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Because of KDE's excellent KParts mechanisms, and goal of reusing the existing applications for the most part (with better communication and integratoin between them), the project is moving fast despite the lack of recent "news" on the site above. It all exists within the KDE PIM package.

Still too many gratiutous K's in the names for my tastes... but at least it's a lot better than the working name given to the project.

Because of KDE's excellent KParts mechanisms, and goal of reusing the existing applications for the most part (with better communication and integratoin between them), the project is moving fast despite the lack of recent "news" on the site above. It all exists within the KDE PIM package.

Still too many gratiutous K's in the names for my tastes... but at least it's a lot better than the working name given to the project.

The name "Kroupware" was invented by some Germans who didn't know the meaning of "kroup", as the project is paid for by the German gouvernment. There was protest in the KDE project against the name, but they had already set up the website and announced it. The server itself is called Kolab, the applications "Kolab clients", so it shouldn't have been a problem to quickly rid of the strange name, but it seems the developers were rather caring about functionality and keeping their contract with the German gouvernment than about promotion to third parties.

Look here, about halfway down the page for the line to add to your sources.list to install KDE 3.1.2 for Debian stable.

One could make the leap to believe that this means companies will embrace free, open source! software. Maybe. Or one could look deeper and see that companies are looking to standardize - something that open source software doesn't seem to doing.

There may be places in businesses that open source software will be able to make good progress in - I hope so - but it reads like IT managers are looking to the old standards (IBM, Microsoft, SAP, etc.) for the near-term fixes that they need and any new, whizbang ideas (e.g. wi-fi) will be met with strong resistance...

• Pentium 4 2.8GHz with HyperThreading (2 CPUs in 1): $266.00
• Asus P4C800 motherboard & 800MHz frontside bus: $190
• 512MB 5ns RAM: $89.99
• Enlight case: $59.00
• ATI Radeon 9600 AGP 8x 128MB video: $178.00
• Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM hard drive: $108.00
• Generic DVD drive: ~$30
• Can of metallic blue spray-paint to personalise the case: $5
• FreeBSD 5.1: $free

Well according to this page, their email client is KMail, the increasingly popular Outlook -styled-email.

While I applaud their efforts, and I am sure I am nit-picking, wouldn't it be like a Eudora-styled-email-client, or at least an Outlook Express-styled-email-client? I mean Outlook is more like a complete Personal Information Manager (PIM), for better or worse...

KDE discussion of Safari

QtJava
ScribbleWindow.java example

It also work on Windows.

Wow, you know -- I had *exactly* the opposite experience!

I bought a G4, installed OSX on it.. and ran it like that until -- lo-and-behold -- I got a chance to see a friend's Debian box. All tricked out w/ latest KDE, the apt-get pleasure of just about everything i need... I instantly trashed the OSX and put Debian on it for good.

Im not looking back, I cant even imagine how Apple is keeping up! Im looking forward to the next KDE release!

I also disagree that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. However, if your basis for "ready for the desktop" is a "consistent" UI then please, leave me out. I want consistancy like I want the clap.

Linux's many UI's could easily be described as overwhelming, and are definely inconsistant with each other. But I consider at least 3 UI's superior to OS X's Aqua. They are (in order or superiority); Enlightenment, gnome, and kde.

I would also like to discuss, not to flame, the claim that OS X is "smooth". I have used OS X. I have a G4 running 10.2 on my desk as I type this. I respect the OS and the steps Apple has taken to solidify it's OS offering. I would say OS X is a usable operating system, and that it's options and use are definetly simple. Not intuitive, but simple. I would next say that the interface is attractive. However, XP was attractive for the first month I had it. Now it's old, boring, bland. At least in XP I can change the color of my windows (blah). How can I do this in OS X? Can it even be done? I've seen at least 50 different OS X users, many of whom are "zealots" for Apple. None of these OS X desktops have looked any different, except for the backgrounds and the order of the icons. Oh, and the hard drive icon, thrill.

