gatch writes "theKompany.com released version 1.0 of their cross-platform PIM suite Aethera. KOrganizer is included as a calendar and todo list component. Check out these screenshots. According to Shawn Gordon, theKompany president, 'Actually we are about 2 weeks away from having Aethera work with Kolab [groupware server] - at least that is our sense of it at the moment.' Interesting discussion at KDE.news."

Gianluca Insolvibile writes "I plead guilty: I have always admired Microsoft's COM architecture and the relative simplicity that allows you to reuse already installed components to create even complex programs. And I have always been fascinated by the distributed nature of DCOM, which seemed to me much more graspable than complex monsters like CORBA and J2EE. While looking for equally expressive Open Source component technologies among GNOME and KDE, I was never able to find something fitting my needs (I never got into Bonobo deeply enough, though)." Read on to see how this led Gianluca to Juval Loewy's O'Reilly-published Programming .NET Components, and what he thinks of the book.

ThaReetLad writes "In this article at DevX, Executive Editor A. Russell Jones makes the case for a standardised GUI for Linux. He argues that the promotion of choice of GUI as a positive feature of using Linux is detrimental to its chances of attacking Microsoft's home user monopoly. From the article: '...the open source community must recognize that its primary goals: freedom of choice, freedom of source code, and freedom to alter applications, are not the goals of the average user.' In particular he argues that the choice of desktop between KDE, Gnome, IceWM etc, is not one that a former windows user, even a fairly technically competent one, is going to able to make an informed choice on, and that they should not be forced to make that choice in order to get good use out of any applications they might want to use."

InodoroPereyra writes "This article at The Dot indicates that the KOffice developers decided to switch to the Open Office file format (OASIS) for their next major release. Excellent news both for KOffice, which will benefit from OpenOffice's excellent filters, and for the GNU/Linux Desktop users in general, who will benefit from a unified file format standard between these office suites."

An anonymous reader writes "A presentation given by Matthias Ettrich (director of Qt development, author of LyX, and founder of the KDE project), was given to the annual KDE Developer's Conference in Nove Hardy, Czech Republic. In this presentation, Matthias details what's going to be new in Qt 4.0, which will be used as a base for the next version of KDE after 3.2. Apparently, Qt 4.0 will not only include faster startup times and lighter memory usage, but will have sweeping architectural changes, including a splitting of Qt's GUI classes and non-GUI classes."

feklee writes "The preparations for the rally against software patents on Wednesday are running at full speed. Thanks to announcements in DWN, on KDE, in the Register, and elsewhere, the Online Demo has already more than 600 participants such as Savannah and KDE.de. Now, what about your project?"

valluvar9000 asks: "I recently was able to talk a local secondary school (public) into letting me convert their existing computer systems (not in use and in storage) into a LTSP based setup. They are OK with it as long as it does not cost them money. However the whole solution needs to be deployed in the local language (Tamil) as the medium of instruction is not English. Fortunately Tamil (TSCII & Unicode) support is widely available and quite mature on KDE and GNOME. Can Slashdot help with the selection of good educational tools (Maths, Science, General problem solving and any other topic of interest) that are GUI based (KDE preferably) and internationalizable (this is important)? The target ages are between 6 years to 12 years."

A user writes "Siemens Business Systems, after conducting an extensive survey on non technical workers ("secretaries and managers, not IT people") is predicting that the Linux desktop will capture 20% of the market for desktop computers in large enterprises within the next 5 years. Senior program manager Duncan McNutt, who has overseen Siemens's testing of Linux desktops with users and administrators in enterprise settings, believes that the Ximian desktop and application suite, running on either SuSE or Red Hat, requires two days of training, which is the same as what most enterprises budget for a Windows/MS Office version upgrade. Interestingly, they used Ximian Desktop, instead of KDE, because Gnome, particularly Ximian's version, was "different enough" to set user expectations that the experience would be less like Windows. "

aqsalter writes "Benjamin Reed of Fink fame is calling for help porting KDE to Mac using Qt/Mac. Interested parties should swarm the KDE-Darwin mailing list. KWrite for Mac here we come!"

