News Archive for September 1999

According to Fujitsu Siemens Computers:

"Fujitsu Siemens Computers, one of the main Linux supporters worldwide, is proud to sponsor the KDE-Two developer meeting. Fujitsu Siemens Computers strongly supports open source projects like KDE as one of the leading GUIs for Linux. The GUI is of particular importance with regard to further enhancing the acceptance of Linux in different environments from Desktop to Server."

Packages for SuSE 6.2 -i386 can be downloaded from:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/SuSE-Linux/suse_update/KDE/update_for_6.2-i386

Packages for both SuSE 6.0 - i386 / SuSE 6.1 - i386 can be downloaded from:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/SuSE-Linux/suse_update/KDE/update_for_6.1-i386

Packages for SuSE 6.1 - AXP will be available next monday from: ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/SuSE-Linux/suse_update/KDE/update_for_6.1-axp

All packages will soon also be available from ftp.kde.org and its mirrors.

[...]

SuSE congratulates all KDE developers with this impressive release and would like to thank them for all the hard work they have put into KDE.

The cuteIDL developers are proud to announce a new tool designed to make KDE more efficient in its use of CORBA. CuteIDL is a modified version of MICO's IDL compiler that makes use of efficient and easy to use Qt features. Such a modification has been possible thanks to the great design and modularity of MICO. This allowed very important simplifications in KDE's code, removing the need for a huge number of conversions.

Cuteidl brings

• improvement to the performance of all CORBA-based apps
• reduction of the memory consumption
• simplification of CORBA programming for KDE
• reduction of compile time
• new possibilities for CORBA usage in KDE, like using shared libraries

Some problems may remain, of course. Don't hesitate to report them !

David Faure <faure@kde.org>
Simon Hausmann <hausmann@kde.org>
Lars Knoll <knoll@kde.org>

These packages are built on RedHat 5.2. They work on 5.1 as well, if the "jpeg" updates from Red Hat are installed. They also appear to work well on RedHat 6.0 systems, if you wish to use them this way. (Note: these are not ``Official Red Hat 6.x'' RPM's)

The optional-application KDE collections are separated into RPM subpackages, so a subset can be installed. kpackage-1.3.8 is also supplied; two versions, (for rpm-2.5.x and rpm-3.0.x) are provided, as rpm's database format changed.

New feature: TWO different sets of RPMS are supplied:

• "rh5x" (oldstyle) series are traditional KDE rpms that install to /opt/kde (or can be relocated with "rpm ... --prefix " ).
• "FHS2" (FHS-compliant) series are new RPMS that are designed to be compliant with the File Hierarchy Standard v2.0, (as advocated by Red Hat).

The goals of KRASH are to stabilize development and to offer developers a chance to familiarize themselves with the new Qt and upcoming KDE 2. The plan is to feature-freeze kdelibs on October 15th with kdebase following on November 1st. The final alpha-quality release is slated for December 1st. After the release, everything will be unfrozen and the release process for KDE 1.90 will begin.

The KOffice framework and family of applications are also to be included in KRASH. Lotzi Boloni has decided to help with KChart (formerly KDiagramm) and Montel Laurent has already been doing an admirable job on KSpread; hackers are still however needed for KFormula. Testers, documenters, and developers in general are also welcome.

CORBA news. There have been some significant developments on the CORBA front. On the one hand, KDE 2 has been ported to the new and improved MICO 2.3.0 but on the other, several fundamental issues have been raised.

The discussion ranged from dropping CORBA altogether -- especially after folks have been comparing applications like KSpread and KIllustrator with and without CORBA support -- to dropping the multiple process architecture and instead switching to a shared library approach for local CORBA components.

