News archive for August 1999

We might mention that, with this last adition, KDE compatibility is now available in: kwm, blackbox, Window Maker, Enlightenment, XFCE and flwm.

Marc Merlins an already well known Linux fan, who loves to cover (with lots of photos) the most important Linux conferences and conventions, had very kindly covered KDE's presence at LWCE. You can find here descriptions and photos of the daringly called "KDE vs. Gnome" presentation, where Nat Friedman of Gnome and Kurt Granroth of KDE had the possibility to present side by side the two popular Desktop Environment projects, and to answer to questions from audience.

Other information about KDE presence at public events can be found at the KDE Events page.

A new querying engine (making good use of the full featured backend of the whole themes.org site) allows a fast and efficient browsing of the almost 100 themes targeted to 1.1 and 1.1.1 KDE versions. Case Roole adds: "New features such as user preferences, theme statistics and a screenshot gallery have now become part of the site. The layout is configurable through the new "window manager" interface."

Thank you, hard working guys.

The applet API is not expected to change significantly although the underlying protocol will, so start hacking those applets! Writing an applet is as easy as subclassing KApplet, see the example.

More Chrome. Before leaving, Matthias also committed KWin, the new KDE window manager. KWin is currently not quite usable and not really open for hacking since Matthias will be working on it without access to the net during his vacation. It's been mainly committed so that Mosfet can start on some new drool-worthy decorations.

Speaking of Mosfet, he has recently been hired by MandrakeSoft to work on KDE. He now has a news site up and has already committed several juicy items including new effects and gradient options for themes, arrow and progress bar enhancements, QTabBar enhancements, and bevel effects/reverse gradients (whoa). Also, in case you missed it, here's a nice Linux.com interview.

KDE HTML Widget. Lars Knoll announced a rewrite of khtml. The rewrite uses DOM Level 1 as its internal representation with the aim of adding javascript support. Since the rewrite is not complete, it has been committed to the khtml_to_dom branch.

More on KDEStudio's DockWidget. Last week, I lacked an explanation for the DockWidget library, Richard Moore was kind enough to provide one: "It's basically a fancy type of MDI [Multiple Document Interface]. It allows an application's view widgets to dock in a similar way to the current toolbars and menubar. This allows the user to arrange the windows however they wish. This sort of idea is used in some microsoft applications such Visual C++. Personally I quite like it, though I hope there is an option to 'lock' things in place to prevent naive users getting confused." Indeed, looking closely at the new KDE Studio screenshots, you can see little controls on each view...

More on the KDE Application Server. Gabor Szentivanyi wrote in with a new plan of attack for the application server that was proposed a while ago. The proposed first step is to start porting the configuration and registry backends to a small object persistence engine. He is looking for suggestions and more developer involvement.

KDE Quickies. Kurt Granroth has made available the slides for his LinuxWorld Expo presentation. Spanish readers may also want to check out Antonio Larrosa's slides for Campus Party. As usual, all these slides have been created with KPresenter. David Sweet announced an update of the KDE Developer's HOWTO. Boris Povazay sent an update on the KDE Standard Website Project. In particular, the medium-sized standard website is now available.

Ian Zepp announced kmap-0.3, a frontend to the nmap port scanner. Herwin Jan Steehouwer announced KXIcq 0.3.90Beta, a total rewrite with lots of new features. Norbert Weuster announced a webpage for knetdump, a network analysis tool. Espen Sand announced khexedit 0.8.3 which includes a funky new HTML export feature (RPM available thanks to Troy Engel).

New KDE 1.1.2 snapshots are available for testing. The KDE Linux Packaging Project may have binaries for your distribution. Ivan E. Moore II announced KDE 2 and KOffice packages for potato as well as us slink users. The KOffice packages have something of a caveat. Finally, David Faure found some incentive for preserving the .kde.html "hidden" feature previously described.

From now on, the weekly reports will cover Mondays to the following Sunday. Please also note that the spiffy new URL for the archive is now http://developer.kde.org/news/weekly/. The old site will remain available so as not to break existing links.

In other KOffice news, Torben Weis announced KTar, a class for reading/writing gzipped tarballs which will come in useful for handling what will likely be the KOffice document format. Shortly after, Werner Trobin posted initial drafts of a KOffice Storage Specification as well as a KWord Part-Frame Specification. Roland Kaufmann offered his thoughts on the matter.

Jeremy Blosser has created a new site for KImageShop, a relatively new member of the family of KOffice applications.

KDE 1.1.2 is making good progress. Waldo Bastian has been hacking the theme manager and has already added several missing features, improvements and bugfixes. According to Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel's latest release report, all critical 1.1.2 bugs have been addressed and the icons are almost complete. The plan is to release source tarballs on August 30th and binaries on and after September 6th.

