Slashdot Mirror

Many users wrote to alert us that KDE 4.0 has been released. Here's Computerworld Australia's take on the release KDE 4.0 is based on the Qt4 toolkit, which brings significant enhancements in the way memory is used. "So it ends up making KDE less resource intensive than KDE 3, which is quite an improvement," according to Australian KDE developer Hamish Rodda, who calls the new architecture "future-proof." Computerworld notes that developers are already at work porting the new environment to Windows and the Mac.

Peter writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman and ITWire have praised KDE and KOffice developers for taking a principled stand against OOXML, while raising serious concerns about the GNOME Foundation's decision to give credibility to Microsoft's broken format. This comes on the heels of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's depiction of OOXML as a 'superb standard', and GNOME Foundation director Quim Gil's stonewalling of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis / Theora format on behalf of Nokia. Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?"

Peter writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman and ITWire have praised KDE and KOffice developers for taking a principled stand against OOXML, while raising serious concerns about the GNOME Foundation's decision to give credibility to Microsoft's broken format. This comes on the heels of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's depiction of OOXML as a 'superb standard', and GNOME Foundation director Quim Gil's stonewalling of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis / Theora format on behalf of Nokia. Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?"

VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."

VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."

VincenzoRomano writes "It's official! KDE 4.0 will be released on January 11th of next year. The release itself doesn't sound very firm, as 'the developers are confident to be able to release a more polished and better working KDE' and not the long awaited prime-time release. At the very first Alpha release on march 11th, the release date had been forecasted to October 2007, and then shifted to the end of the year with the second Beta. Despite this, the promises for the fourth version are quite interesting and maybe deserve a 'stay tuned'."

angryfirelord writes "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality. While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase."

angryfirelord writes "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks that the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality. While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE community decided to publish a first release candidate for the KDE 4.0 Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken place all over the KDE codebase."

An anonymous reader writes "After 36 hours of reverse engineering, the method for producing the checksum on new iPods has been discovered." You can also get linux support working if that's what you crave for your shiny new toy.

dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."

dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."

ingwa writes "The KOffice team today released version 1.6 of its office suite. Among other things, this release contains an improved Krita which can now handle color spaces like CMYK. This makes it the only free image editor that can be used in professional pre-press work. Together with the other improvements, this release probably makes it the best free image editor in the world. The release also contains improvements in Kexi, the MS Access like database application, and a new scripting framework which makes it extremely simple to script applications that handle OpenDocument data. With this release KOffice also surpasses OpenOffice.org in some ways, e.g. it handles over 70% of the W3C MathML test suite while Openoffice.org only handles 22%. See the KOffice homepage for more information."

Rob Kaper wrote in to tell us about KDE's 10th anniversary. From the article: "Yesterday at 10:00 AM the president of the KDE e.V. Eva Brucherseifer welcomed the audience of the presentation track at the KDE anniversary event at the Technische Akademie Esslingen (TAE) in Ostfildern near Stuttgart, Germany. Keynote speakers were Matthias Ettrich, founder of the KDE project, as well as Klaus Knopper of Knoppix fame. During their presentations they looked back at KDE's successful past 10 years and they offered their thoughts about the future of KDE and Free Software." Rob adds this thought: "We've come a long way in ten years, but where must we still improve?"

Rich writes "KDE has just released the first developer snapshot of KDE 4. This release isn't for end users, but should help developers who want to begin writing applications for the KDE 4 desktop. This release already includes a new CMake based build system, a change from DCOP to DBUS and of course a port to Qt 4. If you're interested in desktop development, check it out."

Rich writes "KDE has just released the first developer snapshot of KDE 4. This release isn't for end users, but should help developers who want to begin writing applications for the KDE 4 desktop. This release already includes a new CMake based build system, a change from DCOP to DBUS and of course a port to Qt 4. If you're interested in desktop development, check it out."

Rich writes "KDE has just released the first developer snapshot of KDE 4. This release isn't for end users, but should help developers who want to begin writing applications for the KDE 4 desktop. This release already includes a new CMake based build system, a change from DCOP to DBUS and of course a port to Qt 4. If you're interested in desktop development, check it out."