The actual tangible result of all this discussion is cuteidl, described as "an IDL compiler with marshalling code for the QTL" and which has been progressing at a very fast rate thanks in part to the amount of enthusiasm over it as well as the nicely modular MICO code. The intent of cuteidl is to hide all or most of the MICO/CORBA C++ bindings from the programmer and instead present a nice clean API that takes better advantage of the Qt/KDE framework and requires little or no knowledge of CORBA. As a consequence, a lot of unwanted bloat has also been eliminated. It is hoped that in combination with tinymico, and perhaps the shared library approach, the CORBA situation will improve immensely.

This issue is sure to be brought up and further decided at KDE-Two where about 50 core KDE developers the world over will be meeting.

KDE Chrome. Lots of updates (along with the obligatory screenshots) are available on Mosfet's site. Newly implemented features include pixmapped borders, more customized widgets and effects on user action, various updates and bugfixes. It's safe to say that Mosfet has brought theming to a whole new level.

In other art news, "the artist currently known as Torsten" Rahn has taken a 3 month break to work on his diploma-thesis. He has gracefully passed the onus on to Rik Hemsley who announced a plan of attack for KDE 2. Covered are icons, backgrounds, themes, and screensavers. In the latter case, he particularly emphasizes that he does not want "animations of Konqui the dragon flaming little terrified Gnomes". Perhaps he'd accept little nerds with glasses instead of the Gnomes. :-)

Rik also made available an extensive and illustrated tutorial on creating KDE icons.

KDE User Interface Standards. Peter Penz has set up a very nice site in an attempt to promote KDE User Interface Standards. It's been a bit controversial on certain points such as the push to eliminate one of the oh-so-useful pair, Close Window (Ctrl-W) and Quit (Ctrl-Q), but everything is still open to discussion at this point. Some of us Emacs users may never be satisfied by certain keybindings but in the end they should be mostly configurable.

KLPP update. Ivan E. Moore II, responsible for the prompt availability of KDE 1.1.2 debian packages, wrote in with an update on the KDE Linux Packaging Project. There's been some problems caused by the huge amount of traffic generated by KDE users but thankfully people have stepped in to help. Previous list subscribers will unfortunately have to resubscribe.

KDE Quickies. Espen Sand updated us on the progress of his DialogCore efforts and also proposed a way of standardizing window captions. Cesar Gutierrez Corea announced frontends for bind and sendmail, dubbed KBIND (screenshots) and KSendmail (screenshots) respectively. Samuel Kvasnica announced SampLin, a data acquisition package for Linux. It includes a graph widget that may be useful to other developers. Michael Goffioul announced a new development snapshot of the popular kruiser file manager. Johannes Sixt announced the imminent release of KDbg 1.0. Lotzi Boloni announced a new homepage for GOFAI-WMT.

LinuxWorld ran a very positive review of KDevelop. Two new sets of KDE slides are up, one set from Reginald Stadlbauer's KOffice presentation at Linux Congress and the other set from Cristian Tibirna's talk at Marche International du Multimedia (PNG support required in both cases).

An archive for these reports is available. Une version francaise pourrait eventuellement etre disponible ici.

Get the hot peek at Mosfet's personal site.

"I'm pleased to announce the Solaris 7 (x86) packages of KDE version 1.1.2. For this version you need to download qt-1.44 with GIF support.

packages can be download at

ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde

(as soon they have been release for ftp from the incoming directory) and the normal location at:

ftp://ftp.patriots.net/pub/solaris_packages/7-x86/KDE/

[...]

NB: The Sparc version will be available end of this week! (or sooner :) )

Kind regards,
Luc Suryo "

" ...KDE 1.1.2 is available for NetBSD through the package system. It can be found under this URL:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/x11/kde/README.html

Kind regards

Matthias Scheler "

"Hi there!

the first Linux-distro to include KDE 1.1.2! :)

announce on: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/heliosannounce.php3

Greets,

Gael. "

"I just wanted to let you folks know that Yellow Dog Linux (for Apple and IBM PowerPC computers) Champion Server 1.1 ships with KDE 1.1.1. (Our previous release has KDE too).

