News Archive for May 2000

A snippet from the article: "A friend, having looked at Konqueror's Web page, recently dropped me a note: "What won't it do?" The answer is, not much--it performs all the tasks you could imagine and some that you haven't dared imagine."

To read the entire article hop on over to LinuxPlanet.

"I've just added Keystone, a VNC client for KDE to kdenetwork in the CVS. You can find more information about it at http://apps.cx/keystone"

Here is the current feature set:

• Non-blocking socket handling
• Authentication and logon
• KDE 2 user interface
• Raw and CopyRect encodings
• Full screen mode
• Grab keyboard mode
• Taking screenshots of the remote desktop
• Event dispatching
• Konqueror helper application support (you can run Keystone by   entering a vnc: URL anywhere in KDE).
• Options, login, password and about dialogs
• 8 and 32 bit depths supported

Rich

Today, Kaiwal Software (Shane) Co., Ltd. and theKompany.com signed a sponsorship agreement to support the development of KWord. Two programmers will be available for dedicated KWord development for a period of two years. TheKompany.com is sponsoring the salaries while Kaiwal is providing the equipment and the workspace in Phuket/Thailand.

Enhancements planned include, but are not limited to, filter development, keeping KWord up to date with the ongoing KDE developments, integrating scripting facilities and internationalization. All contributed code will be published under either the GPL or the LGPL.

We recognize the importance of a full blown Office suite for KDE and Linux to give users strong incentives to migrate from MS Office and Windows. KWord as a key application of KOffice will play an important role in this. To achieve that goal we'll help to make KWord as stable, slick and feature rich as possible.

Contacts:

Kaiwal Software (Shane) Co., Ltd.
48 Villa 1
Phuket 83000
Thailand
http://www.kaiwal.com
Rüdiger Koch (rkoch@kaiwal.com)

theKompany.com
5 Coluso
Rancho Santa Margarita, CA 92688
United States of America
http://www.theKompany.com
Shawn Gordon (shawn@thekompany.com)

Scott comments, "I've only been running it for about eight hours as I write this, but so far there have been zero crashes of KDE as a whole. "

To read the article follow this link.

If you read the official announcement, you'll have the occasion to learn, among others, that KDE-1.90 is targetted at developers and at brave interested users willing to test, get acquainted with and learn first hand about the latest technologies created by the absolutely amazing KDE developer community.

All praises to the heavy working, never tired creators, testers, documentation writers, translators, packagers and all those who decided to put time, effort and knowledge in this absolutely miraculous project.

This is an interesting reading. Thanks to all involved.

Amir Michail, a young researcher in computer science at the University of Washington, finds that KDE, thanks to its consequent use of object-oriented programming technologies, is highly interesting from his angle of view, i.e. from the perspective of discovering code reuse patterns in the code base. What is interesting with Amir's work, is that the results are strongly beneficial to the community of KDE developers.

Amir accomplished lately a major stage of his research by bringing his main project, CodeWeb, to a final status. In a letter to the KDE mailing lists, he kindly asked the developers to fill up a questionnaire with pure scientific purposes, that would help him better tune his project in the future. He writes:

"If you tried using the CodeWeb data before --- even if you did not find it helpful or only looked at it briefly --- please fill out the mostly multiple-choice questionnaire (anonymously if you wish).

If you do not wish to complete the entire questionnaire, please answer some of the questions; partial responses are better than no responses.

Your feedback is much appreciated and will have a major impact on the development of CodeWeb and similar data mining tools (which will be done in an open source manner in the future)."

Thank you, Amir, for your excellent and useful work.

KDE.com (http://www.kde.com) went live earlier today.  Although the name has ".com" in it, it's not at all commercial -- in fact it offers a number of free community services many of you might enjoy:

• fully searchable mailing lists -- that's right, search all mailing lists at the same time! -- with phrase searching, date searching, match highlighting, attachment viewing, and more (if someone has a complete comp.windows.x.kde archive they would like to contribute, please let me know -- currently it only goes back to March 4, 2000);
• fully searchable KDE core documentation, to be supplemented in the near future with third-party developer documentation;
• full search capabilities for the KDE family of websites;
• KDE- and general desktop/development related headlines (customizable feeds);
• a comprehensive KDE portal-type directory; and in the KDE tradition and spirit, customizability and themeability and a clean, sleek look.

