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Yes and 80% of the world are morons

Excellent statistic. I believe i will add that to my test of the '4 out of 5 statistics are made up' theory.

Where do you want to point and click today?

are you trying to say that you can't point or click in a Linux environment?

Wait, were you contradicting his point, or making it? It looks to me like you were making it, the OSX interface is the worst I have ever seen. I would put enlightenment well ahead of OSX, but few people seem to have my tastes, because I firmly believe that KDE is better than the Windows Desktop Environment, and I think that GNOME is just barely above OSX.

That is apperantly just me though...

Biological evolution and software development aren't exactly the same thing.

Let's consider Apple's stated reason for using KHTML. You can find an email about it here. They have some pretty high praise for it. I'm not a konquerer or KDE user but I think that's no coincidence. Credit where credit is due, people.

When I observe what's happening in the computer world, I see a many companies working really hard to make life easier for people who want an alternative. Some of them are even large, relatively stable companies such as Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, etc...

I try not to sound anti-Microsoft most of the time. Some people actually consider my advice valuable enough to help them make their purchasing decisions with regard to technology. So, I try to remain unbiased.

What really makes me smile, though, is when the largest and, supposedly, most stable of technology companies helps to make it easier to switch to an alternative.

In this case, Microsoft has effictively told all Apple computer users "We don't consider you valuable and we don't want your business."

It is not insignificant just because IE is free software. Consider the companies who do the majority of their business through the Internet. They also find it easier to choose an alternative. Now, if they want to keep their Apple customers and utilize the latest technology in their Web sites, they only need to design their Web sites according to a specification (W3C) which is supported by browsers on every platform. Reduce cost and development time with just a single site, without cross-browser tricks, and it works everywhere... Ok, that's ideal, not real, but it's an ideal that Microsoft has been effectively working against while every other browser development team works towards it.

I do not wish to digress too far, but consider this: Safari is based on a KHTML code base, which is derived from the KDE project, which is primarily used on the Linux platform, which is seen as a threat to Microsoft's business.

Every day there are new problems where legitimate businesses, who purchased all of their software legally are told that they need to pay a license fee to continue using it.

Even home users have problems. Given the nature of the latest version of the most common operating system, it's necessary to format the hard drive and re-install occasionally. But if you do it more than three times, you have to call Microsoft and convince them that you actually purchased your software so that you can have a new activation code. This one has personally affected me. Even though I have legally purchased more copies of Windows XP than I am using, I use a cracked "Corporate Edition" of the software because I don't want to deal with the hassle of Activation.

The company with the largest market share keeps irritating their paying customers. Businesses are already choosing alternatives in droves. Soon, even average users won't even want to bother with them.

Well... Apple users... Where do you want to go today?

--
-- Ghodmode

Eric Laffoon is asking for donations towards the http://kdewebdev.org/ project. He's been sponsoring a full time developer for years out of his own pocket and could use some help.

http://dot.kde.org/1134848565/

Then use Kopete instead.

http://kopete.kde.org

If only someone would code this idea.

Indeed, there have been countless iterations of different UIs throughout the history of graphical computing. Linux alone has dozens of disparate DEs and WMs. Fluxbox, FVWM, Window Maker, Enlightenment DR16, XFCE, KDE, and Gnome are among the most popular and most current and stable examples. Keep in mind, of course, that the 'nix desktop is experiencing a huge evolution right now, with projects such as ToPaZ (storyboard) and Luminocity, Appeal with Plasma, SymphonyOS' Mezzo desktop, and Enlightenment DR17.

Indeed, there have been countless iterations of different UIs throughout the history of graphical computing. Linux alone has dozens of disparate DEs and WMs. Fluxbox, FVWM, Window Maker, Enlightenment DR16, XFCE, KDE, and Gnome are among the most popular and most current and stable examples. Keep in mind, of course, that the 'nix desktop is experiencing a huge evolution right now, with projects such as ToPaZ (storyboard) and Luminocity, Appeal with Plasma, SymphonyOS' Mezzo desktop, and Enlightenment DR17.

http://amarok.kde.org/amarokwiki/index.php/MySQL_H owTo

I would add KOrganizer to the list. It's nice having good, complete calendar/scheduling software while waiting on Sunbird or whatever the Mozilla organization eventually craps out (and I mean that in a good sense).