We're dedicated to KDE as our desktop and it will be a core aspect of out upcoming release.. Yellow Dog Linux Gone Home 1.0 for the home user.

Thanks for the great software,
Dan"

"Two major updates have occured in the KLPP (KDE Linux Packaging Project). The first being that of bad news. The Mailing list took a dump and I had to rebuild the puppy. Anyone who wants to be on the list (any of them) need to resubscribe ( http://kde.tdyc.com/mailing/ ).

The second is that of good news. Everyone who has dealt with the KLPP in recent times knows the troubles we have had with servers. Either we are hogging too much bandwidth and our ISP shuts us off, or we kill the box it's running on. Well, a few people so far have stepped forward to help out with these. We currently have a site supplying disk space and bandwidth for the whole KLPP and another one that for now is just taking on the Debian portion and will later expand into the full KLPP.

We also have a few more mirrors in general for Debian pacakges.

Here is a complete list of apt-get'able sites.

HTTP based apt-get'able sites

"

    GOAL OF THE KRASH (1.89) RELEASE
    ================================

    * Stabilize development. 
    * Offer third party developers a convenient way to become familair with
    Qt2.x / KDE 2.x

    REMARKS
    =======

    KRASH will be alpha quality software. It is not recommended to use
    KRASH for daily work. Although the API of KRASH should be relatively
    stable, CHANGES will be made to it before the final KDE 2.0 release.
    It is not recommended to release applications based on this release.
    Distributors should NOT SHIP this release without providing a stable
    and complete version of KDE as well.
    
    
    CURRENT STATE
    =============
    
    1. Determine what has to be done before 1.89 can be released.
    
    
    NEXT MILESTONE
    ==============
    
    2. Feature freeze kdelibs in FOUR WEEKS from now. (15-10-99)
    
    
    RELEASE SCHEDULE 1.89
    =====================
    
    1. When: NOW
    What: Determine what has to be done API-wise before 1.89 can be released.
    What: Determine what will be released with 1.89
    
    2. When: 15 Oct '99
    What: Feature freeze kdelibs.
    
    3. When: 1 Nov '99
    What: Feature freeze kdebase.
    
    4. When: 1 Dec '99
    What: Release of 1.89 (kdelibs + kdebase only)
    
    --- Everything unfrozen
    
    
    
    THINGS TO SOLVE FOR 1.89
    =======================
    
    *  Are KApplication and it's subclasses done right? Does for
    example WM modules need a special KWMModuleApplication? I wonder
    why kdesktop runs at all -- it can't be both a KOM- and
    KWMModule-Application at the same time.
    
    *  Robustness of kded 
    
    *  Mico changes (tinymico?)
    
    *  Handling of Styles 
    
    *  New session management
    
    
    AFTER 1.89
    ==========
    
    After 1.89 has been released all packages will be unfrozen. Goal is
    to start with a 1.90 release directly after 1.89. This means that
    with releasing 1.89 kdelibs will be unfrozen and that after 1 month
    kdelibs will be feature frozen for 1.90.
    
    
    CHANGES TO THE RELEASE SCHEDULE
    ===============================
    
    If you foresee problems with the above schedule, have additions or have
    questions about the schedule, please contact Waldo Bastian (bastian@kde.org). 
    
    Changes made to release schedule will be announced on the KDE development
    mailinglists. Once a week the status of the release will be posted
    to the KDE development mailinglists.
    
Yes, discussions already started. Good luck, team.
    

"Hello Friends, I just sent out this announcement to kde-announce. KDE 1.1.2 has been released, and so it is time to say "Thank You" to all the people working hard to make it possible. There are much to many to count: the translators, the artist team, the packagers, all the people fixing the last bugs, and last but not least the developers.

THANKS!

Now let's have a party today, and then we should forget about the 1.x code and go even faster into KDE 2.0 again. Wouldn't it be nice to have a 2.0 beta as a Christmas present? :-)

Bye, Matthias."

