KDE Development News

This past week, there has been an impressive show of cooperation between the KDE and GNOME projects involving prominent hackers from both camps. The initial subject of discussion was concerning a common network-connection manager that would enable applications to detect whether an internet connection was currently available or not; both projects had already been working on the issue including two independent efforts from KDE developers Bjoern Kahl and Matt Koss. The discussion diverged to the larger issue of making GNOME and KDE play nice together including related CORBA matters. (See also the gnome-kde list.)

KDE Audio Server. Christian Esken has checked in some major changes to the KDE audio server. In addition to supporting direct output to a sound device, the audio server now supports the Enlightened Sound Daemon (used by Enlightenment, GNOME and various other apps) and/or writing directly to a file. The audio server also now works flawlessly with 8 bit samples and does almost as well with 16 bit samples.

Other KDE 2.0 updates. Mario Weilguni is back with an update on animated menus for KDE. There are currently 8 funky effects implemented, including the popular "no effects" option. Daniel M. Duley is adding GTK+ pixmap theme compatibility to the current theme support in KDE 2.0. Please contact him if you have any pointers to a reference for the GTK+ pixmap theme config format.

KDE Linux Packaging Project. The tireless Ivan E. Moore II has made KOffice debian potato packages available. Be warned that KOffice is not yet of release quality and may have certain features disabled due to the fact that it is now based on the ever-changing KDE 2.0 codebase. Ivan also gave us this update on the status of the KDE Linux Packaging Project where he hints of a possible future arrangement with the Linux Mandrake folks. Troy Engel posted this update concerning Red Hat packages.

More KDE Quickies. Martin Jones was quick to respond to a security flaw that was discovered in klock; the latest patch is available here. David Sweet announced a new plotting widget for KDE. Amir Michail has identified typical reuse patterns of the Qt/KDE libraries in the hope that it will be useful to KDE developers.

Troll Tech has released Qt 2.0. Johannes Sixt announced version 0.3.1 of KDbg. Daniel Naber announced version 0.1.2 of kwordnet. As expected, KDE 1.1.2 is now in code freeze.

Martin Konold gave us this report (with this clarification from Matthias Ettrich) on LinuxTag 99; apparently KDE had a rather prominent time at the show. David Faure made his slides for a talk he gave in Japan available. Finally, here's an amusing thread on terminology used in KDE.

Errata. Last week, I incorrectly interpreted one of Stephan Kulow's articles. The article clearly explains certain significant changes in KConfig and has nothing to do with the issue of customizing system kdelnk files as a user. Stephan assures me that the next release of kmenuedit and kpanel will deal with the latter unrelated issue more transparently.

An archive for these KDE devel bits is available. ---- -N.