The KDE Project announced the availability of KDE 3.1 Beta 1 today. This release, which marks the second test release
of the KDE 3.1 series, offers many improvements and bug fixes over KDE 3.0, which was release in early April. KDE, which stands for K Desktop Environment, is a popular desktop user interface for Linux and UNIX systems.
A story in ComputerWorld talks about TrollTech's upcoming Qt 3.1 beta. Qt is a multi-platform development toolkit made famous by the KDE desktop environment, and more recently, by the Sharp Zaurus PDA. Qt 3.1 gains integration with the Mac Appearance Manager, support for antialiased text, and user settings. OpenGL support has also been greatly improved, with hardware acceleration now in place.
In our review of OEone's HomeBase 1.2 release ( OEone HomeBase Offers Computing, Simplified), we noted that HomeBase was probably the most innovative interface released since the advent of the GUI. OEone HomeBase Desktop is the only package we know of that has pulled off a simplification of the user interface without “dumbing down” the system.
As the economic downturn has taken its toll on GNU/Linux companies, many surviving companies have decided to move away from the desktop market, and focus on the server instead. This escalated to an alarming pace after the death of Eazel, a startup that created the Nautilus file manager, and while the focus-on-server mania has calmed down lately, it is still very much alive. Yet, it seems to me, that focusing on the server will in the end cause these companies to lose not only the desktop, but the server as well.
Philippe Fremy has written a nice piece describing the benefits of the Qt toolkit over Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). For those of you not familar with Qt, it is the toolkit used by the KDE desktop as well as the Qtopia environment featured on the Sharp Zaurus PDA. Qt - unlike MFC - works on Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X (Aqua).
It started seemingly innocuously enough; a letter was received by one member of the KDE development team asking the KDE Project to use RedHat Linux on machines at LWCE and to display RedHat's shadow man logo on those machines. In exchange, the letter from RedHat explained, KDE would “benefit from many valuable marketing benefits in our booth, on our website, and in our newsletter.”
UPDATE (7/30/2002 15:21 and 16:04 EDT): New information from RedHat is available at the bottom of this article.
In an announcement late last week, the Debian Project released its much anticipated Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 distribution. Debian is well known for its high level of stability, as well as powerful package (software) management tools.
In a move anticipated since rumors of talks leaked out last month, MandrakeSoft issued a press release today announcing the availability of PC's at Wal-Mart's internet division with Mandrake Linux preloaded. This move follows Wal-Mart's earlier offering of PC's with LindowsOS pre-installed last month.