News Archive for May 1999

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.

After some correspondence with the ImageMagick team I have gotten the go-ahead to port the ImageMagick graphic manipulation library to KDE classes and announce a collaboration between KDE and ImageMagick. This brings a large code base of advanced graphical effects and conversions to the KDE project that can be used in order to design image manipulation applications.

The code for the ImageMagick based classes will be a stock artistic license similar to that of X11 and FreeBSD.

...

... this is very good news for the KDE project and brings us much closer to having advanced KDE graphic processing and editing applications.

-- Daniel M. Duley - Unix developer & sys admin.
mosfet@kde.org

Mosfet, thank you very much for your invaluable efforts.

Kurt Granroth is a skilled KDE developer and a member of the core team. Among his contributions to the KDE project, one can find KBiff, a full-featured mail-checker.

KAbiWord. Andrew Wansink briefly announced that he has started work on a port of AbiWord to KDE.

This sparked a little controversy, mainly the realization that KOffice has been quite usable at several stages in the development, yet no interim user release has ever been made and the lone Freshmeat announcement dates back to last October. The fact that the KOffice codebase has now been ported to KDE 2.0 makes the matter of an interim release a little trickier. Fortunately for Debian users, and thanks to the formidable efforts of Ivan E. Moore II, debian packages for kde*-cvs and koffice-cvs will eventually be available.

Also in light of various difficulties involved with a KDE interface for the Gimp, there is talk of developing a new easy to use, yet powerful image manipulation tool for KDE. Developers interested in such an effort should contact Michael Koch.

More KDE Quickies. In other news, the KDE team has made the move to the latest and greatest MICO 2.2.6; Bo Thorsen gave us this update on KodeKnight development; Antonio Larrosa announced and implemented a new controversial feature for Konsole and other applications: background transparency; Stephan Kulow declared -- and executed -- intentions of revising the KDE file hierarchy standards with an eye to enabling better compliance with the FHS; and finally, for a cheap laugh, you might want to see how aggressively the KDE developers have been porting over to QString in light of the Unicode support in Qt 2.0.

Thanks, Navin.

Slackware Linux 4.0 has finally made it's way to the general public. Sporting the long-awaited 2.2 kernel and the K Desktop Environment, it's quite an impressive upgrade.

KPanel. There's been a lot of discussion on the matter of applets, docking and swallowing in KDE. The thread started with this message from Matthias Ettrich and diverged somewhat into menubar/toolbar issues including this description of a menubar/toolbar consolidation from Glen Parker (it turned out that Sirtaj Singh Kang had already laid out the foundation for an implementation of this idea) and an explanation from Matthias on the problems associated with tear-off menus.

KConfig. Preston Brown raised the issue of switching from INI-style config and desktop files to XML, possibly in cooperation with the GNOME folks. Cristian Tibirna summed up some of the issues involved; there appears to be little consensus on whether XML would be a worthwhile improvement or not.

KDE Quickies. Also this week, David Sweet announced a new mini-HOWTO for KDE developers, and David Faure released a temporary patch for the infamous FTP upload problem that was introduced in KDE 1.1.1.

Thank you again, Navin. We look forward for the continuations :-)

Uwe

Curious how this machine could look like? See it here.

Go to the Oriented Objects :-) page and take a look at the Official KDE Mascot T-shirt design, authored by Stefan Spatz with the help of Torsten Rahn (members of the KDE artist team). The design features Konqi, the KDE Mascot and the Gear Logo.

Our all-mighty Stephan Kulow, Master of the Current Release and Grand Sorcerer of the CVS, gloriously said: "Hi! 1.1.1 is ready. This time it's tagged with KDE_1_1_1_RELEASE. See you ;)".

Martin Konold, Mighty Knight of FTP, packaged the code base and passed it already to the Glorious Army of Packaging Crusaders. They already made available precompiled packages for many popular Linux distributions. Such packages will become available for the other more than 25 supported UNIX platforms in the next days.

This new release includes corrections for a few notable problems reported by users since 1.1 release. Also, a large amount of minor improvements and performance tuning have been operated.

You can read a press release and the ChangeLog.

In the end, the usual (but always very sincere) thanks of the news page maintainer to all the hard working developers and all the very dedicated users/reporters for making possible the best Unix desktop offer ever available ;)