Also, re: Konqueror, it's great as a Linux file manager, but I personally avoid it for web browsing and I don't support it on websites I develop. Why? The rendering engine sucks, and therefore I would have to write an inordinate number of workarounds. And writing those workarounds aren't worth it, as an extremely small percentage of hits to my sites come from Konqueror.

Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Mark Shuttleworth and now Linus Torvalds seem realize the value of KDE's superior architecture, on which which many must-have KDE apps. These apps don't have any gnome equivalents that are nearly as useful and feature-rich:

AmaroK music player -- The most feature-rich and polished music player on the Free Software platform.

K3b -- Best CD and DVD authoring program with intuitive wizards, on the fly transcoding between WAV, MP3, FLAC, and Ogg Vorbis, normalization of volume levels, CDDB, DVD Ripping and DivX/XviD encoding, Save/load projects, automatic hardware detection/calibration and much more.

DigiKam -- The most feature-rich application for digital photo management.

Wireless Assistant -- Most user-friendly app for connecting to wireless networks. Managed Networks Support, WEP Encryption Support, Per Network (AP) Configuration Profiles, Automatic (DHCP, both dhcpcd and dhclient) and manual configuration options, Connection status monitoring, etc

KDE Education -- Educational (Science, Literature, Geography, etc) programs for children. Could play a big role in whether school districts decide to use Free Software in their classrooms.

Konqueror File Manager -- Embeded image/PDF/music/video viewing (via KMPlayer [kde.org]) and a tree-view arrangement of the filesystem familiar to Windows users (Nautilus doesn't come anywhere close)

KDE Control Center -- Centralized location for desktop control. Controls _all_ common aspects of the KDE applications: language, power settings, special effects, icon and window themes, shadows, shortcuts, printers, privacy, etc. This is what makes KDE so well integrated -- all KDE apps respect changes made here, so they all have the same feel. SUSE has even made YAST a module of the KDE control center so users can access distro-specific settings from here. Compare this to the dismembered approach Red Hat (and other gnome distros) have been forced to adopt in the absence of a centralized gnome control center. (ie. a bunch of individial programs named redhat-config-**** that nobody can ever remember)

Seamless, transparent network file access on SMB, FTP, SSH and WebDav networks from _any_ KDE application.

Kaffeine -- The most polished FOSS movie player.

MythTV -- The most advanced analog and digital TV viewer/recorder in the Free Software world (built using QT).

Baghira -- A native QT style that faithfully imitates OS X eyecandy, aimed at new users coming from the Mac world.

Klik -- Gives non-expert access to bleeding edge versions of apps without requiring any compilation or permanent installation.

KDE and QT also make up a technically superior platform for developers, drastically lowering the learning curve for programmers new to FOSS development. KDE apps can be built from the ground up using the best development tools in the Free Software world (which also happen to be built on QT/KDE):

Kdevelop for syntax highliting, application templates, and project organization.

QT designer for GUI development

Quanta -- Rich web development environment for PHP, CSS, DocBook, HTML, XML, etc with advanced context sensitive autocompletion, internal preview and more.

Ars Technica is reporting that Nokia 770 Internet uses Opera, but I would think it's quite possible that Nokia will offer updates containing a KHTML-based browser (some version of Konqueror) soon.

Nokia has been collaborating with KDE developers to build a browser for some of their other embeded systems, such as the Series 60 Smartphone. Nokia engineers have stated that KHTML is more resourceful than Gecko, has a cleaner architecture, and starts up faster. Also, KHTML is free (LGPL), while Opera is proprietary and therefore probably requires them to pay licensing fees and royalties.

Ars Technica is reporting that Nokia 770 Internet uses Opera, but I would think it's quite possible that Nokia will offer updates containing a KHTML-based browser (some version of Konqueror) soon.

Nokia has been collaborating with KDE developers to build a browser for some of their other embeded systems, such as the Series 60 Smartphone. Nokia engineers have stated that KHTML is more resourceful than Gecko, has a cleaner architecture, and starts up faster. Also, KHTML is free (LGPL), while Opera is proprietary and therefore probably requires them to pay licensing fees and royalties.

The KDE Project announces KDE.in.

This is a direct outcome of the the recently concluded FOSS.IN/2005 conference.

