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Corporate KDE
roomisigloomis writes "This article at CNET shows some headway being made in KDE development with aims at the corporate desktop. It's cool that it's funded by the German government."
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>the great Microsoft apps like Office, IE, and Photoshop
The greatness of IE and Office is highly debatable, and Photoshop isn't even made by MS, you moron.
Ingo Klöcker says,
- 3.1-release-plan.htmln /en/html/index.html
Hi everybody!
The C|Net article claims that "the first elements [of Kroupware] have appeared in the new KDE 3.1"[1]. That's (unfortunately) wrong. As you can check yourself cvs was "frozen for feature commits that are not listed in the planned-feature document"[2] on July 1, 2002 while the Kroupware "project began in September."[1]. So it wasn't possible to include anything from the Kroupware project in KDE 3.1.
In particular the article claims:
"Two elements of the client work are in the new KDE 3.1, released Tuesday: the KMail software can handle encrypted e-mail attachments, and the KOrganizer calendar software can communicate with Exchange 2000 servers."
Both elements are not part of the Kroupware project.
The KMail improvements, i.e. support for PGP/MIME (RFC 3156) and S/MIME, were made by the Ägypten project[3] (which incidentally also was ordered by Germany's agency for information technology security).
The KOrganizer plugin[4] for connections to Microsoft Exchange 2000® servers was written by Jan-Pascal van Best completely independant of the Kroupware project.
Anyway, you can all look forward to KDE 3.2 which will include most (if not all) of the client side elements of the Kroupware project.
Regards,
Ingo
[1] http://news.com.com/2100-1001-982816.html
[2] http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde
[3] http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/index.html
[4] http://korganizer.kde.org/workshops/ExchangePlugi
heh they forgot aetherea
which looks like a nice outlook clone
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Of course, you can have both.
For a little insight on the KDE-Germany connection, here's a snippet from http://ktown.kde.org/~nolden/kde/README, a readme by Ralf Nolden, one of the people responsible for building KDE for debian:
The main reason to set up this repository is, amongst others, that I'm working at credativ GmbH, located in Juelich, Germany since September 2002. We are contracted to set up KDE 3.1 together with the Aegypten project (http://www.gnupg.org/aegypten/) on Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 (woody) by the BSI (Bundesamt fuer Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik), the german governmental agency for security in IT-technology. The Aegypten project itself is a development effort contracted by the BSI to enable governmental authorities to use S/MIME certifications for email communications with KMail and Mutt as email clients. The graphical user interface for Desktop use is the primary goal behind the project. The same is valid for the Kroupware (http://www.kroupware.org) project, wich implements a groupware solution for KDE with two components, the kolab server as the group-ware server component and KMail, KAddressbook and KOrganizer as client-side components. The Kroupware project is currently under development by the according companies and will be merged into KDE 3.2.
The article is wrong: the german government did not fund work on KDE, a t least not directly. A number of companies have been contracted to extend KDE for the government. As the code is GPL, they have to release it to the public.
It is not, since it was contract work. It had to be release since it extended GPL'd software.
It's actually "anybody who speaks German can't be that bad". Geesh.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If you've never used a fully integrated GUI environment, it will be hard to appreciate what KDE is trying to accomplish on the desktop.
KDE's strength is in the integration. KDE is not about being yet another window manager, but was meant as a holistic answer to the desktop problem. A KDE desktop is meant to be a collection of integrated applications with predictable, uniform behavior. You will see the same file dialog (with URLs and bookmarks), print dialog, toolbar editor, font chooser, color picker, help infrastructure, address book, and predictable cut and paste. Sharing of components means familiar behavior throughout, such as the file manager embedded in the file open dialog or the image viewer embedded in the file manager. When you open a file, the dialog remembers the bookmarks and frequently used directories you used in other KDE apps. In other words, the KDE experience provides a uniformity, familiarity and predictability that goes well beyond mere theming or toolkits. This is good for beginners.
What you get when you mix apps is the usual jumble of X apps doing their own thing in their own way. Apps do not remember your favorite colors, your print settings, your favorite directories. It's the familiar X desktop: a Frankenstein collection of apps not quite fitting together. Red Hat 8's superficial skinning does nothing about this. "KDE" is reduced to being an oversized, slow window manager: nothing more. It is not really KDE. Why would anyone want to use that?
I'm under no delusion that KDE is quite there yet. But some day, the major KDE apps will be merely good enough for everyday use. If they are merely adequate, the overall integration will offer a major advantage over non-KDE apps that can put them over the top for all practical purposes.
Another excellent article that includes a tutorial on the new KDE kiosk framework:
http://www.linux-mag.com/2002-11/kde_01.html
That name is just the project name, the server is called Kolab and the client has been named Kontact. Unless I've misunderstood something :)
Kontact is KDE's Evolution. Check the Kontact site which have more info, including screenshots.
Of course, what you say would make a modicum of sense if KDE (or GNOME) had the goal of "put[ting] in place a gigantic, sluggish infrastructure and try to force everything to use the same libraries".
Since they don't, your comment is basically handwaving.
The goal of these desktops is to provide the infrastructure needed to make application development simpler, nicer.
For example: Suppose Quanta was not a KDE application. Now imagine a webmaster wants to use Quanta to edit pages on a website.
Since that is a very necessary feature, Quanta would have to implement some sort of ftp client. And perhaps also a scp/sftp client, a webdav client, and so on for every mechanism it wanted to support.
But... luckily Quanta *is* a KDE app. So, it got all that for free. And if tomorrow someone writes a mechanism to access any other remote site, Quanta will get it too.
Mind you, that is only one example of many, showing how infrastructure is sorely needed. Lack of it leads to poor applications.
There is a project called Kontact that is integrating the user interfaces of the various personal information management tools of KDE (KAddressBook, KMail, KOrganizer, etc.). It is scheduled for official release with KDE 3.2, but they have a release available now!
If you are running the gentoo build of KDE3.1 there is a good reason why the media player(s) don't work. There currently is no updated version of the Xinelibs in portage which is required by KDE3.1 Therefor it has been disabled. (See the ebuild file, or forums.gentoo.org for more info.) I was kinda bummed about this, but look forward to when I can try this functionality out.
A couple of people have said this, but I can't find anything in the GPL that says the code has to be released to the public. It's only if you distribute binaries that you need to also include the code.