And more goodies are in the works . . . .

Enjoy!

Andreas

aRts C API Ready. Stefan Westerfeld announced that the aRts C API is now ready for public use. aRts is the sound server that will be used for KDE2, which allows many applications to use the audio device at the same time. This means modules can now be developed for plain C applications to allow them to output through aRts. Stefan also notes that he has already developed two: one for Quake, and one for Mpg123.

Kicker Updated. Matthias Elter wrote in with the note that many new features have been merged into Kicker in the main KDE2 CVS branch. New features include: no more splitter between the buttons and applets, a simplified applet API, applets can be moved and reorganized just like buttons, general code cleanup, and more robust layout save/restore code.

KDE Developer Tutorial Updated. A new version of Anontio Larrosa's KDE Developer Tutorial is now available at http://www.arrakis.es/~rlarrosa/tutorial.html. Recent additions include a new chapter on using KXMLGUI and miscellaneous small fixes needed by the latest KDE2 snapshots.

KWord Developers Wanted. Reginald Stadlbauer is requesting for new developers to take over the development and maintenance of KWord. Time is now limited for him, and he plans to focus on his first pet project, KPresenter. Of course, he will answer any questions about design and implementation issues. If you're interested, please let him and the kde-devel/koffice lists know!

Multimedia Market 2000. Martin Konold brought word of the great success the KDE team had at the Multimedia Market 2000 exhibition which took place recently in Stuttgart, Germany. He also provided a link to pictures of their booth and presentation at ftp://ftp.us.kde.org/pub/kde/events/Multi_Media_Market_2000/. Our friends at the gnome project, who were also there, have more pictures of the event at http://home-of-linux.org/germany/mmm-2000/.

KDE Developer Network. Dan Pilone posted the news that the upcoming KDE Developer Network is almost ready to go live. The submission process is already open, however, and articles can be submitted at articles@shdn.org. As usual, feeback and suggestions are also welcome.

Talking KEdit. A version of KEdit that can talk has been uploaded as KTalkEdit by Richard Moore, as part of his attempt to add support for speech synthesis to KDE 2. Note you must have the Festival speech synthesizer installed for KTalkEdit to function. Currently, it supports reading the document text and reading the current text selection. In addition, a first step towards a screen reader has been made, but extra methods in Qt will be needed before it can progress further.

Modern Theme. Mosfet, the developer of the KDE 2.0 theming system has designed a theming module for KWin, the new KDE window manager. This code clones much of the "Aqua" style look and feel but is much faster without the associated memory and speed penalty of pixmaps. Check out his work at http://www.mosfet.org/modern-0427.html.

Qt-2.1 Released. The official 2.1 version of Qt has been been released by the trolls, prompting yet another update of qt-copy. You can download the new Qt version at ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/qt-x11-2.1.0.tar.gz.

Quickies. Konqueror now supports Netscape plugins! Look here for some screenshots of a flash application running in Konqi. KDE's CVS server has officially been transferred to SourceForge, as of Friday, May 5. Kurt has posted a FAQ here. For those of you having trouble making Jade and SGML work properly on your system, Frederik Fouvry has created a troubleshooting document that you can find at http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~fouvry/kde/sgml-errors.html.

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.

Note from the author:
"Please note that I wrote this way back when www.mosfet.org didn't exist. So it's missing on the list of web sites. I alerted them and maybe they'll add it.

Please note also that the link to my company SysEx is broken. The top level domain "na" is missing. "

Uwe

Sandy Meier On behalf of the KDevelop Team "

The KDE Team is pleased to announce the launch of Konqueror.org, a website devoted to Konqueror, KDE's next-generation, full-featured, powerful, flexible, modular and Internet-transparent file manager, web browser and universal document viewer.

"While the site offers rich content already - including a number of mouth-watering screenshots - it is a work in progress and we will certainly continually improve it", said Chris Lee, webmaster and principal architect of the site. "We plan to add tutorials and FAQs for users, include a plug-in and component directory and supplement the developer's news and tutorials. This will be the site to go to for official, as well as unofficial, Konqueror news and information."

You can find the full press release here.