KDE Blogs 

Last week new KDE contributor Ivor Hewitt committed the first version of an image blocker for Konqueror which ranked first position in the list of most wanted features at that time. When looking at the next top entries you will perhaps know that many are under development: Bittorrent support in kget is being considered to be added once the kget rewrite to support plugins is finished. Support for removing attachments in KMail is the first TODO of Don Sanders (he is currently busy implementing asynchronous filtering, the most hated bug). The themeable KDM greeter exists already in KDE 3.4 although it doesn't support all GDM elements yet and misses a GUI to set it up (but see KDM Theme Manager). Client side IMAP filtering is also being worked on by Don, a new contributor requested a VCS account to implement ACL support recently, Cervisia is getting Subversion support, smooth scrolling exists in HEAD/trunk and so on. In summary many features which will make many people happy in near-future KDE versions. Read More

Among my other numerous and intricate tasks at work, I also play the temporary role of informatics djin in our research group. I herd machines, mold users (yeah :-| ), tend for software (both sickly commercial licenced stuff and marvelous free gems), test compilers etc. I thus come regularly in contact with absolute new unix users (in the occasion of creating their accounts and guiding them around), that come from 3-4 years of windows history and are cruelly plunged, headfront, into a boiling sea of C++ & g++ & python & Finite Elements & Mathematics & Unix & KDE & XEmacs. People that see a command line for the first time in their life. I have to handhold them during the first days and explain to them why machines don't crash (thus no need to hit the pesky reboot button) and so on. Read More

Tx to a slashdot article about KDE and OpenUsability, I am really confused, perhaps sad. It was the discussion afterwards. I did not know that the world is devided into Gnome and KDE. But if I read (some of) the comments, I get the impression. True, the idea for the OpenUsability project came out of discussions during Nove Hrady two years ago, and many KDE projects do like it and use it, and the OU project learned a lot about potential workflows and how to ease cooperation from it. But, and let me quote: "Now getting usability expert on board to solve these issues sure is the right way and if KDE 3.4 is anything to judge from, there are great things to come for KDE." Hello? Again, anyone who produces free software can and should make use of OpenUsability. Read More

On Wednesday evening I visited the podium discussion for the Open Source Jahrbuch 2005. Afterwards some speakers and visitors moved on to a nearby cafe and I chatted with Oliver Zendel of LinuxTag e.V. and also a bit with Eva Brucherseifer and Jan Mühlig about KDE and Appeal until early Thursday. Read More

Next week, on Wednesday the 18th of May, I will be overseeing a KDE Flamewar (and talking about how to tweak KDE) for the Nottingham Linux Users Group. Come one, come all! Read More

Notice how there isn't a vs in the title? :) Hyatt and Maciej joined us on IRC yesterday, and we had some really good discussions. I might as well also admit that Maciejs comment was true (but out of context). Please notice that that implies we are discussing solutions and a common future. The idea of a common source tree is pretty much abandoned as we have very different goals and requirements, but we are discussing improved cooperation. With Apple just having released Tiger and us preparing for KDE4 we have a unique opportunity for bringing our source trees closer again. Read More

There is a big ballyhoo on Slashdot and many other newssites regarding a "KDE <--> Apple divorce", as well as "Firefox scolding the KDE Team". Let me summarize what happened. The story starts in 2003: Read More

As already pointed out by others, we started porting kdelibs to Qt4. Thanks to the restless work of Maksim, DCOP now compiles and works, at least the client part of it. He managed to restore compatibility with the protocol used in KDE3, so we now have some means of posting stuff between toolkit versions. Read More

Well, I've just got back from London visiting my brother. A note for anyone who plans to visit the Turner Whistler Monet exhibition at Tate Britain - make sure you book. The queues are unbelievable, I've never seen anything like it at a gallery here. Read More

No, clee -- it is old news, very old in fact ;-) And the guy for sure didnt "invent" it. The equipment is too heavy to really carry on your back. It is noisy. And it stinks. I should know -- I actually tried it once. I didnt enjoy it much, though it momentary felt like a cool thing. But to each his own....I like it more without the engine. Just your muscles and the sun, baby. Read More