Development Tools. Sandy Meier announced KDevelop 1.0beta1, a rather featureful C++ IDE for Unix. Goodies include an application wizard, a GUI designer, class browser, syntax highlighter, documentation browser and much more. Troy Engel was swift to provide an RPM (SuSE RPM also available thanks to Stefan Suchi).

Johannes Sixt also announced KDbg 1.0beta1, a graphical debugger frontend for gdb. Both KDevelop and KDbg are slated for inclusion in KDE 1.1.2.

On a related note, Bernd Gehrmann announced Cervisia 0.2, a CVS frontend. RPMs and debs are already available thanks to those cool guys at the KDE Linux Packaging Project.

KDE 2.0 Updates. Daniel M. Duley has been working on a widget theme designer for KDE 2.0. Users will be able to design widget themes by easily customizing pixmaps, colours, gradients, scrollbar button position, slider types, arrow types, and more. A screenshot is available.

Lars Doelle announced utmp support for konsole in the form of kwrited. The aim is to register a single login no matter how many konsoles one has running. kwrited registers this login and pops up a window whenever a write or wall type message is received.

Richard Moore made available a screenshot showing off KAppletViewer, the demo for kdejava. Java support in khtml (and hence konqi) is not far off... developer.kde.org also now has a page for kdejava amongst lots of other additions.

Cristian Tibirna offered his thoughts on transparent backgrounds for KDE. He proposes implementing a transparent background server that would be part of kdesktop, the desktop manager for KDE 2.0.

Torben Weis gave us a tiny update on tinymico. Discussions are currently underway with the MICO folks on how best to proceed. Cristian Tibirna has been quietly adding multi-head support to KDE. Rudiger Koch revealed intentions of implementing Thai support for KDE but has a few concerns that need addressing. Matthias Elter made available a screenshot page for KDE 2.0.

Widget/Class updates. Paul Campbell reminded us of the existence of KUniqueApplication, a class designed to be used in place of KApplication for situations where only one instance of an application is required to be running.

Judin Max announced the DockWidget library. I'm not sure what it does but the reaction was pretty enthusiastic. Also available are the STabCtl and CheckListBox widgets. David Sweet announced several improvements on KPlotW, a 2D plotting widget. Mosfet announced KDualColorButton. His KPixmapEffects has also been getting high praise.

KDE Quickies. Richard Moore announced Psion 5/EPOC file link support for KFM. It is currently of alpha quality. Moritz Moeller-Herrmann announced a script for converting the KDE menu structure to the IceWM menu syntax. Amir Michail announced more improvements to the Qt/KDE reuse patterns page.

Espen Sand announced khexedit 0.8.2. The new version includes a Qt 2.x port and features several improvements and bugfixes. The reaction to khexedit has been very positive indeed. As usual, Troy Engel made an RPM available. Chris Schlaeger announced KTop 1.1.0pre. Troy promptly made RPMs available. Mirko Sucker announced kardinfo 0.1, a tool for handling PCMCIA cards.

KDE (and Qt) has picked up one of LinuxWorld's Editors' Choice Awards and is evidently related to several other wins. Congratulations to all involved!

Finally, Steve Hutton reports that Corel is looking for KDE/Qt developers.

An archive for these reports is available.

KDE wins the "Desktop Environment" category. As an Anonymous observed on Slashdot, KDE can be related in a way or another to most of the awards granted by LinuxWorld. Interesting, isn't it? :-)

Here is (part of) Mandrake's announcement:

    MandrakeSoft, the company behind the popular Linux-Mandrake Linux
    Operating System will finance David Faure, KDE-core-developer to work for
    the KOffice and KDE projects. 
    
    According to Gaël Duval, co-founder of Mandrakesoft, "Mandrake owes a lot
    of its success to KDE and the Free Software movement. We are very happy to
    help back and contribute to the enhancement of development. We invite all
    the companies who profit from Open Source Software to support KOffice by
    funding dedicated developers. The more good developers join the KOffice
    project, the faster it will be ready for the users."
    
    According to David Faure "KOffice is an integrated office suite based on
    the KDE libraries. It currently includes an enhanced wordprocessor with
    desktop publishing functionality , a spreadsheet, a presentation
    application, a vector drawing program, a diag ram program, a formula
    editor and an image viewer. KOffice makes use of the most advanced Object
    Model in the OSS world. Thanks to this, it is possible to embed any
    KOffice component in a different KOffice application. This is realized
    using the KOM/OpenP arts object model. Of course the KOffice is, as the
    whole KDE project, a free project which is released under the GNU GPL. 
    