Carewolf writes "While KDE4 is pushing ahead the stable KDE 3.5 branch is also seeing quite some development and new features. Today KDE 3.5.4 was released, with improved removable device support, speed optimization and many bug fixes. Among the bug fixes is of course a fix to layout the new slashdot sidebar properly in Konqueror. The story is also carried on The Dot."

Carewolf writes "While KDE4 is pushing ahead the stable KDE 3.5 branch is also seeing quite some development and new features. Today KDE 3.5.4 was released, with improved removable device support, speed optimization and many bug fixes. Among the bug fixes is of course a fix to layout the new slashdot sidebar properly in Konqueror. The story is also carried on The Dot."

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports on a recent German Linux migration by the tax authority in Lower Saxony which has made the decision to migrate an impressive 12,000 desktops to SuSE Linux using KDE. The project, which is now in process converting 300 desktops daily, moves systems from Solaris x86 version 8, which the organisation has been running since 2002. The migrations are reported as going well thus far. KDE's Kiosk desktop customisation, source code access and licensing costs were cited as key reasons for the decision. Congratulations to all involved, and best of luck going forward with this effort!"

UseFree.org writes "The position of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was strengthened today when the free & open source K Desktop Environment (KDE) announced that it has joined the ODF Alliance. KDE developer David Faure has been instrumental in developing the OpenDocument standard, which is already implemented in KOffice, KDE's office suite. Faure says: 'The fact that KOffice provides an independent implementation of the OpenDocument file format, and was able to take part in its specification, proves that OpenDocument is actually a standard, not just a rubber stamp on Sun's OpenOffice file format. What makes an open standard is not merely approval by a committee, but independent implementations.'"

UseFree.org writes "The position of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was strengthened today when the free & open source K Desktop Environment (KDE) announced that it has joined the ODF Alliance. KDE developer David Faure has been instrumental in developing the OpenDocument standard, which is already implemented in KOffice, KDE's office suite. Faure says: 'The fact that KOffice provides an independent implementation of the OpenDocument file format, and was able to take part in its specification, proves that OpenDocument is actually a standard, not just a rubber stamp on Sun's OpenOffice file format. What makes an open standard is not merely approval by a committee, but independent implementations.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."

sayanchak writes "An incorrect bounds check has been discovered in kjs, the JavaScript interpreter engine used by Konqueror and other parts of KDE, that allows a heap based buffer overflow when decoding specially crafted UTF-8 encoded URI sequences. It might allow malicious Javascript code to perform a heap overflow and crash Konqueror or even execute arbitrary code. Source diff patches for KDE 3.2.0 - 3.3.2 and KDE 3.4.0 - 3.5.0 are available."

sayanchak writes "An incorrect bounds check has been discovered in kjs, the JavaScript interpreter engine used by Konqueror and other parts of KDE, that allows a heap based buffer overflow when decoding specially crafted UTF-8 encoded URI sequences. It might allow malicious Javascript code to perform a heap overflow and crash Konqueror or even execute arbitrary code. Source diff patches for KDE 3.2.0 - 3.3.2 and KDE 3.4.0 - 3.5.0 are available."

sayanchak writes "An incorrect bounds check has been discovered in kjs, the JavaScript interpreter engine used by Konqueror and other parts of KDE, that allows a heap based buffer overflow when decoding specially crafted UTF-8 encoded URI sequences. It might allow malicious Javascript code to perform a heap overflow and crash Konqueror or even execute arbitrary code. Source diff patches for KDE 3.2.0 - 3.3.2 and KDE 3.4.0 - 3.5.0 are available."

cyclop asks: "I am a close friend of a Ph.D. student on human interface usability. She's now working to tailor a KDE-vs-Gnome usability study (a pretty hot topic these days), and I have been called to help, as a long time GNU/Linux desktop user. What kind of advice -- both technical and theoretical -- would you give us on conducting a deep and objective study on the Unix desktop, that can be useful for the developers and the OSS community?" "She has installed GNU/Linux and used both KDE and Gnome to get to know them, while I provided her a number of links on background information and previous usability studies on both DE, and advised her to subscribe to relevant mailing lists of both projects. However, I feel that it's not enough and that there are a lot of potential pitfalls and misconceptions that wait for us, me being a geek and she being a Linux newbie. Moreover, she found that most of the previous studies on the web were quite sloppy, in comparison with common usability research standards."