Of course many heartfelt thanks will go to our Release Master, who has put into this release an incommensurable amount of work and time, consisting in stressing and tensing coordination work, synchronization and consistency checks, all in addition, and not by substitution to the direct work on code and packaging.

Find the official announcement and the changelog at the usual places.

The KSpread development pace has also picked up thanks to a new active hacker, mlaurent. Hopefully some of those hidden features will now be brought to the forefront.

The KOffice website will soon get a facelift thanks to Jeremy Blosser. The new site has not yet gone online due to a few remaining interaction bugs with KFM.

KDE multimedia. Stefan Westerfeld wrote in with a proposal listing the pros and cons of replacing KAudioServer2 with aRts, the analog realtime synthesizer. aRts is now very flexible, offering more than the just the possibility of mixing audio streams. As a bonus, the core does not depend on KDE/Qt so other projects are free to adopt it. Another option being considered is switching to the more light-weight Enlightened Sound Daemon.

Stefan also happens to be looking for developers and graphical artists to help with the user interface for aRts, please contact him if interested.

Konqueror. The idea of view plugins is that konqueror should be able to seamlessly embed and integrate applications that can take care of mimetypes not otherwise understood by the browser. For this to work however, the helper application needs to conform to a certain interface. Simon Hausmann has written a nice little HOWTO explaining exactly what's involved. It is hoped that more people will start building konqueror support into their applications. Nice candidates for this include the wonderful aKtion movie player, kghostview, kdvi, ...

Simon also posted his thoughts on how konqueror should progress before the next developer's release.

Better Dialogs. Espen Sand has been working hard at improving KDE dialogs. You can find his latest proposal and screenshots for the KDE About dialog here. He also posted some information on DialogCore, an effort to standardize and clean up KDE dialogs in general. As it turns out, some of this functionality is already available in DialogBase (see kdelibs/kdetest for an example) so the efforts will have to be merged.

Leon Widdershoven brought up the issue of print dialogs.

KDE 1.1.2. The high colour icons, themes and the rest have finally been committed to CVS. KDE 1.1.2 binaries are expected to ship next week. One piece of sad news is that the KDevelop folks have judged that KDevelop is not quite ready for a stable release and so it has been decided that KDE will ship without it. Incidentally, a certain company is looking to customize KDevelop for non-C/C++ languages and is interested in hiring developers. Contact Daniel M. Duley for details.

Also on the subject of IDEs, Judin Max has announced several updates and the first source snapshot of KDE Studio. As you may know, this project has already resulted in many useful and general widgets.

News from the Web. Avus announced KDE Forum, a Zope-based discussion site for KDE, temporarily hosted here. It already has several interesting news items. Avus is looking for someone to help move this site to a nicer URL.

Mosfet has also declared intentions of starting a new KDE development news site. He is currently looking for a co-founder to help with the design.

On the subject of news, Mosfet asks a very good question: Why are KDE developers not posting their applications to Freshmeat? Tons of new KDE applications are being uploaded and processed, yet many of these are not being announced on the defacto website for new and updated applications. A few volunteers could well take over this task.

KDE Quickies. Mirko Sucker announced a rewrite of KDatePicker. Ian Geiser announced kweather, a dock applet for kpanel. Peter Putzer announced KSysV 1.0.0pre2. Paul Dwerryhouse announced kticker 1.0.0beta2. Finally, Mosfet has an update on the KDE Widget Designer (with screenshot).

An archive for these reports is available.

The article, called Linux ShootOut is an interesting reading and gives a good rundown of the image that our so familiar (for us) Linux and KDE can offer to new users coming from the mainstream world of operating systems.

NOTE: many thanks to Mosfet (Daniel M. Duley) for sending us the information about this material.

The site is still in development but already looks interesting. On a technical note, Zope is used as the back engine.

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.