News Archive for July 2000

"A lot has happened since the last KDE release", said Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, President of Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB and long-time core KDE developer. "Besides fixing many of the remaining bugs, we also achieved numerous improvements in useability, functionality and appearance. I am especially impressed by the remarkable advances in HTML display and in KOffice."

The announcement

"Because of the status and development muscle behind KDE and the progress already made with Konqueror, this is definitely one to keep an eye on. Preview releases of KDE 2.0 have been coming regularly and it's achieving stability quickly."

The author, Rod Roark does two mistakes though: a) calling Qt toolkit proprietary and not making clear if this is his misunderstanding or the perception of the few members of KDE's competition (here is the official reference to the Open Source licensing status of Qt) and b) failing to present an on-par list of Konqueror features, which is at least as capable as Mozilla right now, if not more capable. All in all the article offers a fair view of Konqueror's position in today's Unix browsers landscape.

Jump to the article here.

If you're one of those interested in KMail's evolution, here's something to appease your waiting to the final release of KDE-2. KMail maintainer Don Sanders sums up what's new in the development branch of KMail (which will soon become the official stable version) - and he made cool screenshots too :-)

This means that you can finally exchange your mail folders and address books with the ones you are currently using at work. And as a plus it will facilitate upgrading from Windows to Linux+KDE!

Currently supported imports:

• Outlook Express 5.0 folders --> to KMail folders
• MS Exchange .PAB format --> to Kab (KDE AddressBook)

Support for KDE 2.0 will be made available later in autumn 2000.

Contact: Hans Dijkema <hdijkema@be-value.nl>

Home Page: www.hum.org

In addition to native KDE2 themes, we are pleased to announce that KDE now supports pixmap GTK themes. However, while GTK themes are displayed faster and more efficiently than even native GTK itself, we do not recommend using this format for creating new themes. Theme developers should prefer KDE2's native widget theming which yields superior results both in terms of quality and speed. A nice HowTo and some documentation on KDE2 theming is available here.

To import a GTK theme in KDE, run the 'klegacyimport' wizard, which will let you add it to KDE's theme selector panel in the KDE Control Center.

For the full announcement, click here.

The Meeting

I just wanted to keep everyone posted: The CVS has been tagged for the 1.92 release. Please note that we now have a

COMPLETE FEATURE FREEZE

in effect! This means that the API, messages and feature set will not be changed until KDE 2.0 is released. The only changes to the CVS that are now allowed are:

• bug fixes, preferrably with reference to the bug #
• updates to the translations
• updates to the documentation

Please note that some packages have been removed from 1.92, although they are still in the CVS. These applications will not be part of the 2.0 release:

• kdemultimedia:
  • kautorun
• kdegraphics:
  • kfax
  • kcoloredit
  • kpaint
  • kiconedit
  • katalog
• kdebase:
  • kikbd
• kdenetwork:
  • kfinger
  • kbiff
• koffice:
  • kimageshop
  • graphite
  • kformula

This is necessary so that the translator and doc writers don't spend their valuable time on these applications.

Thanks for all the hard work that went into the CVS in the last weeks!

Bye,
Matthias.

This is important information about the KDE 2.0 release plan. Please read carefully!

Current Status
==============

• 3 days until the KDE 2.0 Feature Freeze
• 1 weeks until KDE 1.92 will be released
• 4 weeks until KDE 2.0 RC 1 will be released
• 7 weeks until KDE 2.0 will be released

NOTE: Because of all the work currently done in Trysil, the feature and message freeze will be delayed 2 days!

For now, the next important milestone is July 19th, when a decision will be made which applications will be in the 2.0 release, and which applications will be moved to kdenonbeta until they are fit.

July 19th will also be the day when all messages (text strings in the source-code) will be frozen to allow the translations to get in sync.

On July 20th, the features for KDE 2.0 will be frozen. After that date, only bug fixes will be possible.