    David Faure has been a core developer for the KDE project for two years.
    He is maintainer of the KDE file manager (kfm) and its OpenParts-based
    rewrite (konqueror). He has also participated in the development of the
    KDE libraries, including KOM/OpenParts, as well as the development of
    KOffice itself.
    

Interesting for us is that more than half of the participants in the survey indicated that they use KDE as their primary desktop. Also, almost half of the respondents indicated primary interest in developing KDE applications.

Also, a strong interest for developing Open Source applications was revealed. The developers also want a high quality Rapid Integrated Develpment Environment. This explains very well the strong attention KDevelop received lately.

There's linux distribution in korean which is named Mizi Linux that includes KDE basically without any other window manger. The Mizi Research is developing KDE application and patching much more for korean and internationalization libraries and applications.

    Welcome to week 12 of our release journey.
  
    Good news today: All critical bugs that stopped us from
    releasing 1.1.2 have been addressed, and the icons are almost
    complete. A lot of work has gone into the translations
    lately. The improved theme manager is now feature
    complete. This means that we are really close to a release
    now. The current plan is to
    
    release source tgz's    on      August    30th
    release binary rpm's    on      September  6th
    
    Please keep up the good work!
 
    Status: (x = 7)
 
     1. Start of release                Week 1
     2. Application Freeze                   4
     3. Translations                         6+x
==>
     4. Source release                       8+x
     5. Final release                        9+x
 
     Current estimate: x = 7 weeks

     TODO: Finish the icons and themes
     Please consider the KDE_1_1_BRANCH to be frozen!
     
     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.
     
     Updated snapshots of the current CVS will soon appear on
     ftp.kde.org.

     Bye,
     Matthias.
     

The currently running LinuxWorld Expo offered us all in primetime a sneak preview of what Corel prepares for us. You can also look here for a few other details.

Definite Linux, at version 6.1, produced by Jason Clifford Consulting, ships with the 2.2.10 kernel, the XFree-3.3.4 and with KDE-1.1.1 among others.

Phat Linux v3.0 comes with lots of popular software, including KDE, X-Windows, Netscape, and much much more.

M. Kinebuchi is the coordinator of the User Group and together with this announce he kindly sent us a few more details about the JKUG:

"We have already participated with translating po files or localizing applications to Japanese.

Junji Takagi developed internationalization patch against Qt 1.xx and was given an allowance to distribution that patch from Troll Tech. This patch allows us to display Japanese correctly in KDE.

Taiki Komoda is an coordinator of our i18n team and translated many of po files.

We are planning to translate user help documentation and KDE web site to Japanese.

Members of JKUG are now counted to over 200. We are willing to propagate KDE in Japan more and more."

We believe this is a great event. Coordinated effort of developers and translators in this part of the world largely using non-latin writing are very benefic. KDE offers the huge advantage of an easy-to-localize, modern, free and OpenSource computer graphics environment which is not tied to a local market or a local culture. We are very pleased to observe such a great interest in KDE in the asian countries, where KDE has a lot to offer and to gain.

Many thanks to Satoshi Kinebuchi and our gratitude to Matthias Ettrich who sent us the information.

"The KDevelop Team is proud to announce the availability of the KDevelop Integrated Development Environment for Unix Systems, version 1.0 Beta 1.

The KDevelop IDE offers functionality for the following parts of C/C++ application development:

• a wizard-based project generator that builds configurable frameworks for various type of application
• a coding environment, which includes:
  • a syntax-highlighting editor
  • a class browser and viewer
  • various file viewers
• a documentation system with direct access to HTML-formatted documentation including five handbooks for KDE and Qt development, along with fast search functionalities
• a dialog editor that allows for rapid construction of user interfaces embedded into the development environment completely
• works with the most needed programs automatically to edit files by mime-type, such as KIconedit or KDbg
• CVS support for project development
• support for easy internationalization of projects
• internationalized into 10 languages (application; documentation only available in English)
• many additional features such as auto-saving, command line passing etc.

Have fun!

The KDevelop Team

In an update published on August 1st 1999, Brandon "GreenMarine" Reinhart of Unreal informs that , the games software company prepares a Linux version of their "Unreal Tournament" game.

Brandon states that "K Desktop Environment is the desktop environment I'm using for X. It rocks! It has all sorts of nifty applications that make things easier, plus it has some cool device browsing capabilities if you are pretty Linux illiterate like me."

Also, this screenshot shows the Linux client of the game running on X inside a KDE session.

We already knew KDE has lots of useful applications :-). Nevertheless, we enjoy to find such concrete exhibits in support to our belief. Thanks Unreal, thanks Carsten.

Antonio will represent KDE at this show. The organizers invited him to assist to the whole show and to give an one hour conference about KDE.

For more details, look at the Linux party page.

Good luck Antonio