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 (and improving) 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.