In summary, OS X is slick and beautiful, but I need variety. My desktop now is enlightenment, and with a middle click and a selection of a menu item, looks exactly like the OS X desktop. I'm sick of it. I want a new one. I am completely blown away that no graphics designer wants to overhaul his desktop's look and feel. I'm good friends with several graphic artists all of whom are mac zealots. None of them have the foggiest idea how to change my desktop. None of them have anything to constructive to say about the useability of the OS X desktop.

Linux will absorb OS X users on the desktop. But, and more importantly, Linux will take over the desktop from Microsoft. It will take a few years. But Redmond knows it, and they're scared, and they're showing it.

Adobe could not be cool with a long tradition of GNU tools using mangled names of products for their GNU "clones."

Just a few:
Linux ~= Unix - Unix was a mangled name for Multix, btw.
gawk ~= awk - There are so many similarly-named command-line utilities that Stallman had a hand in that I don't dare try to list them. I think most of them even kept the names of the original Unix programs with little/no hassle.
KOffice ~= M$ Office - This is the suite that KIllustrator/Kugar belongs to. Boy, "office" is a word about as worthy of trademark as "illustrator." Wait, was that Microsoft being tolerant of trademarks!? I think so. Adobe is more viscious that M$?
KWord ~= M$ Word - more from KOffice suite.
Kivio ~= M$ Visio - KOffice suite again.
mrproject ~= M$ Project
AbiWord ~= M$ Word
KTron ~= Tron (the movie) - KDE group again. Threw this package in there to show that even the MPAA and Disney are tolerant (but not in all cases). Then again, Tron 2.0 is coming up, so maybe attention will come back.

I disagree with the evolution evaluation. As others have said, evolution's too big, too dependent on library hell. I'd put my money on apple using part, or all of kroupware/kolab, at least as a backend, as it seems to offer the benefits of outlook, without the proprietary nature of said product, and is already pretty well polished.

AFAIK KHTML isn't a proprietary solution

Agreed. You can also take a look at a couple of my projects - wvWare and AbiWord </shameless-plug>, KWord, or any one of a number of similar products.

[abiword on unix]
AbiWord --print=file.ps file.doc
ps2pdf file.ps

KOffice 1.3 has a similar --print command-line argument.

[abiword on win32 - follow the instructions in the parent post. it'll work for abi or any other win32 program too]

[wv anywhere]
wvPDF file.pdf file.doc

Both run well on Win32, OSX, Unix, QNX, and BeOS, which is a few more platforms than OO can currently boast. wvWare will even run on OS/390 and OS/2 with a little tweaking. Plus both can be run non-interactively from a command line or similar without a dedicated X connection, which is useful for server environments.

Most people don't know (or have forgotten) that OpenOffice isn't the only fee software office suite out there, nor is it necessarily the best one for all cases. It is a good one though, and do wish them continued success.

Dom

As the release notes state, FreeBSD 5.1 includes the latest stable releases of GNOME and KDE, 2.2.1 and 3.1.2 respectively.

Getting FreeBSD 5.1 would be a great way to easily get the latest stable versions of these desktop environments as they were intended to be (without all the distribution-specific customizations made by Red Hat, SuSE, and so on).

Granted, you could also use Gentoo current or Debian unstable, but FreeBSD 5.1 is likely to be more stable (in the sense of not frequently changing) and you can get it on CD.

This release is in memory of Alan Eldridge.

This is an example of where free software is certainly ahead of the commercial equivalents. Both Kopete and Gaim have had options to encrypt using PGP for quite some time. (Gaim for significantly longer, iirc)

By delegating the authentication and validation to PGP, they are potentially as-secure-as PGP. By doing in-house certification, ala. Trillian & AIM, the identification and encryption is an internal mechanism, and I would argue (successfully) that it is more difficult to prove its potential to be secure.