WHudson writes "Relevantive AG, a German consulting firm who recently completed a study on Linux usability, posted their results in English translation today. Bottom line: Linux nearly as easy to use as Windows XP, but the wording of system and program messages could use some more clarity."

Deusy writes "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba. I've heard a lot of noise with regards to Karamba (and Super Karamba) and a lot of moans from Gnome users about the lack of a Gnome equivalent. Hopefully this should fill that void and more, as one of the developers comments that gDesklets is the product of "months of planning" and describes Karamba as an "ugly hack"."

AstroDrabb writes "Linux, once viewed as an operating system that only computer geeks could appreciate, is today a much more user-friendly software that companies, public administrations and consumers can master almost as easily as Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP."

MmmmJoel writes "After months of delays, and on the heels of OpenGroupware.org, version 1.0 of Kolab has finally been released. Commisioned by the German government to develop a Free Software groupware solution, Kolab is the server piece of Kroupware, which will be integrated into the KDE 3.2 desktop. The Kolab KDE Client was released concurrently at 1.0. This release has been announced on Slashdot before, with an initial planned release for December, 2002."

hpj writes "Trolltech today released QSA. An ECMA based scripting extension to Qt (On which KDE is based) which allows easily adding scripting support to Qt (And in extension KDE applications). It is licensed like Qt under GPL as well as commercial licenses for Windows, Mac and X11 for those GPL is not suitable."

steman writes "On the 10th of July 2003 LinuxTag begins, the largest Linux event in Europe. It will be held in Karlsruhe, Germany. Four days will be packed with up to 20,000 visitors, over 120 exhibitors (including more than 30 Free Software orientated projects such as FFII, BSD, KDE and Debian), coding marathon and many conferences (including specialist business and government conferences). Best of all, in the spirit of the Free Software Movement, it will be largely free (entrance, and many conferences are free)."

prostoalex writes "The low-cost Linux PC market so far dominated by Lindows got a new entrant. According to News.com, Linare plans to sell a $199 no-monitor model with 1GHz VIA CPU, 128MB RAM, 20GB HDD, KDE, OpenOffice. An extra $50 would get the user upgraded to a 2GHz Athlon. Company is located in beautiful Bellevue, WA, which, as News.com noted, is quite close to another Seattle suburb - Redmond, WA."

Programmers and others interested in the GNOME desktop environment gather annually for an event called GU4DEC, the GNOME Users and Developers European Conference. This year, there's extensive live coverage of GU4DEC (currently in progress, at Trinity College, Dublin) on the web, including a growing online photo album, audio recordings and video streams, and presentation materials. (The schedule is handy if you want to follow along.) I hope there's a similar sort of integrated documenation / dissemination from the upcoming KDE developers' conference at the Czech Republic's Nove Hrady.

michae1m writes "Trolltech today announced that Qt/Mac will be released under the GPL (GNU General Public License) at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) 2003 in San Francisco on June 23rd (http://www.trolltech.com/newsroom/announcements/0 0000129.html). For some screenshots check out dot.kde.org/1055852609. This means many X11 Qt apps will be easily rebuilt for OS X without requiring X11, very cool."

Bruha writes "Lewt over at Warcry News Network has written his review for Ximian Desktop 2 targeted at the home users that are looking for a good desktop solution. He mentions this is a good product that could be bundled with Redhat or Mandrake to provide a one stop solution for the desktop user where they dont have to install any extra software to fully surf the web. Which you do with KDE/Gnome installs of most distro's."

Mohammed Al-Sahaf writes "If you use FreeNode, be sure to check out #commits, where they have a bot watching the CVS/Subversion repositories of a number of major Open Source projects (including GNOME, KDE and Python). Its fascinating to be able to watch development as it occurs all over the Open Source world. If you have a project of your own that uses CVS, you can add yourself to the bot. Also, the stats page makes interesting viewing!"