WhiteFoxBR writes ""The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available." Here a Visual Guide to new features, including build-in ad-block for Konqueror and support for MSN and Yahoo! webcams in Kopete. "

WhiteFoxBR writes ""The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available." Here a Visual Guide to new features, including build-in ad-block for Konqueror and support for MSN and Yahoo! webcams in Kopete. "

WhiteFoxBR writes ""The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available." Here a Visual Guide to new features, including build-in ad-block for Konqueror and support for MSN and Yahoo! webcams in Kopete. "

WhiteFoxBR writes ""The KDE Project is happy to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Many features have been added or refined, making KDE the most complete, stable and integrated free desktop environment available." Here a Visual Guide to new features, including build-in ad-block for Konqueror and support for MSN and Yahoo! webcams in Kopete. "

JRiddell writes "Security developers for the four major browsers recently met together to discuss Web security. The meeting, hosted by Konqueror's George Staikos, looked at future plans to combat the security risks posed by phishing, ageing encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practise. IE 7 is one of the first browsers to implement some of the ideas discussed such as colour coding location bars and an anti-phishing database." From the article: "The first topic and the easiest to agree upon is the weakening state of current crypto standards. With the availability of bot nets and massively distributed computing, current encryption standards are showing their age. Prompted by Opera, we are moving towards the removal of SSLv2 from our browsers. IE will disable SSLv2 in version 7 and it has been completely removed in the KDE 4 source tree already."

IceFox writes "In the past few years many of us have been introduced to a new type of application, the Type Manager. Most of us are familiar with iTunes, but there are many other Type Managers out there that are gaining market share and a rabid fan base of users such as digiKam and amaroK. Type Managers seem to have that magic combinations of features that makes users love them. I have been taken a closer look at the Type Manager, what makes them so usefull, what they really provide for the user and came to some surprising results. After creating a list of all the traits of a Type Manager I was able to define exactly what a file manager should be and discovered that there are in fact many partial Type Managers out there now that implemented only half of what makes up a full Type Manager."

HatofPig writes "The KDE Project has released the first release candidate for KDE 3.5, the last of the 3.x versions. There are many added features and bugfixes such as easier Kicker configuration and many UI tweaks. Get the source, Suse packages, or packages for Kubuntu and start filing bug reports today!"

HatofPig writes "The KDE Project has released the first release candidate for KDE 3.5, the last of the 3.x versions. There are many added features and bugfixes such as easier Kicker configuration and many UI tweaks. Get the source, Suse packages, or packages for Kubuntu and start filing bug reports today!"

HatofPig writes "The KDE Project has released the first release candidate for KDE 3.5, the last of the 3.x versions. There are many added features and bugfixes such as easier Kicker configuration and many UI tweaks. Get the source, Suse packages, or packages for Kubuntu and start filing bug reports today!"

Rich writes "KDE could soon be making its way into your mobile phone. At aKademy in August David Carson and Deepika Chauhan from Nokia presented the work they've done in integrating KDE components into the latest version of the company's mobile phone software. Philip Rodrigues discusses this work with them on dot.kde.org."