Not only does open source appear to have the feature first, it seems to do it provably better.

audiocd:/ so how is this easier that double clicking your CD drive and having a media player play the music?

Media player doesn't CDDB, rip and encode it for you in a choice of formats. Nor can you drag and drop individual tracks as cdda, WAV, MP3 or Ogg file.

I notice you were silent on fish:// - perhaps you want some more protocols to try? How about rlogin:/host.name.here or rdate:/time.uwa.edu.au ? print:/ or print:/manager take your fancy? No? Try man: and catch you jaw. imap://username@mail.host.name/ and manage your email folders?

The list goes on. Sufficient to say that IE's lunch has been well and truly eaten. (-:

The alternative will need a decent clock

Sure, even older.

When KDE is already on version 3

obviously newer and better.

Why do the old systems go to Europe to die?

Like Linux (Linux is from Finnland and Finnland is in Europe, in case you don't know)
and KDE? (OK, KDE is a desktop environment and no OS, but also a German non-profit organisation)

Mandrake is a French company. SuSE is a French company.

You should get informed.

Well, would you rather try at least 20 choices to find one you like or be stuck with one default that you absolutely don't like.

there should be one, DEFAULT, good looking and very user friendly one out there

There should be a clean, cheap alternative energy to crude oil. There should be a cure for cancer and AIDS and a dozen other ailments. There should be a fridge full o' beer in my garage right now...

But there ain't...

Granted there weren't tons of developers reviewing KDE, but it was the core developers. The people who know the code the best. How is that not a security audit on a large open source project?

Safari for the Mac is one of the fastest and innovative browsers on the market.

Let's give credit where credit is due. Safari on the Mac is not solely an Apple innovation. Safari is the KDE project's Konqueror browser with some tweaks.

And it's not as simple as hardware/software prices/support. There's some critical stuff that cannot and does not show up in the specs, and it's not cheap.
I agree. Perhaps, after all Linux can not seem to run very top-end systems. Worse yet, you will not find it in the enterprise systems As to the Desktop, Well skip that as well

You can solve yesterday's problems on tomorrow's computers quite cheaply.
Same thing here as well (with out the sarcasm). Tomorrow's problems are being solved on todays computers due to their low cost. Otherwise, we would be waiting till the costs of the computers were less than the costs of the problem.

I try to donate every year to different charities like the EFF and others. I'm not wealthy so it usually amounts to ~$300/year. I've never dontated to the FSF, because it is unclear to me where my money is going. I will not give the FSF a dime until until they stop childish behavior such as this, and another reservation I have about donating to the FSF foundation is what projects are funded? Does the FSF fund any "open source" projects? Would projects that compete with GNU/ projects receive any funds?

I have no interest in donating to the FSF if my money is going to be spent telling people how to name their software projects or "educating" people on why the name open source is bad.

This isn't needed anymore.

Actually, this has absolutely nothing to do with pilot-link. It has to do with the way USB on any hardware is handled. You have to make the physical electrical connection between Palm handheld and Cradle before the hardware (your computer) can see the device, map a driver against the device, and allow you to communicate across it.

That being said, the pilot-link maintainer (hey, that's me!) has fixed this in a pseudo-fashion by adding a sleep() loop in the latest CVS code that I can see, which means you can launch pilot-link first, or hit the HotSync button on your Palm/Cradle first, and it will "Just Work".

KDE's Kpilot works like this, Gnome has a similar application too.

Both of these tools, built on top of the libraries provided by pilot-link, provide their own daemon process; kpilotDaemon from KPilot in KDE-land, and gnome-pilot (gpilotd) in GNOME-land, which polls for device creation in /proc, and binds accordingly.

Other than being built upon pilot-link, these applications have nothing whatsoever to do with the pilot-link codebase. This means, for those who don't run GNOME or KDE (a growing percentage from what I understand), this is not an option, so they use pilot-link and J-Pilot (also built upon libraries provided by pilot-link).

