Konqi, the KDE mascot

KDE Project Releases Leading Linux Desktop, Welcomes Enterprises to the Free World

The KDE Project Ships the Third-Generation of the Leading Desktop for Linux/UNIX, Offering Enterprises, Governments, Schools, and Businesses an Outstanding Free and Open Desktop Solution

April 3, 2002 (The INTERNET). The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0, the third generation of KDE, a free and powerful desktop for Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.0 is available in 50 languages and ships with the core KDE libraries, the base desktop environment, an integrated development environment, and hundreds of applications and other desktop enhancements from the other KDE base packages (administration, artwork, development, edutainment, development, games, multimedia, PIM, utilities, and more). A KDE 3 port of the KDE office suite is available. Consistent with KDE's rapid and disciplined development pace, the release of KDE 3.0 includes an impressive catalog of bug fixes, performance enhancements and feature additions.

KDE, including all its libraries and its applications, is available for free under Open Source licenses. KDE can be obtained in source and numerous binary formats from the KDE http servers or ftp mirrors, and can also be obtained on CD-ROM or with any of the major Linux/UNIX systems shipping today. . . .

K Desktop Environment 3.0

Printing. One of the most exciting additions to KDE 3 is the new printing framework, KDEPrint. Its modular design makes it easy to support different printing engines, such as CUPS, LPRng, LPR, LPD or other servers or programs. . . .

Internationalization. KDE 3.0 is shipping in 50 languages and additional languages are expected for the future KDE 3.1 release . . .

Browser. Konqueror is KDE's fifth-generation web browser, file manager and document viewer. The standards-compliant Konqueror has a component-based architecture which combines the features and functionality of Internet Explorer/Netscape Communicator and Windows Explorer.

Konqueror uses KHTML as its rendering engine. KHTML supports the full gamut of current Internet technologies. It supports the scripting language ECMAScript ("JavaScript") as well as Java; the XML 1.0 and HTML 4.0 markup languages; cascading style sheets (CSS-1 and -2); secure communications with SSL; Netscape Communicator plug-ins, including Flash and RealAudio and RealVideo; and, in conjunction with some commercial add-ons, Windows Netscape plugins, including Macromedia Shockwave Player, the QuickTime and Windows Media Player 6.5 multimedia players, and various MS Office document viewers.

"One of the major improvements brought by KDE 3.0 over KDE 2.2 is the JavaScript/DHTML support in Konqueror," stated Dirk Mueller, a KHTML developer and the KDE 3 release coordinator. "The implementation of the DOM model, used for rendering XML and well designed HTML pages, has been much improved. The CSS 1 rendering module support is considered complete. The JavaScript bindings and support is almost complete, faster and more stable than in KDE 2. The resulting improvements in the speed and rendering quality of state of the art web pages is something users will appreciate immediately."

Konqueror's improved JavaScript support is nicely demontrated by the added support for Heirmenus, a sophisticated JavaScript pop-up and drop-down menu system. This release also adds comprehensive SSL certificate and CA management tools, as well as new configuration options for image management and a reimplemented zooming functionality.

File manager. Konqueror is also KDE's file manager. In KDE 3.0, Konqueror can display additional file information - file size, permissions and mimetype-specific information such as ID3 tags for MP3s or comments for JPG images - in a tooltip, and, in appropriate cases, edit this information. Moreover, Konqueror provides audio file "previews" by hovering the mouse over the file's icon. In addition, Konqueror's sidebar now features a media player, to which one can drag audio/video files for quick play.

Email. KMail is KDE's full-featured and user-friendly e-mail client. KMail supports both the popular IMAP and POP3 mail standards. Users can have multiple accounts and multiple identities. Its address book is based on the vCard address book standard, and is shared with the rest of KDE. . .

Office suite. KOffice 1.1.1, a free, integrated office suite which utilizes free and open standards for the component object model, is available for KDE 3.0. All KOffice components are capable of embedding other KOffice components/documents as well as images, support scanning images, provide advanced printing features, use a DOM-compliant XML for their native document format, and provide a DCOP interface for desktop scripting.

Word processing. KWord is a FrameMaker-like word-processing and desktop publishing application ideal for those who need not frequently interchange MS Word documents with others, though this limitation should disappear with the release of KOffice 1.2 in mid-August 2002. It has a frame orientation, making it suitable for simple desktop publishing (DTP). . . .

Spreadsheet. KSpread is a scriptable spreadsheet program which provides both table-oriented sheets and support for complex mathematical formulas and statistics. KSpread's document-level features include templates; multiple tables/sheets per document; headers and footers; comments; and hyperlinks. . . .

Presenter. KPresenter is a presentation application. . . . Besides the capability to generate screen presentations with effects, KPresenter can also generate HTML slide shows or PDF documents with just a few mouse clicks. . . .

In addition to the forgoing components, KOffice 1.1.1 for KDE 3 ships with Kontour (a vector-drawing application); Kivio (a flowchart application); KChart (a chart drawing application); KFormula (a formula editor); Kugar (a tool for generating business quality reports); and filters (for importing documents created by, or exporting documents for use with, other office suites or office programs).