Draw your own conclusion ;-)

Kde India Announcement

My stereo isn't in the same room as my main listening speakers. I have the stereo downstairs in the family room. Upstairs in the living room I have a pair of (reasonably high quality) bookshelf speakers mounted on the wall and a subwoofer. I use a remote repeater to control the volume and selection on the reciever downstairs. So far so good - I can switch sources and control the volume and CD player from upstairs.

So then I have my media computer also downstairs hooked directly to the stereo through the sound card outputs (yes, I know the squeezebox high higher quality outputs, but I can't tell the difference between playing off the computer and a CD, really).

So if I had a squeezebox I couldn't see the display because it has to hook up to the line inputs on the stereo (at least according to the diagram on the web site). So what I would need is a remote head unit that I can put upstairs to control the box hooked up to my stereo. I didn't dig too deep on their web site, but I didn't see it. What I've done to solve this problem myself is to write a web interface to AmaroK so I can control the songs from our ibook that's upstairs. This gives me maximum control for minimum visible equipment.

For listening to the TV, I picked up a Ramsey Electronics FM transmitter and hooked it up to the TV out. Then I tune the radio downstairs and voila! It actually sounds really good - much better than you would think (the FM is not compressed, unlike your basic radio station).

I'm suprised no one has mentioned amaroK. It has a pretty cool built in feature that looks up lyrics, a band's Wikipedia page, and other neat stuff. They just came out with a new version too.

I don't think there is an OS X native version, but it can be compiled with Fink. Other than the fact that you can't buy music I like it better than iTunes.

I find the articles quite well written but for the Macedonian deployment I don't see any positive coming out of it. Sure for Macedonia it might be interesting to get a cheap operating system solution specially now after the years of war and the slowly restructuring of their economy open source might be the right way to go.

But I am not sure whether GNOME is the correct choice for the Schools and the demands and requirements that such schools have. The problem I see is that Darko has a personal preference that he says is GNOME and his decision to deploy the schools is based on is personal preference rather to what might be technological a better choice (summed up).

The problems here is GNOME which from my experience as former contributor is far away from being in a state where it fullfils requirements of the schoolars. Specially in the education sector GNOME lacks a lot of useful software as well as in other areas it lacks completenes of these software.

I think also the reasons brought up like "simplicity" and "cleaness" reminds me of the dozens of marketing announces made by GNOME and sounds more like a programmed opinion rather than a real objective opinion of what exists these days.

If we look over to KDE for a moment then I must say that it has by far more to offer specially for schools and education than GNOME. If we happen to have a look at "kdeedu" for example:

http://edu.kde.org/

Then we see a lot of useful programs specially for kids to learn lessons in vocabular training, in percentage calculation, in function plotting, in geography, or chemical stuff. Please note that this is just a value free comment, because it's urgently required to take the best out of the best (a slogan that I learned from the times where I supported GNOME that it's always important to use the best software existing).

Not just that but I also know that KDE is the by far more feature complete and coherent Desktop to accomplish exactly these needs much better and much more efficient than what GNOME has to offer. It simply works and get the pupils their work done.

And this is by far a reply from my side that is miles away from what I really know about GNOME and what really reflects my very personal opinion. Going into details here would probably generate a flamefest with people again which I am trying to avoid since people are inconvinceable.

Though this said. Darko is quite confident that he can generate new "Developers for GNOME". This is quite a honourable wish but personal own experience for many years with myself as person and many others that I known have proven that "generating new Developers for GNOME" and "have those become part of GNOME and fully accepted" are two pair of shoes and knowing their elbow community of developer proves that this will be getting a really rough task and only leads into frustration.

I also question whether that what gets installed is also that what gets used by the pupils or schools later on. Once their infrastructure is getting better, people start to experiment (even pupils at home). That's how we all learned about Linux and I doubt that the 468 schools and some 182 computer labs continue staying with GNOME once they find themselves trap into many problems that they can not solve. I think from the 5000 Desktops that are planned - only half of them will remain with GNOME (in best). The other half will continue piracing Windows or switch to something else. It's also not clear that this project leads into success since there are two sides of a project. One that was successful and the other that was a mistake and failed. Both valid project with different ending.

By the way, it would have been nice to have an official announcement from them. It would be good to read an independant article about this totally free from any value or personal opinion. It's hard for me as reader to track down whether this is a real project or just a well written marketing writing specially set to show a new chess move in the game for the best Desktop.