I'm sure it's harder to accomplish this for kernel level code (it's primarily OSes being pointed at right here) but you can think everything is working hunkey-dorey and not realize something is going wrong under the covers.

Most errors of this can be found with testing under tools like valgrind or Rational's purify. I'm sure there are others (I've heard of ParaSoft Insure++, ATOM Third Degree, CodeGaurd, and ZeroFault), but the quality of these tools really matters.

The issue is that tiny errors can cause crashes intermittently, and not immediately. For example:
uninitialized memory reads -- usually not a problem, but if this value is ever actually used, it will be.
array bounds reads -- never acceptable, but depending on the structure of memory, may not always cause an immediate crash.
array bounds writes -- like ABRs, may not be immediately fatal, but these are going to crash your code sooner or later.

Since they don't always cause an immediate crash, these errors are likely to creep in to released code without use of one of these tools. And if you want to know why we shouldn't always run programs in an environment that checks these kinds of things, try it once; you'll notice a speed hit of usually an order of magnitude. C/C++ is a perfectly acceptable language -- not all debugging has to be done by the compiler/interpreter or only after you notice a problem.

Anyway, hope that wasn't too pedantic....

KDE and GNOME.

Learn to use cvs, it allows you to keep up with the "new features" at the cost of stabilty.

Read this this and this.

The CVS version of kde is way ahead of gnome, it's just that it's not up to alpha quality yet.

Learn to use cvs, it allows you to keep up with the "new features" at the cost of stabilty.

Read this this and this.

The CVS version of kde is way ahead of gnome, it's just that it's not up to alpha quality yet.

UI wars aside, KDE 3.1.2 still has an obnoxious bug. Please vote and/or comment at the given link.

KDE is IMHO awesome, but its habit of automatically switching focus to error dialogs on another desktop is driving me insane. Especially since, statistics aside, the switcheroo invaribly happens when I'm writing a Slashdot post, and in my furor hit "enter" just as a warning dialog comes up.

--
Just another 2 minutes that I should have been writing my thesis.

The link to the KDE 3.1.2 change log is missing in the story. And for the case you missed it, the KDE 3.1 New Feature Guide and the KDE 3.1 Screenshots are still available.

The link to the KDE 3.1.2 change log is missing in the story. And for the case you missed it, the KDE 3.1 New Feature Guide and the KDE 3.1 Screenshots are still available.

The link to the KDE 3.1.2 change log is missing in the story. And for the case you missed it, the KDE 3.1 New Feature Guide and the KDE 3.1 Screenshots are still available.

Here's the thread on the KDE 3.2 release cycle.

Couldn't find any solid information about the expected release date!

kde 3.2 progress
Given the todo's are about twice the sice of the finished's I'd guess about 3-4 months. (3.1 was released 2 months ago i think...)

KDE has already benefitted from this release!

Did you know that the "q" in qmail stands for "queer"??? That's SO cool!!!

Top results for one-letter google searches as of Sat May 17
a : Apple
b : B'Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the ...
c : CNET.com
d : D-Link Systems, Inc.
e : Welcome to E! Online
f : Welcome to F-Secure, Securing the Mobile Enterprise
g : G*Loomis
h : H-Net, Humanities & Social Sciences Online
i : Yahoo!
j : J-???
k : KDE Homepage - Conquer your Desktop!
l : LEXPRESS.fr : l'info au quotidien. L'actualité économique, ...
m : 3M Worldwide
n : SBC Pacific Bell Knowledge Network Explorer : Online Learning : ...
o : www.oreilly.com -- Welcome to O'Reilly & Associates -- computer ...
p : Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
q : Q4music.com - The World's Greatest Music Magazine Online
s : GNU's Not Unix! - the GNU Project and the Free Software ...
t : AT&T
u : The whatUseek Network
v : Welcome to Bobby WorldWide
w : Welcome to the White House
x : Netscape.com
y : Yahoo!
z : HealthAtoZ - Your Family Health Site

Sink the Galeon, it's no longer January the 6th, the firebird is extinguished, for the Konqueror is here!

