News Archive for April 2000

"We are fully committed to Linux. Our Qt technology is already the basis of KDE, the wildly popular graphical desktop environment for Linux," said Haavard Nord, CEO of Troll Tech.

To read the press release click here.

Mosfet relating to the difference between KDE 1.X and KDE 2.0: "The main difference is now KDE2 is heavily component based, focusing on the browser. All of the KOffice applications (KWord, KPresenter, KIllustrator, KSpread, KImageShop, KIllustrator, KChart, and KFormula) as well as many other KDE applications such as the PS/PDF viewer, mpeg and image viewers, and DVI viewers are all components now - internet transparent and embeddable in the browser."

To read the entire interview click here.

"From: London Capitals
Subject: A note of Appreciation

Dear Sir;
I am an American who works in London with underprivileged kids. We work with the kids primarily through American football. We have maintained a website for the past 7 years. I teach the kids primarily through Linux. The KDE desktop environment has proved incredibly helpful in giving these kids a simple to understand interface with a dense operating system.

It is good for them to learn this way for their own futures. Windows seems simpler to them, and real world computer apps are less daunting. At least a half dozen of our kids have gone on to work in the computer field after learning through KDE.

We are a poor club but we would like very much to make some small contribution to your development. All kids can succeed if they are given the proper tools to succeed. KDE has proven itself to be one of those tools.

I note that you seem in need of hardware. Is there a piece of equipment we can purchase for you?

Thank you, David Cruz
President
The London Capitals Youth American Football Club"

Dear David, there's no greater contribution than your heartwarming message of faith and hope. Beyond each and every developer's reasons of involvment in this big project we love - KDE - the most important for anyone among us is to know that our work, our gift is helpful and well received.

And there's no greater pleasure for us than to know that we did succeed to make this world, at least a bit, better. No "piece of hardware" can equal this :-)

We salute you and your kids, David, hands on hearts. And we wish you all the best, and a bright future.

The KDE community

Mike McBride <mmcbride@ematic.com> is asking for volunteers who are willing to help KDE move forward towards the 2.0 release, by writting documentation. There are projects to fit anyone's schedule, from on-line help for small kcontrol modules (that probably will take you a couple hours), to detailed documentation for fundamental programs, which may require more time or even team work. It is helpful if you have experience writting documentation, but all help is needed and appreciated.

If you have any questions or want to help, please contact Mike.

New Session Management. Matthias Ettrich has implemented new session management code for KDE2, in the form of a dedicated session management server, ksmserver. The new server talks the standard X11R6 session management protocol, XSMP. Unfortunately the protocol does not seem to be well supported-- even within X11R6's own distribution, the only application which uses it is xclock. However, using an existing standard is probably a better move than creating a KDE-specific protocol, and hopefully XSMP will be utilized by more third party applications in the future. For more details, check Matthias' README.

Dr. Konqi Now Functional. Waldo Bastian wrote in about a new feature in KDE2 called Dr. Konqi, which will automatically startup and inform the user should a KDE application crash and dump core. If you're a developer and you need to disable Dr. Konqi, simply pass '--nocrashhandler' as an argument to the application or set the KDE_DEBUG environment variable to a true value.

Kaim Needs Developers! Benjamin Meyer recently began work on the "Kaim" project, an AOL instant messenger client for KDE, and is requesting the assistance of other developers. He has code and screenshots of his work in progress on his website at http://www.csh.rit.edu/~benjamin/benjamin/works/kaim/. There is still much work to be done so if you can give him a hand, contact him at benjamin@csh.rit.edu.

KAudioPlayer. Stefan Westerfeld has added a KAudioPlayer class to libkdecore, in order to assist porting old KDE1 applications which were written using the KAudio Class. The new class plays sound files using KDE2's aRts framework, yet does not require linking to the MCOP libraries.

Qt-copy Updated. Qt-copy has once again been updated to the latest Qt beta from the Trolls, qt-2.1.0-beta4. As usual, the update is highly recommended.

Suggestions, comments, and especially contributions to soudan@kde.org. You can always find the current edition of KDN at http://developer.kde.org/news/weekly/, as well as archives of past editions. KDN is published weekly, written and edited by Bill Soudan (soudan@kde.org) and Prasanth Kumar (kumar1@home.com).

If you'd like to have each issue of KDN automatically emailed to you as soon as it comes off the press, send an email with the subject "subscribe kdn-announce" to soudan@kde.org.

As of April 3, 2000, the KDE libraries are in a "soft" API and binary freeze.

What Does This Mean? This means that all API changes and changes that will make the libraries binary incompatible are not allowed UNLESS the changes are absolutely necessary. That is the "soft" part of the freeze. When the libraries hit a "hard" freeze, then changes will be absolutely forbidden.

In any event, all API and/or binary incompatible changes MUST be discussed on kde-core-devel and 24 hours MUST be given to allow for this discussion and the change MUST be necessary. If those conditions aren't met, then the change WILL be reverted.

See Kurt's post for more details.

KDELIBS Freeze Delayed. The long-awaited feature freeze for kdelibs is now April 3rd, pushed back from the original March 30th date. Kurt Granroth has posted a progress chart at http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kdelibs-status.html, which details the current status of each module of kdelibs.

Corel Contributions. A few Corel developers wrote in with some great news this week. Ming Poon writes that Corel has secured half a dozen of their full time QA people to assist in testing during the KDE 1.9 cycle, and is also actively offering help to developers with tasks listed on the KDE jobs page. In addition, after 6 months of searching, Corel has hired a full time UI designer to help with any UI design issues.

We heard from 2 other Corel developers this week in addition to Ming. Andre Charbonneau presented a proposal for a regional control panel, and is requesting suggestions and comments. Brian Pirie jumped in to a thread on the KDE print dialog, detailing Corel's progress on libaps, their Application Print Services API.

Faster configure. Michael Matz posted a patch to kde-core-devel this week which increases the speed of config.status, the configure phase which actually creates each Makefile, by a factor of almost 18! While not necessarily exciting to most users, the core developers were, of course, extremely pleased.

Floatable Widgets Available in KDEUI. Falk Brettschneider has committed a set of classes for floatable widgets in kdeui. These classes give KDE developers the capability to include 'tearable' widgets in their applications, which are controls that can be dragged from a KDE window and float in their own separate window.

Suggestions, comments, and especially contributions to soudan@kde.org. You can always find the current edition of KDN at http://developer.kde.org/news/weekly/, as well as archives of past editions. KDN is published weekly, written and edited by Bill Soudan (soudan@kde.org) and Prasanth Kumar (kumar1@home.com).

If you'd like to have each issue of KDN automatically emailed to you as soon as it comes off the press, send an email with the subject "subscribe kdn-announce" to soudan@kde.org.