TODO
====

• Fix bugs
• Implement missing features
• improve documentation and translations
• The package maintainer should send a list of packages to hoelzer@kde.org. The list should indicate:
  • Packages that should go to kdenonbeta, because they are not fit for KDE 2.0, and will not be fit for a release on the near future
  • Packages that should be excluded from the release, but will return back immediately after KDE 2.0 is released.

Here is a list of the current package maintainers:

kdeadmin : Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (bero@redhat.de)
kdegraphics : Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel (mhk@caldera.de)
kdegames : Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel (mhk@caldera.de)
kdemultimedia : Antonio Larrossa (antlarr@arrakis.es)
kdenetwork : Kalle Dalheimer (kalle@dalheimer.de)
kdepim : Rik Hemsley (rik@kde.org)
kdetoys : Stephan Kulow (coolo@kde.org)
kdeutils : Matthias Elter (m_elter@t-online.de)
koffice : David Faure (david@mandrakesoft.com)
kdesdk : Stephan Kulow (coolo@kde.org)

Release schedule:
=================

As a reminder, the current release schedule can be found at
http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/release-schedule.html

Bye,
Matthias.

From the ViewML web site:

"The ViewML Project selected the KDE Desktop's kfm HTML display engine because of its superior design and display capabilities. The HTML engine was extracted, then ported, using a thin glue layer, to the small but fast FLTK (Fast Light Tool Kit, www.fltk.org) applications framework to keep the RAM usage extremely small, but still allows us to fully implement all of the necessary user interface controls."

Look for the KDE HTML display engine in a hand held computer soon!

The UK Computer Shopper magazine (August 2000 cover date) has KDE listed as one of the top 150 computer products of all time.

A few quotes:

"Open Source was notorious for lacking user interface polish before the KDE desktop environment came along. Now the era of the point and drool interface has come to UNIX - by way of a million and a half lines of code, some incredibly cool volunteer programmers, and this project. "

" This is the first file manager I've found on Linux that doesn't make me flee screaming back to the command line after 30 seconds. "

The conclusion:
"In fact, Microsoft had better watch out. Newer releases of Windows are becoming so gnarled and full of exceptions and weird inconsistencies in the user interface - mostly added in the name of customer demand - that the clean interface, consistency and component-based architecture of KDE may put the boot firmly on the other foot. "

To read the article click here.

To read the article click here.

This is important information about the KDE 2.0 release plan. Please read carefully!

Current Status
==============

9 days until the KDE 2.0 Feature Freeze
2 weeks until KDE 1.92 will be released
5 weeks until KDE 2.0 RC 1 will be released
8 weeks until KDE 2.0 will be released

Milestones
==========

For now, the next important milestone is July 17th, when a decision will be made which applications will be in the 2.0 release, and which applications will be moved to kdenonbeta until they are fit.

July 17th will also be the day when all messages (text strings in the source-code) will be frozen to allow the translations to get in sync.

On July 20th, the features for KDE 2.0 will be frozen. After that date, only bug fixes will be possible.

TODO
====

• Fix bugs
• implement missing features
• improve documentation and translations
• The package maintainers should please start to get in touch with the individual application maintainers to get a clear picture if an application will be fit to be included

Here is a list of the current package maintainers:

kdeadmin : Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (bero@redhat.de)
kdegraphics : Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel (mhk@caldera.de)
kdegames : Matthias Hoelzer-Kluepfel (mhk@caldera.de)
kdemultimedia : Antonio Larrossa (antlarr@arrakis.es)
kdenetwork : Kalle Dalheimer (kalle@dalheimer.de)
kdepim : Rik Hemsley (rik@kde.org)
kdetoys : Stephan Kulow (coolo@kde.org)
kdeutils : Matthias Elter (m_elter@t-online.de)
koffice : David Faure (david@mandrakesoft.com)
kdesdk : Stephan Kulow (coolo@kde.org)

When you have decision of which application(s) will have to go to kdenonbeta, please send a mail to:

David Faure (david@mandrakesoft.com)

so he can do the move on the CVS server, without loosing all CVS history information.

Release schedule:
=================

As a reminder, the current release schedule can be found at: http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/release-schedule.html

Bye,
Matthias.