alll about linux

If the Firefox browser were a car, it would be in the garage right now being souped up by an anxious group of gear heads.

When Firefox 3.0 is released later this year, the open-source browser is likely to contain a host of new features, including offline support for Web applications and new bookmark and search features. Mozilla released the second alpha version of Firefox 3.0 earlier this month.

While the final feature set hasn’t been determined, Firefox 3.0 will also contain elements for its 4.0 release and beyond, said Mike Schroepfer, vice president for engineering for Mozilla Corp., during a stop in London on Tuesday. The browser is due out in the second half of the year. >>>>>

Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt toolkit has become the second Patron of KDE. Trolltech itself should not need an introduction, since they have worked together with the KDE project since its inception ten years ago. Knut Yrvin, the community manager for Trolltech points out that “KDE does an excellent job of making UNIX-based desktops easy to use. Trolltech gains from feedback, bug reports and the spread of Qt through the success of KDE“.

Being a Patron of KDE is an ideal way to both support the KDE project and become a more active member of the KDE community. After the inaugural membership of Mark Shuttleworth, Trolltech is the first corporate Patron of KDE.

“Being a Patron of KDE should help KDE when organising developer gatherings and organising the voluntary effort done by thousands of developers”, Yrvin continues. Trolltech’s involvement with KDE is widely-acknowledged, the company providing the Qt toolkit, a high performance, cross-platform developer framework which is distributed as Free Software under the terms of the GPL license.

Patrons of KDE may display the “Patron of KDE” logo on their website and any other material for as long as they are a Patron of KDE and will be listed on the KDE e.V. website, if they so wish. This is the highest level of membership available within KDE e.V., and will allow KDE e.V. to continue its work supporting and maintaining the structures of development.

Of course, aside from financial matters, sponsors of KDE are a vital part of the vibrant community outreach and relations scheme - feedback from all our supporters helps to shape our shared goals and future development.

KDE e.V. wishes to thank all its current supporters, and would like to invite all interested parties to help us continue to serve the KDE community. - kde.news

The Desktop Search in SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 is extremely helpful. However, if you have just copied a whole bunch of files locally, or maybe you just recently added an email account that contains a lot of messages, those items may not appear in your search results until the search engine has had a chance to index the new data. But that means that you just need to wait, right? No. Getting incomplete results from a search tool leads users to mistrust this important productivity feature.

Blog Post

On Friday, the KDE Project released the third in a series of development previews for the upcoming KDE 4.0 release. Dubbed “Kludge,” the 3.80.3 release includes the Sonnet language library, the new Dolphin file manager, and the Solid hardware library.

Packages for Kludge are already available for Kubuntu Edgy and openSUSE, and source is available from the KDE Web site. The release is not meant for end users, but aimed at programmers who want to assist with KDE 4 development, and porting or developing applications to KDE 4. Kludge is still incomplete and seriously buggy, and unlikely to be usable for day-to-day work for some time.

Despite some initial erroneous reports, Dolphin’s appearance does not herald the demise of Konqueror. Konqueror will continue to be available in KDE 4, and Dolphin will be available as a less complex file manager. KDE developer Aaron Seigo corrected the early reports on his blog. “The plan right now is for Dolphin to become the file manager that gets launched from the default panel buttons and by apps requesting to launch a file manager…. Konqueror is a power user’s application that cannot be fully replaced by something like Dolphin (and vice versa). They have different use cases and different target audiences.”

Complete Article

Every once in a while I will be using an application which is unique to KDE and think “Wow this is really neat” or “I don’t know how to live without this tool”. Today that application is KSnapshot.

KSnapshot is a simple screen capture tool that does way more than your every day print screen. As a designer, this tool is essential when I do interface reviews or prepare client briefings. Along with taking screen captures of the entire screen or individual windows, it also allows you to draw and select a region to capture, select a specific windowing element such as a toolbar or menu, and also has options to remove window decorations. You can then choose what you want to do with the image, such as directly saving to file (it auto-increments the previous filename which is nice for interface documentation), copying directly to clipboard (what I used the most for note taking and client briefings), or sending directly to printer (paper copies are good to draw on and take notes).

- via 

openSUSE 10.3 mockups by J.Steiner   …. looking nice, but I prefer blue, even though iguana is green. Especially like the graphics, in combination with font, in boot menu screen.

“We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step towards ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.” In addition: ” Dell recognizes our customers’ desire to have unlimited control over the software on their PC. In fact, today XPS customers can opt-out of almost all preinstalled software. We will be expanding this effort in the coming months.”

The StarOffice 8 Conversion Technology Preview, a plug-in for Microsoft Word 2003 that allows users of Microsoft Word 2003 to read, edit and save to the OpenDocument Format (ODF) is now available.

This initial plug-in application will support the conversion of text documents (.doc/.odt) only and full support of spreadsheet and presentation documents will be available in the final version, expected in April. The converter is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Word users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Word’s documents to and from ODF.

Click here to download the plug-in at no charge.

 More