KDE 1.92 Release Announcement

Tuesday, 25 July 2000

Third Beta Preview of Leading Desktop for Linux^® and Other Unixes^® July 25, 2000 (The INTERNET). The KDE Team today announced the release of KDE 1.92, codenamed "Korner", the third beta preview of KDE's next-generation, powerful, modular desktop. Following on the heels of the release of KDE 1.91 (Kleopatra) on June 24, 2000, Korner is based on a snapshot of Trolltech's^tm upcoming Qt^® 2.2.0 and will include the core libraries, the core desktop environment, the KOffice suite, as well as the over 100 applications from the other standard base KDE packages: Administration, Games, Graphics, Multimedia, Network, Personal Information Management (PIM), Toys and Utilities. Korner is targeted at users who would like to help the KDE team make usability and feature enhancements and fix the remaining set of bugs before the release of KDE 2.0, scheduled for early September 2000.

Korner benefitted greatly from a productive 10-day conference of many core KDE developers in Norway last week. "A lot has happened since the last KDE release", said Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, President of Klar�lvdalens 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."

Korner offers a quite stable desktop suitable for a non-critical environment. The principal benefits lie in the cutting-edge technologies provided by Konqueror and the KOffice suite, in KDE's enhanced customizability and in KDE's continued improvements in ease of use.

• Konqueror reigns as the next-generation web browser, file manager and document viewer for KDE 2.0. Widely acclaimed as a technological break-through for the Linux desktop, Konqueror has a component-based architecture which combines the features and functionality of Internet Explorer^®/Netscape Communicator^® and Windows Explorer^®. Konqueror will support the full gamut of current Internet technologies, including JavaScript^TM, Java^®, HTML 4.0, CSS-2 (Cascading Style Sheets), SSL (Secure Socket Layer for secure communications) and Netscape Communicator^® plugins (for viewing Flash^TM, RealAudio^TM, RealVideo^TM and similar technologies). In addition, Konqueror's network transparency offers seamless support for browsing Linux^® NFS shares, Windows^® SMB shares, HTTP pages, FTP directories as well as any other protocol for which a plug-in is available.

• The KOffice suite is one of the most-anticipated Open Source projects. The suite consists of a spreadsheet application (KSpread), a vector drawing application (KIllustrator), a frame-based word-processing application (KWord), a presentation program (KPresenter), and a chart and diagram application (KChart). Native file formats will use XML, and work on filters for proprietary binary file formats is progressing. Combined with a powerful scripting language and the ability to embed individuals components within each other using KDE's KParts technology, the KOffice suite will provide all the necessary functionality to all but the most demanding power users, at an unbeatable price -- free.

• KDE's customizability touches every aspect of this next-generation desktop. Korner benefits from Qt's style engine, which permits developers and artists to create their own widget designs down to the precise appearance of a scrollbar, a button, a menu and more, combined with development tools which will largely automate the creation of these widget sets. Just to mention a few of the legion configuration options, users can choose among: numerous types of menu effects; a menu bar atop the display (Macintosh^®-style) or atop each individual window (Windows-style); Native KDE2-Themes and GTK-Themes; icon-effects and -themes; system sounds; key bindings; languages; toolbar and menu composition; and much much more.

Downloading and Compiling Korner

The source packages for Korner are available at ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/distribution/2.0Beta3/tar/src/ or in the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp server mirrors. Korner requires Trolltech's Qt 2.1.9-korner, which is a snapshot only available from the above locations under the name qt-copy-1.92. Please note that Qt 2.1.9-korner is not an official Trolltech release and is also not part of KDE's beta testing.

Please be advised that Korner will not work with older versions of Qt, including Trolltech's latest stable release, Qt 2.1.1, which formed the basis of the Kleopatra release.

For further instructions on compiling and installing Korner, please consult the installation instructions and, if you encounter problems, the compilation FAQ.

Installing Binary Packages of Korner

The binary packages for Korner are available under ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/distribution/2.0Beta3/ or under the equivalent directory at one of the many KDE ftp server mirrors. Korner requires Trolltech's Qt 2.1.9-korner, which is a snapshot only available from the above locations under the name qt-copy-1.92. Please note that Qt 2.1.9-korner is not an official Trolltech release and is also not part of KDE's beta testing.

Please be advised that Korner will not work with older versions of Qt, including Trolltech's latest stable release, Qt 2.1.1, which formed the basis of the Kleopatra release.

At the time of this release, precompiled packages are available for:

• Caldera-2.4
• Mandrake
• Redhat
• SuSE

Check the ftp servers periodically for pre-compiled packages for other distributions.

About KDE

KDE is a collaborative project by hundreds of developers worldwide to create a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop environment employing a network-transparent, intuitive user interface. Currently development is focused on KDE 2, which will for the first time offer a free, Open Source, fully-featured office suite and which promises to make the Linux desktop as easy to use as Windows^® and the Macintosh^® while remaining loyal to open standards and empowering developers and users with Open Source software. KDE is working proof of how the Open Source software development model can create technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

For more information about KDE, please visit KDE's web site.