Anyone has some independant source to confirm this ?

Both desktop environments appear to have very good internationalization.

For Gnome: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.12/notes/en/rni18.htm l and http://www.gnome.org/i18n/

For KDE: http://i18n.kde.org/stats/gui/stable/toplist.php

So, currently Gnome supports* 43 languages, and KDE supports 23 languages.**

It is not at all obvious to me how KDE's internationalization is so superior. If you could explain your rather blanket statement, I would appreciate it. Otherwise, it seems to me that both desktops have excellent internationalization. Kudos to both KDE and Gnome.

* "supports" defined as at least 80% of strings translated.
** Note: I'm sure KDE will support more languages as their 3.5.1 release comes out: the x.y.1 usually has a lot of attention devoted to translations.

I think the "new package manager every month" people must all still be using redhat 9? I haven't thought about packaging since I switched to a Debian based distro (Ubuntu). The most intresting I've seen lately in packaging is Klik .

The technical stuff: Users were running on ageing Sun hardware with relatively low performance (Blade 1000s, Ultra 60s). The applications they run are technical applications for which ports exist for both Solaris and Linux. The new hardware is high-end HP workstations with more memory and processors than you can shake a stick at, combined with Nvidia FX3000/3400/3450 GFX cards. OS is RedHat 3.0. That was forced upon us by the key application which is only supported on that distribution.

Rationale behind the move: Move to Linux because the applications run faster. That's it.

So what worked well?

The major factor in the success of this rollout was the relatively low degree of change in terms of what was presented to the users. The applications they use were simply ports of the Solaris versions. Nothing new to learn. The only difference is that they work a whole bunch faster. Instantly the user base is won over and there's buy-in.

Another, seemingly small, item was the look of the login screen and the desktop environment on first login. First impressions do matter, and getting this right turned out to be very good PR. As the desktops were deployed, users would crowd round the first of the new systems in their areas and "kick its tyres". People were genuinely interested in what they were seeing, and a buzz spread round quickly. On our feedback forms many commented on how much they liked the new, tricked out, environment. In reality little had changed in terms of usability and people weren't frustrated that they couldn't find their favourite application (or analog, where none existed)

There was a relatively low impact for the support team too. Accustomed to Sun's jumpstart, kickstart is an intuitive and easy mechanism for deploying to a large number of identical desktops very easily. Power on, press F12, and the whole thing is automated from that point onwards.

What didn't work well?

The desktop environment was customised from the standard Redhat KDE login so that the right click menu displays a cascaded list of technical applications. Non-essential stuff was removed. Working out how the KDE menuing system hangs together wasted 2 days of my time. Redhat support were useless and I had to use a combination of strace and the source to prove definitively how it works. My major gripe with this whole process was the total lack of adequate documentation. If you're coming from a commercial Unix vendor's platform you'll be accustomed to good quality documentation that gives you all you need to deploy in a couple of hours. Just compare the CDE guides on docs.sun.com to the KDE manuals on www.kde.org and you will see what I mean. This is a fundamental weakness in the OSS world that must improve before large organisations will consider widescale deployments.

What else?

There was no desire or justification to migrate the backend office applications to the Linux desktop. Don't go there - it's a hiding to nothing. If the rest of your enterprise is using MS Office and Exchange there is no sense in trying to fudge things with OpenOffice or Evolution or their ilk. If you do, you *will* have problems. Somethings just don't work, and the support team don't want to spend the rest eternity trying to figure out why a particularly obtuse Word document with some recondite macro is refusing to display in OpenOffice. So how do those users get their standard office tools? Citrix. It just works. Leave the pain of MS support to the masochists and get on with your day job

Kopete does all this right now, except that for H.323 it calls Gnome-meeting (which is fair, IMHO).

It also does MSN video, and I believe Yahoo video is coming, too. Haven't played with video much, no webcam.

Here's the plugin list, by the way:
http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdenetwork/kope te/plugins.html

Here's the full feature list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopete

Check out the plugin's dialogue.

Standard KDE problem. The functionality is there, just not perfectly documented, and WAY too many dialogues.

http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdenetwork/kope te/plugins.html#plugins-connection-status

Should auto-reconnect, and

http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdenetwork/kope te/plugins.html#plugins-cryptography

Gives you Cryptography.