HatofPig writes "As the dust settles from aKademy 2005, the annual KDE conference, it's a good time to take a look at what the KDE developers are working on. Though KDE 3.5 isn't even out yet, developers are already working on KDE 4. Plenty of work has already gone into porting existing code to Qt4, the GUI toolkit upon which KDE is based, and KDE developers are working on projects that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works."

danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."

danimo writes "In response to his letter to the Massachusetts administration, the KOffice team has written an open letter to Microsoft manager Alan Yates. It clarifies some false claims that Yates made, such as KOffice, StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being one codebase and that OpenDocument was thus never a real standard. Massachusetts has meanwhile adopted OpenDocument."

christchurch writes "The KDE Project has announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5 Beta 1, dubbed "Kanzler". This will be the last major release in the KDE 3 series. Qt 3.3.5 was released too late to adapt to it and it shows some fundamental compilation problems. We had a preview of KDE 3.5 two months ago."

corso64 writes "Ohio Linux Fest 2005, a free conference/event for Linux and OSS enthusiasts, looks to be every bit as good, if not better than Ohio Linux Fest 2004. Last year, IBM, Novell, Apache, Beowulf, Mozilla, along with Jon "Maddog" Hall made Ohio Linux Festival 2004 a huge success along with tons of swag, freebies, and door prizes (including a Linus-autographed cdrom of the original source release of Linux). This year IBM, Novell, Apache, Digium, KDE and others will be doing sessions on Asterisk, KDE, Digital Forensics,Unified Threat Management, Ubuntu, Server Farms and lots of other topics. Check it out this October 1st!"

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Eric Seidel, Apple WebCore developer, Safari may soon have 'experimental SVG support.' He ported KDE's new DOM architecture KDOM as well as their Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation KSVG2 and render tree library KCanvas to WebCore. A new section devoted to SVG is also up on the WebCore site. Does this all mean that SVG will now go mainstream, finally?"

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Eric Seidel, Apple WebCore developer, Safari may soon have 'experimental SVG support.' He ported KDE's new DOM architecture KDOM as well as their Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation KSVG2 and render tree library KCanvas to WebCore. A new section devoted to SVG is also up on the WebCore site. Does this all mean that SVG will now go mainstream, finally?"

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Eric Seidel, Apple WebCore developer, Safari may soon have 'experimental SVG support.' He ported KDE's new DOM architecture KDOM as well as their Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation KSVG2 and render tree library KCanvas to WebCore. A new section devoted to SVG is also up on the WebCore site. Does this all mean that SVG will now go mainstream, finally?"

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Eric Seidel, Apple WebCore developer, Safari may soon have 'experimental SVG support.' He ported KDE's new DOM architecture KDOM as well as their Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) implementation KSVG2 and render tree library KCanvas to WebCore. A new section devoted to SVG is also up on the WebCore site. Does this all mean that SVG will now go mainstream, finally?"

Bill Kendrick writes "Back in January, ZDNet reported that the city of Vienna, Austria was looking to move at least a portion of its desktops to Linux. Well, it looks like it happened (in German; use the fish). Their official distro is based on Debian with KDE, and is called WEINUX." Update: 07/06 12:49 GMT by T : Several readers wrote to correct the spelling here: the correct name of the distro is "WIENUX."

lypanov writes "Trolltech has released Qt 4.0 both under commercial and GPL licenses for X11, Mac OS X and MS Windows. It is the first time that a MS Windows GPL edition is available. To celebrate the release Trolltech employees have created a song and a music video (Bittorrent download, Ogg Theora version). Read the Qt 4 Overview and the online Qt Reference Documentation for more information. You can download Qt from ftp.trolltech.com or from one of its mirrors. Work on KDE 4 has already started with making a development branch of KDE compile and run with Qt 4."

BonoLeBonobo writes "Xorg is going to include a new acceleration architecture which will help desktops to have better eye-candy effects thanks to a better XRender, thus composite, acceleration. Developped by Zack Rusin, a KDE and Qt developper, this new feature should be present in Xorg in September. Porting the existing drivers to this new acceleration architecture should be easy."

eean writes "As reported by KDE Dot News, today Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced the beginning of a cooperation between Wikimedia and the KDE project at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the first applications, like the media player amaroK, start to integrate Wikipedia content the idea is to create a webservice API to access the information from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary."

eean writes "As reported by KDE Dot News, today Jimmy Wales, chairman of the Wikimedia Foundation, announced the beginning of a cooperation between Wikimedia and the KDE project at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, Germany. As the first applications, like the media player amaroK, start to integrate Wikipedia content the idea is to create a webservice API to access the information from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia or Wiktionary."