restricted to KDE libraries, CVS, and other central development issues.

For more details on mailing lists associated with the KDE project, please visit the contacts page

Thanks for your understanding
Team KDE

More ORB talk. Torben Weis has been hard at work on the ORB issue and the results of his efforts is tinymico, a significantly slimmed down version of MICO that also takes much less time to compile. Torben has been working closely with Kay Romer of the MICO team so it is quite possible that tinymico will be provided as a compile time option in the official MICO distribution. There are a few remaining issues before KDE is ported to tinimico.

On the subject of alternative ORBs, Phil Mesnier wrote in with some clarifications on the TAO ORB.

And in other CORBA news, Kurt Granroth has been surreptitiously working on enabling plain applications written in bash, Python, Perl or almost any other language to communicate with KDE applications without directly using CORBA. Kurt will soon provide us with more details on this exciting development.

KDE 1.1.2, week 4. It has been decided that kdevelop, kdbg and possibly kdoc, ksgml2html, ktranslator and a few other development-tools will be added to the KDE 1.1.2 distribution. The aim is to provide a nice and ready-to-go development environment for Unix developers and potential Unix developers.

KDE 1.1.2 is expected to enter the code freeze stage soon.

KDE 2.0 Improvements. If you're a developer and you have been confused by the new KStandardDirs and locate() stuff, Stephan Kulow has posted a little HOWTO. The point of these changes is to allow KDE to handle multiple directories more intelligently; the user will be able to install applications in /usr/, /usr/local/, /opt/ or any arbitrary set of directories and each application should be able to obtain relevant files automagically.

Another issue that many KDE users have probably encountered is the inability to modify a system kdelnk or system configuration file and then save the changes transparently to the home directory. Stephan Kulow is right on the ball here as well.

KDE Linux Packaging Project. Ivan E. Moore II is back en force and with a brand new homepage to boot. It appears that the project has now expanded to support new unofficial Red Hat packages as well as debs. They have an impressive list of the currently available packages. The Debian/KDE page is here.

Corel on kde-devel? Corel now has a more visible presence on the kde-devel mailing list. In the past few days we've seen messages from 2-3 Corel employees, including this somewhat controversial bug report from Ming Poon as well as a few other messages from Corel employees actively working on KDE improvements or simply participating in the discussion. Nice to see them around.

KDE Quickies. Peter Harvey gave us this brief update on ODBC in KDE. Havoc Pennington reported an interesting new development: Cooperation between the KDE and GNOME projects on a future window manager specification. KDE's own Matthias Ettrich and Cristian Tibirna have joined the fray.

An archive for these KDE devel bits is now available.

Take a look at Amir's results about KOffice's reuse pattern.

Amir says: "I have used data mining techniques to identify typical reuse patterns of the Qt/KDE libraries. This was done by examining the KOffice applications which make extensive use of these libraries.

The idea behind this work is to help developers write KDE applications by discovering helpful reuse knowledge from applications written by experienced KDE developers."

He'd like to let him know to what extent the developers find this tool useful.

The system was broken by a suite of nefast DNS and server breakdowns a few days ago.

Stephan says: "Finally the bugs system is up again. So please close the bugs you want and encourage users to report some ;)"

The browsing tools for the bugs tracking system are located at bugs.kde.org. To report a bug, write a mail message to submit@bugs.kde.org in which you fill-in the "Package:", "Version:" and "Severity:" labels and you include an as detailed as possible description of the bug and of the way it can be reproduced (more details at the bugs.kde.org site).

Time to dance again ;). Thank you, friends.

Here's Ivan:

    I have a lot of it up and functional including a web based archive of
    this mailing list. (tho it just started)  The site will be also be searchable.
    
    I'm working on a package index with package name, version, author, and
    description.  I am also working on a BTS (bug tracking system) for these
    packages since there are something like 44 packages (plus the core KDE packages
    like kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork...etc...).  wow.  This does not include
    the extra packages I have done for slink users in the past (and will do
    again now that the box is back up).
    
    Please let me know if there is anything else I should have up on the
    site.  Here is a what still needs to go up so that you don't report
    what's already on the list of things to do...
    - Requested To Be Packaged list. (list of packages that someone has
        requested for me to package up.)
    - Bug Tracking System.  (A way for people to see what the list of current
        bugs are for each package as well as report bugs)
 
    Ivan 
    

We hope all the best for Ivan, and we are grateful for his efforts.