Not to mention that kopete has video support now. And some other cool stuff like auto-translate through babelfish.

Check out the plugin's dialogue.

Standard KDE problem. The functionality is there, just not perfectly documented, and WAY too many dialogues.

http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdenetwork/kope te/plugins.html#plugins-connection-status

Should auto-reconnect, and

http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdenetwork/kope te/plugins.html#plugins-cryptography

Gives you Cryptography.

Not to mention that kopete has video support now. And some other cool stuff like auto-translate through babelfish.

to be Kopete, for KDE.

http://kopete.kde.org/

It's fast, easy to use, very elegant. It suffer from the same problem most KDE apps have, far too many options, but once you get it setup the way you like it, its fantastic.

Video for Yahoo chat, as well. Jabber, MSN, ICQ, AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo, others that I haven't even heard of.

It's really nice; but only for Linux right now.

I'd start with the following:

• The man pages and info documentation included with any Linux system.
• The Gnome and KDE developer sites. If you're developing commercial software, develop for Gnome and your app will work fine on KDE.
• For specific applications like graphics and audio, you may need to use other libraries (i.e. libsdl and wxWidgets)
• If you have any questions, there is 24/7 live human technical support for application developers on IRC. Don't undervalue this - being able to ask a real human and get an immediate answer is huge. (try asking in irc.freenode.net #linux or #debian for what channel to ask specific questions if you can't figure it out)

Scribus exists for some time now, and still, it was only a few months ago that I heard about it, and only 3 weeks ago that I installed it. And I was absolutely amazed at its quality (and standard support, even the latest pdf specs, including embedded script support!). What OSDL needs is a central place where all the great apps likely to be needed in an enterprise/office environment should be listed. There aren't that many actually, but how many of the respondends who missed PageMaker knew about scribus? Seeing the quality of the app, I was surprised at the lack of marketing/hype this application receives. Even their website ... well, it is not bad, but it isn't good either.

Right now marketing focuses on distributions or tools, and rarely on the application stack (except FF and OO.o). GNOME does a good job at marketing as well. But KDE? They formed a new marketing group only recently, and as they started to look around, they found plenty of examples for KDE use in business, like this one (Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrates 1000 PCs to KDE). Or take a look at this initiave: part 1, part 2.. Or another example here. Quote:

second, i have the inkling that we have a lot of small and medium sized business deployments out there. personally i count anything under 500 seats to be in that umbrella. at the table (which i picked at random) i ate lunch at in munich during trolltech dev days there i found myself sandwiched between two such examples. while eating the rather amazingly good food, i discovered that on my right was a fellow who works for a company that makes linux based satelite t.v. transmission software (sky t.v. is amongst their clientelle) and they use qt for their in-house engineering tools. on my left were three men from a vienese company that writes kde software for a group of five private hospitals. these hospitals all run kde on the desktop and everything from patient records to x-rays is handled on them.

Interestingly, KDE claims Konqueror 3.5 passes Acid2. See http://www.kde.org/announcements/visualguide-3.5.p hp

Well, it appears that Konqueror now passes as well (not too surprising considering that Safari is based on Konqueror's KHTML rendering engine).

http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=Google%20T alk%20support

With the 3.5 release KDE has added "KitchenSync". The original specs for this are highly technical. You may need to watch many hours of HGTV before attempting to use this application. At last, KDE is Komplete!

From http://docs.kde.org/development/en/kdebase/faq/web browser.html :

9.12.

Can Konqueror use user-specified stylesheets, like those in the Firefox adblock extention?

Yes, you can set Konqueror to use any kind of valid css stylesheet to filter webcontent or improve accessibility. From the Konqueror main window simply click Settings->Configure Konqueror... and select Stylesheets. Set the radio button to Use user-defined stylesheet and browse to where the stylesheet you want to use is located. Alternatively, you can select Use accessibility stylesheet defined in "Customize" tab and then set your own options.

An example of css rules that implement ad blocking can be found at: http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/adblock.

Revision 3.4 (2005-01-19)

I believe the main thing keeping people off Kopete in the U.S. is that it does not support group chat in AIM. http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77181

This is strange, because I use Safari, and it does support application/xhtml+xml.

