Nat asks: "Here I am, plowing along at work on an ancient machine, and thanking heavens for how much easier Open Source makes my life. In particular, I've ended up settling with KDE and its main tools due to its ability to be configured into a relatively fast and lightweight environment, despite its number of features and useful tricks. I have discovered a good few of those already, but would like to ask you guys for further illumination: what are your favorite KDE tricks?"

mernil writes "BBC Reports "A giant space rock was set to whizz past the Earth on Monday under the close scrutiny of astronomers. The mountain-sized object had been classed as a "potentially hazardous asteroid", but scientists say there was no danger of a collision with Earth. [...] At this time calculations suggested it would be about 268,873 miles (432,709km) from the Earth, only 1.1 times the planet's distance from the Moon."

An anonymous reader writes "Earlier this week Jesse Keating announced the availability of Fedora Core 6 Test 1. New items in FC6T1 include Intel Macintosh support (well, mostly), update notification applet, GNOME 2.15, KDE 3.5.3, and the Fedora Core 6 Extras development repository is already available. With FC6T1's availability, Phoronix has published their own preview of this release. The article is focused on an editorial about changes to come for Fedora Core 6, as well as images from Fedora Core 6 Test 1. The next Fedora Core 6 testing release (Test 2) is due out in July, while the final release is due out this September."

Taran Rampersad writes "Every now and then, someone comes up with a fun title. 'Linux Annoyances for Geeks' is a definitely fun - and accurate - title for this book. While some people have been fiddling with Linux since it first came out, the majority of Linux users haven't been. I started using Linux in the late 90s, and my work schedule didn't allow me to go to meetings, or track down people who knew things. And the first time you do an install on a machine, you may be disconnected from the very information that gets you connected. Been there, done that. So this book attracted me because despite being an advocate of Free Software and Open Source, there are times when I still type very naughty things on the command line. Read the rest of Taran's review.

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet reports on a recent German Linux migration by the tax authority in Lower Saxony which has made the decision to migrate an impressive 12,000 desktops to SuSE Linux using KDE. The project, which is now in process converting 300 desktops daily, moves systems from Solaris x86 version 8, which the organisation has been running since 2002. The migrations are reported as going well thus far. KDE's Kiosk desktop customisation, source code access and licensing costs were cited as key reasons for the decision. Congratulations to all involved, and best of luck going forward with this effort!"

Boudewijn Rempt writes "Amazon's recommendation system recommended me "Open Source Game Development: Qt Games for KDE, PDA's and Windows" when I was looking for an introduction to OpenGL. While it does contain two chapters on OpenGL, there's much, much more. It's not just an introduction to writing open source games, it's a complete introduction to participating in open source projects like KDE." Read the rest of Boudewijn's review.

An anonymous reader writes "After 12 years in business, Trolltech, the company whose founders created KDE, has filed an application for listing on the Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE). From the article: 'The OSE reports receiving the application the following day, and says Trolltech is now subject to disclosure of information requirements. IPO rumors sprang up around Trolltech last Fall, when the company hired Juha Christensen and Tod Nielsen in September, and then added Benoit Schillings and Dr. Karsten Homann in October. The company said in January that it doubled its design wins, among other significant 2005 achievements', particularly in the arena of using Linux as OS to power mobile phones."

UseFree.org writes "The position of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was strengthened today when the free & open source K Desktop Environment (KDE) announced that it has joined the ODF Alliance. KDE developer David Faure has been instrumental in developing the OpenDocument standard, which is already implemented in KOffice, KDE's office suite. Faure says: 'The fact that KOffice provides an independent implementation of the OpenDocument file format, and was able to take part in its specification, proves that OpenDocument is actually a standard, not just a rubber stamp on Sun's OpenOffice file format. What makes an open standard is not merely approval by a committee, but independent implementations.'"

AlanS2002 writes "FreeBSD developer Scott Long is being reported as saying that FreeBSD is quickly approaching feature parity with Linux. Apparently this is being achieved through efforts to more tightly integrate GNOME with FreeBSD, with one of the priorities being to 'GNOME's hardware abstraction layer--which handles hardware-specific code--working with FreeBSD'."