PIM. Calendaring / Group Scheduling. KOrganizer is KDE's calendaring and scheduling program for organizing appointments, todo lists, projects and more. It is an integral part of the KDE PIM suite, . . .

Multimedia. KDE 3 provides a rich set of multimedia tools, from a CD player to a themeable media player for .WAV, .MP3 and OggVorbis audio files and MPEG-1 and DivX video files (Noatun). Noatun features audio effects, a six-band graphic equalizer, a full plugin architecture, network transparency and several skins. With KDE 3.0, Noatun for the first time offers support for Icecast and SHOUTcast digital audio streaming.

KDE 3 also ships aKtion!, a video player for a large number of video formats. . . .

Edutainment. A package with "Edutainment" applications has been added to KDE. It is maintained by the KDE Edutainment Project, which aims to create educational software based around KDE.

The package currently includes: KEduca, an educational project to enable the creation and revision of form-based tests and exams; KGeo, an interactive geometry learning program similar to Euklid(tm); KLettres, an alphabet and sound-recognition game (in French); KStars, a graphical desktop planetarium; KTouch, a program for learning touch typing; and kvoctrain, a foreign language vocabulary trainer. . . .

K Development Environment 3.0

Libraries. KDE 3.0 offers both free and proprietary software developers a mature, powerful and consistent API for rapid application assembly. Chief among these technologies are the Desktop COmmunication Protocol (DCOP), the I/O libraries (KIO), the component object model (KParts), an XML-based GUI class, a standards-compliant HTML rendering engine (KHTML), the multimedia architecture (aRts), the new database classes, and the XML GUI framework. . . .

Installing KDE 3.0 Binary Packages

Binary Packages. Some Linux/UNIX OS vendors have kindly provided binary packages of KDE 3.0 for some versions of their distribution, and in other cases community volunteers have done so. Some of these binary packages are available for free download from KDE's http or ftp mirrors. Additional binary packages, as well as updates to the packages now available, may become available over the coming weeks.

Please note that the KDE Project makes these packages available from the KDE web site as a convenience to KDE users. The KDE Project is not responsible for these packages as they are provided by third parties - typically, but not always, the distributor of the relevant distribution - using tools, compilers, library versions and quality assurance procedures over which the KDE project has no control. If you cannot find a binary package for your OS, or you are displeased with the quality of binary packages available for your system, please read the KDE Binary Package Policy and/or contact your OS vendor.

Library Requirements / Options. The library requirements for a particular binary package vary with the system on which the package was compiled. Please bear in mind that some binary packages may require a newer version of Qt and other libraries than was shipped with the system (e.g., LinuxDistro X.Y may have shipped with Qt-3.0.0 but the packages below may require Qt-3.0.3). For general library requirements for KDE, please see the text at Source Code - Library Requirements below.

Package Locations. At the time of this release, pre-compiled packages are available for:

• Conectiva Linux, 7.0
• FreeBSD, 4.5-STABLE
• Mandrake, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2
• Red Hat, README
• Slackware, 8.0
• SuSE, various for i386, ppc, s390 and Sparc
• Tru64, link
• YellowDog, 2.2

More binary packages will likely become available over the coming days and weeks, so please check back again from time to time.

Compiling KDE 3.0

Library Requirements / Options. KDE 3.0 requires or benefits from the following libraries, most of which should be already installed on your system or available from your OS CD or your vendor's website:

Compiler Requirements. KDE is designed to be cross-platform and therefore supposed to compile with a variety of Linux/UNIX compilers. However, both the set of available compilers as well as KDE is advancing very rapidly, so the ability to compile KDE on various UNIX systems depends on users reporting compile problems with possible fixes to the KDE project.

In addition, C++ support by gcc, the most popular compiler used on GNU/Linux and many traditional UNIX systems, has undergone major improvements. There are many known compile and code generation problems with older gcc/egcs releases, therefore the support for those compilers has been dropped.

In particular, gcc versions earlier than gcc-2.95, such as egcs-1.1.2, gcc-2.8.x or gcc-2.7.x are no longer supported. In addition, some components of KDE 3.0, such as aRts, generally will be incorrectly compiled by unpatched versions of gcc 3.0.x (this problem should be fixed with the release of gcc-3.1). The code generation bug does not lead to a compile failure, but rather just unexpected problems at runtime. While there have been reports of successful KDE compilations with recent versions of the "Red Hat-gcc" 2.96 and gcc-3.1 CVS snapshots, the KDE project at this time continues to recommend the use of gcc-2.95.* for compiling KDE.

Source Code/SRPMs. The complete source code for KDE 3.0 is available for download.

Screenshots. Rob Kaper has produced some Screenshots of KDE 3.0.

Further Information. For further instructions on compiling and installing KDE 3.0, please consult the installation instructions and, if you should encounter compilation difficulties, the KDE Compilation FAQ.