He had the kindness to show me his own Netwinder, and this was the first time I was able to touch one of these extraordinary machines. At the same time, Pat informed me that KDE-1.1 compiles and runs on the Netwinder without the least hiccup. If there are interested people, you can get the binaries from Pat's FTP zone at Netwinder.org.

Thank you, Pat. Many thanks to the people which made KDE so portable.

This beta release fixes a number of bugs. A number of API changes where also made in response to customer and public requests.

The API is now effectively frozen. Any severe bugs will be fixed prior to the final release. Non-critical bugs will be postponed until 2.01.

Qt 2.00 Beta3 is not binary compatible with Beta2, this means that any programs linked with Beta2 must be recompiled.

The most important fixes since Beta 2:

platforms

64-bit, FreeBSD and gcc 2.7 fixes

QLayoutIterator/QGLayoutIterator

The custom layout API has been changed: void removeCurrent() has been replaced by QLayoutItem* takeCurrent().

QLabel

The functions setMargin() and margin() have been renamed to setIndent() and indent, to avoid collision with QFrame::setMargin().

QAccel

Non-latin1 accelerators are now supported.

QTranslator/findtr/msg2qm/mergetr

All reported bugs fixed and improvements made.

Rich Text

Many improvements and fixes such as suppressed warnings in the QBrowser example. Support for logical font sizes.

QApplication

lastWindowClosed() now works with virtual desktops. Desktop settings on Windows improved.

ScrollView / QMultiLineEdit

Speedups with a new widget flag: WNorthWestGravity.

QPopupMenu / QMenuBar

Speedups, less flicker.

ORB talk. There has been more talk about alternative ORBs. Preston Brown posted some information regarding the TAO ORB but there appears to be little enthusiasm on switching to this particular ORB. On the other hand, Torben Weis proposed modifying Mico itself by taking out unwanted features, making several other bloat-reducing changes and even devising a new language mapping better suited to KDE needs. Meanwhile, Waldo Bastian posted a nice little HOWTO on upgrading KDE-CVS to Mico 2.2.7.

Hidden feature? Kurt Granroth has hacked and improved the little known .kde.html feature of KDE 1.x. The feature, unadvertised in KDE 1.x and unlikely to be present in similar form in KDE 2.0, allows the user to greatly customize KFM's file display by using a slight superset of the HTML syntax. For an example, see this screenshot -- Kurt's message contains the corresponding .kde-global.html.

Debian packages. As many of you have noticed, the machine hosting Ivan E. Moore's excellent debian packages died a horrible death about two weeks ago also taking the mailing list down with it. For those of you hungry for the updated debs, Ivan is doing his best to get the site back up.

KDE Quickies. Pascal Krahmer announced KDevelop 0.4 which also comes with a newly redesigned homepage. Espen Sand announced a new version of khexedit. Matt Koss gave us an update or two on Motif DnD for KDE. Sven Radej has patched KWM to support ART widgets. Lars Knoll gave us this update on character sets and fonts. KDE 1.1.2 is now in week 3 of the release schedule. There have been some grumblings about string translations and the such but otherwise matters appear to be progressing as expected.

Thanks once again, Navin.

• Application wizard for easy creation of KDE, Qt and terminal C++ projects
• Full project management
• Syntax-highlighting editor
• Integrated Dialog editor for the Qt/KDE GUI libraries
• Full-featured Class browser with Class tools
• Integrated HTML-based help system offering Manuals and Class-references
• Extensive Search mechanisms to browse sources and documentation

I am pleased to announce that the tight collaboration of SuSE and KDE developers led to the timely availability of numerous KDE RPMs for the most current SuSE Linux distribution.

The packages are updated daily and are available from

ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse_update/KDE/latest_kde/

Please feel welcome to download and install them for your pleasure. Just download and install with YaST or 'rpm -hUv packet.rpm'.

The same archive can be found on

ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/vendors/SuSE/

and all its mirrors (http://www.kde.org/mirrors.html).

The KDE Team is looking forward to providing similar binary packages for other popular Unix environments in the future.

Yours,
-- martin

Kind regards, Stefan

KDE Internationalization. Woohyun Jang related some of his experience with non-Latin1 letters. He even provided some rather interesting screenshots. Such efforts are particularly important because many developers using languages with latin1 letters find it difficult to anticipate and resolve these issues.

In a related matter, Preston Brown has improved KLocale to now provide localization support for numbers, money, date and time.