Download here

Article on Wikipedia why Mozilla is not suitble for serious use!

What I find interesting on this is that Apple have taken Konqueror embedded and wrapped a Cocoa interface around it. According to the news story you link to, this is a bug not just in Safari but in Konqueror which Safari is based on.

So I've just been to to have a look at the recent news. No mention at all of an SSL bug in konqueror which requires immiediate patching. This makes me wonder - what is the KDE policy on releasing bug fixes like this to their codebase? And it also makes me wonder what Apple's approach to this is. They have given themselves a major headstart by using the Konqueror rendering engine to build a proprietary browser. Have they given their SSL patch back to KDE? Is Safari a codefork or an interrelated project?

How long before K-Team sue KDE for use of the letter "K"? ;-)

This memo demonstrates an important shift in their strategy: they are now in a position where they are competing against Linux on thedesktop, having lost many key battles on the server side. This means that, despite religious crusades and many rifts in the Open Source community, the competition between such projects as KDE, GNOME, and XFree86 has produced better products that are now able to compete on a level playing field with the Windows XP desktop. We know this only because Microsoft said so itself.

Eight years ago when I first started running Linux, I knew it wasn't ready for the desktop. During the internet gold rush of the late 1990s I knew it still wasn't ready for the desktop. But today it is. There is no turning back now - unless Microsoft manages to lock us out of our PCs they will have no chance to reverse the tide, and Windows will lose in the end.

KDE has come a long way in 6.5 years ... if you think keeping up with the Gates' is innovation ... Konquerer looks so much like Explorer is sickening ... This screenshot says it all: kde300-snapshot2-1152x864.jpg

when you open the (k)start menu you get (k)word ... which minimizes to your (k)start bar ... and you better integrate (k)explorer into your (k)file manager ... oh you already did ...

• Total configurability... you can choose anything from wm2 to KDE to act as your environment and at least once, you could make your environment behave in almost any way you wanted (remember dotfiles?)
  
• Nice UI features like focus-follows-mouse, horizontal/vertical maximize, "user placement" of applications (used to always use this in TWM, FVWM, etc.) and so on.
  
• Total network transparency.
  
• Multi-display, Xinerama, multiple-input, etc. etc. etc.
  
• Multiplatform application support (using Basilisk and Crossover, I have Windows applications, Mac OS applications and Linux/Unix applications all on the same desktop).
  

Oh, and BTW, Apple has a definite point here. The difference is that Apple took an unfriendly OS and turned it into a consumer product.

If you really believe in what you wrote:
> It's not just a case of writing something down and say "Agree to it!",
> everything has to be discussed

then your harsh criticism of Mosfet seems very rude and misplaced to me.

He didn't ignore what you call a "spec", and is in fact tagged as a "new draft" and only a
"proposition" on the freedesktop.org page.
On the contrary, he carefully looked at it, and issued very well-founded
arguments (here) as to why he thought it was wrong.

Last time I heard, he was even implementing a full set of useful CLI tools
to back up it's own proposal.
So I'd be very curious to hear why you think this very skilled and talented programmer,
with a huge experience in graphics, is not welcome to change a vapor and PR "draft"
into an effective and sound specification?

If even wannabe spec writers can't stand constructive criticism,
then there's few hope for interoperability indeed...

I'm running KDE 3.1.1 without DRI on a Pentium 2 running at 233MHz with 128MB of RAM.
Overall, I have to say that the speed is okay.
It's not as fast as, say, Windows 98, but it's still useable and sure looks a hell of a lot better.

I was showing off my machine to a Windows-using friend. I hit the power button and he sat there, watching the text fly across the screen. "Does it always take this long to boot up?", he asked. After KDM appeared and I typed in my password we had to endure another long wait as KDE started ITS services.
So, X is fine, but how about better startup times?