No it doesn't. It doesn't complain when presented with an application/xhtml+xml resource, and it applies some XHTML rules, but it's quite a way from supporting XHTML properly. Look at the Konqueror testcases for examples. Because of this, it doesn't ask for application/xhtml+xml in its Accept header when it's requesting resources from web servers.

I don't think a great way to promote web standards is to have websites break on purpose when they detect browsers they don't like.

That isn't what's happening. The website is correctly detecting that the browser doesn't claim to support XHTML.

For what it's worth, I don't think a great way to promote "web standards" is to claim that your favourite browser conforms to specifications that it doesn't conform to :).

The link to Kopete actually links to Konqy. You want this.

But don't tell anybody!

Copied from here?

SteveM

If you are like me you have hundreds or even thousands of images ever since you got your first camera, some taken with a normal camera other with a digital camera. Through all the years you believed that until eternity you would be able to remember the story behind every single picture, you would be able to remember the names of all the persons on your images, and you would be able to remember the exact date of every single image.

        I personally realized that this was not possible anymore, and especially for my digital images - but also for my paper images - I needed a tool to help me describe my images, and to search in the pile of images. This is exactly what KimDaba is all about.

        With KimDaBa it is today possible for me to find any image I have in less than 5 seconds, let that be an image with a special person, an image from a special place, or even both.

        There is of course no such thing as free lunch - with KimDaBa this means that you have to annotate all your images before you are set. KimDaBa is, however, highly optimized for annotating images, so annotating 100 images in 10 minutes are no way impossible.

There is actually a very good reason for the mac style menus, outlined here http://developer.kde.org/documentation/design/ui/f ittslaw.html. Scroll to "Macintosh-style menus are faster."

Essentially, you compared your preferred way of organizing the desktop with his preferred way of organizing the desktop, and concluded that GNOME is better. Congrats.

You can pretty much configure anything in KDE. You can make it plain and simple (by default, it is pretty plain and simple) - you can even lock it down with kiosk and associated tools (read why the Dutch Record Shop Chain Migrated 1000 desktops to KDE to limit it's functionality to accessing one page on the internet and 4 apps if you wish to. And configuring it is rather easy via kcontrol. When I switched to linux 5 years ago, the first thing I really felt comfortable with was kcontrol. I knew that I can't screw up anything with a desktop config utility, and playing with it for a week or so got me accustomed to using it (of course I tried a few apps as well, but the inevitable "now what" question that comes up after installing a new and different operating system is best answered by providing harmless customization tools. At least, that's a good way for noobs to get confortable. Since than, I spend ~10-30 minutes (depending on the amount of new features) with configuration when a major release happens, and I am really glad that I can customize the hell out of it. I won't use something like parent's desktop, but I'm also glad for his ability to use KDE the way he wants without the need to edit obscure values in the registry or download 3rd party apps to do that more easily ;)

The link for the source and Suse packages didn't get through for some reason.

Also, since I can't find any screenshots anywhere, here is a (highly compressed -- don't kill my server!) screenshot of my own desktop with some of the cool features. You can see that they changed the Plastik window decoration a bit, and added a nifty "Lock/Unlock Panels" menu option to quickly hide and unhide the handles beside each applet. The new pager applet is really cool, with the ability to go transparent and show different program windows (desktop 2 has KPilot running) that you can drag around from desktop to desktop inside the applet!

So far no bugs have cropped up either, which is good. I really suggest you check it out.

Why don't you read about the added features and bugfixes ? There is much more to KDE than just eye candy.

For me, it's very useful to read that client side IMAP filtering is at last beeing added (but still in progress, though), and thus I can use KMail and ditch Thunderbird. However, I've no need to see a screenshot of a dialog box for IMAP filtering rules.

Here ya go, for your pleasure.

Klax

Here's a LiveCD with the new KDE RC on it. Please follow the instructions at the bottom of this page to get the best resolution/quality display of X & KDE.

That's pretty much what anaroK's dynamic mode is trying to do. You pick one track, and it creates a playlist based on the songs you play most, similiar tracks, similiar tempo etc. It's a very useful feature, and although perhaps not quite the same thing as this new invention it is a useful alternative to shuffle mode

I would really love to see Last.fm use it. Then my musicplayer could find music for me and in true amarok-style, it will also search for the album-cover and lyrics.