Motif DND. Matt Koss has decided to add Motif drag-n-drop support to Caitoo, a nice download manager for KDE. The main advantage of this is that one will be able to drag URLs from Netscape directly to Caitoo for downloading. Matt will likely work on implementing more general support for KDE.

Columbo. Bernd Gehrmann announced a new project code named Columbo. Inspired from MacOS's Sherlock, Columbo will allow one to search the local file system or the World Wide Web with equal ease. In the future, other abstractions such as searching news or mail may be possible. The source code, which includes a replacement for kfind, can be found here. A screenshot showing the current status of the project is also available.

Daniel Naber also revealed his plans for KWordNet, a promising CORBA front end and back end for WordNet.

KDE Quickies. Troll Tech has released a beta for Qt 2.0. Any bugs not reported soon will likely be present in the Qt 2.0 release, so if it matters to you, go out and test it. Meanwhile, the KDE 1.1.2 release schedule is now in week two. David Faure has made available some proof of concept screenshots showing text and image viewers embedded in Konqueror. Michael Koch announced a new class to provide general command-line parsing support for KDE programs. Hopefully, a KDE standard for command-line arguments will soon follow. Preston Brown provided us with an interesting run down of the Apache shared memory library for potential use in KDE. Finally, "the artist currently known as Torsten" Rahn is looking for a programmer to help with "the most beautiful screensaver in the world".

Thank you very much, Navin.

You can read more about Best Linux at it's web site which is in English, Swedish and Finnish.

Best Linux supports KDE with translating KDE help files to Finnish and Swedish. Already translated are User Guide, , KDM, KPPP, KEdit and only in Finnish KFM and Control Center help files. The next versions will include even more translated KDE documentation.

I would like to thank Steffen Hansen and Robert Schöftner for providing me with good ideas.

Good work, Waldo. Our congratulations.

Qt 2.0 is already used in the bleeding edge KDE CVS base code. The API of the beta version released now will most supposedly remain unchanged for the next full release. Troll Tech developers made available a large number of new features: styles support, internationalization and Unicode support, new pre-built dialogs, hypertext widgets, session management.

In a message to the KDE development mailing list, Arnt Agulbrandsen, of Troll Tech, invited all those interested to try the beta release and decide how it suits their needs. Happy testing.

"There is an exciting set of applications in development today, coming from the same people who brought you the great K Desktop Environment, its called KOffice and it will provide a powerful set of productivity tools." Or "This office suite is very impressive, easy to use and very well integrated." Or "When completed, KOffice will definitely take a lot of people in the Linux industry by complete surprise!"

Thank you, Arthur.

NOTE: for more information on KOffice, go to its web site.

KDE Image Manipulation. There have been renewed talks of future cooperation between KDE and Gimp developers, both on the gimp-developers list as well as on the #gimp channel. Most seem to agree that the Gimp should evolve towards a toolkit-agnostic architecture, but there has as yet not been unanimous agreement on a collaboration.

Meanwhile, Daniel M. Duley (aka Mosfet) announced an alliance with the ImageMagick team. ImageMagick brings a large code base of advanced graphical effects and conversions to the KDE project. The intent is to create KDE libraries that will build the foundation for future advanced graphical applications such as KPaint II or KImageShop. Hot on the heels of this announcement, Matthias Elter announced and presented a detailed description of the KImageShop project, and Mosfet proposed the creation of a joint KDE canvas project.

KMieSculptor. Andreas Pour announced an initial developer's release of KMieSculptor, a tool which simplifies the task of building a GUI. Current bindings include bash and Python with Perl soon to follow.

Debian packages. Ivan E. Moore II gave us a round up of the debian packages currently available for KDE and then added a whole lot more to the list. A new mirror for folks in Europe has also been made available.

More KDE Quickies. devel-home.kde.org is finally back online -- free web-hosting is available to developers needing a website for KDE-related projects by contacting Martin Konold; Waldo Bastian announced the successful deployment of a new optimizing feature, a zone allocator, for the KHTML widget and potentially other applications; Aaron Levinson pointed out that translators often have little context to work from, and gave an example illustrating how application developers can help improve the situation; Mario Weilguni sent out a proposal for cleaning up the KDE libraries. There have been approximately 500 messages this past week on kde-devel alone, a concerned Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel has started a discussion on how best to handle the situation.

Thanks a lot for your efforts, Navin.