An anonymous reader writes "Linux Devices is reporting on a cool new multimedia technology that's slated to be incuded in KDE 4.0. The two key components are Phonon, a central hardware configuration database said to free multimedia applications from the need to configure hardware, and NMM (network-integrated multimedia middleware), a distributed multimedia architecture whereby multimedia content can be readily shared among networked devices and even 'handed over' from one device to another. Potential NMM applications include networked multimedia home entertainment systems, distributed and parallel media processing applications, distributed streaming servers and services, communication and control systems, and large-scale multimedia installations such as video walls, according to the article, which includes some interesting photos and diagrams. Phonon and NMM will be demonstrated at LinuxTag, May 3-6, in Wiesbaden, Germany."

ingwa writes to tell us that the KOffice team has released version 1.5 which offers, among other things, default OpenDocument file format, new project planning tool KPlato, professional color support and adjustment layers in Krita and the long awaited Kexi 1.0. From the announcement: "KOffice was the first office suite that announced support for OpenDocument and now the second to announce it as the default file format after OpenOffice.org. This makes KOffice a member of a very select group and will lead to new deployment opportunities. Great care has been taken to ensure interoperability with other office software that also use OpenDocument."

Trax88 writes "Open Source Development Labs is previewing work that will attempt to make life easier for software companies by bridging GNOME and KDE. The effort, called Portland Project, began showing its first software tools on in conjunction with this week's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo. Using them, a software company can write a single software package that works using either of the prevailing graphical interfaces. Working with Freedesktop.org on unifying interface issues, they plan to release a beta version of the software in May and version 1.0 in June. Ultimately, advocates hope that it will be part of a larger but separate effort called Linux Standard Base, which is designed to make the operating system easier for software companies to use."

Don Church writes "DesktopBSD is reporting that the 1.0 Final of DesktopBSD was released today for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures. This cutting edge FreeBSD derivative now includes KDE 3.5.1 and a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices. The DVD release even includes Amarok, Firefox and other popular software ready to go. They are offering downloads via several mirrors or the official torrent."

At the beginning of this month we sent your questions to Isam Bayazidi of Amman, Jordan. He's a Slashdot reader, founder of the Jordan Planet blogging community, and (I know this from personal experience) knows the best places to buy discount-priced computer components in his home town. Enjoy!

carlmenezes writes "Screenshots of the upcoming and much talked about KDE 4 have appeared at Planet Diaz. They include screenshots of the control panel, system tray, tabbed views, music and mail views, plus a mockup or two. I don't know what the Gnome guys are up to, but KDE is starting to look seriously cool."

irabinovitch writes "The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) has announced that Peter Quinn, former CIO of Massachusetts, will keynote at the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo. Quinn's keynote will be the opening presentation at SCALE's Workshop on the OpenDocument Format in Government Organizations. There will be over 30 presentations at SCALE 4x including Chris Dibona (Google), Aaron Seigo (KDE) and Matt Asay (Alfresco)"

irabinovitch writes "Aaron Seigo will be presenting at SCALE 4x, the 2006 Southern California Linux Expo on February 11-12 in Los Angeles. His presentation will cover the next KDE release and how the Plasma project is looking to reinvigorate the desktop experience by centering the desktop on workflow-centric interfaces. Additionally KDE will have a booth on the expo hall floor."

sayanchak writes "An incorrect bounds check has been discovered in kjs, the JavaScript interpreter engine used by Konqueror and other parts of KDE, that allows a heap based buffer overflow when decoding specially crafted UTF-8 encoded URI sequences. It might allow malicious Javascript code to perform a heap overflow and crash Konqueror or even execute arbitrary code. Source diff patches for KDE 3.2.0 - 3.3.2 and KDE 3.4.0 - 3.5.0 are available."

An anonymous reader writes "The most polished Yellow Dog Linux has been released with the usual distribution updates such as kernel 2.6.15-rc5, KDE 3.4.2, GNOME 2.12.1, and GCC 3.4.4 as well as support for new hardware such as new PowerBooks and preliminary support Dual and Quad-core G5s. Other new features include firewire drive installation and booting, PCMCIA modem and cellphone card support, and Atheros wifi card support."

Ryan writes to tell us Applexnet is reporting that Zack Rusin, a lead developer of KDE, has confirmed that KDE 4 will be able to run and display Dashboard widgets similar to Mac OS X 10.4. From the article: "Basically, this means that a layer (similar in some ways to layers in Adobe Photoshop) in the KDE desktop could function the same way that Dashboard does in Mac OS X. Widgets themselves are not inherently difficult to write nor properly interpret, since they are usually just HTML and Javascript (although Cocoa code can be included, the developer's skills permitting). Furthermore, since Konqueror and Safari share very nearly the same rendering engine, KHTML and WebKit, this too will simplify the process."