DATELINE APRIL 3, 2002

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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.

"More and more pieces have come together for creating a viable Linux desktop," stated Bernd Kosch, Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Alliances at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. "KDE 3 is an important step forward towards this goal since it will make it easier for ISVs to port to the Linux/KDE platform. We see increasing interest in Linux and KDE and we appreciate the excellent achievements of the development team."

"In response to customer demand, we have made KDE the default desktop environment in our Turbolinux Workstation product," said Dino Brusco, VP of Marketing at Turbolinux Inc. "Our customers really appreciate the features and stability that KDE provides and we will be offering this latest version of KDE in future releases of our Turbolinux Workstation product."

"We are very impressed with the design and performance and productivity boosts KDE 3.0 provides for Linux desktop computing," said Carsten Fischer, SuSE Linux Product Manager. "KDE 3 is perfectly aligned with our strategy to provide our users with simple but powerful tools to perform their daily tasks with Linux, and we are very pleased to ship KDE 3 in our new 8.0 release later this month."

"KDE systems - combined with GNU/Linux or a UNIX system - offer a compelling solution for enterprises which desire to realize substantial savings in their IT budgets, and comes at an opportune time in light of current economic conditions and runaway licensing fee inflation," added Andreas Pour, Chairman of the KDE League. "KDE enables enterprises, governments, schools, retail outlets, charities and other businesses to shed themselves of a substantial portion of maddening licensing fees, restrictions and audits. Essentially, I guess you could say that KDE is opening the gates to freedom for the enterprise."

More information about using KDE systems in an enterprise environment is available at the KDE League website.

KDE 2 applications will work with KDE 3 if the KDE 2 libraries are present. Many KDE 2 applications have already been ported to KDE 3, and porting to the new framework is mostly straight-forward.

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.

The framework consists of a print command/dialog; a printing manager; a job viewer for queue control and management; a Command Editor for cascading a series of external print job filters such as enscript, a2ps and pamphlet and providing the GUI elements to configure these filters; a wizard for auto-detecting and installing new printers; and a CUPS configuration tool.

In conjunction with CUPS, KDEPrint can now manage an elaborate enterprise networked printing system. The new features include complete administrative control over multiple print queues and the queued jobs, drag'n'drop printing, print job scheduling, print job prioritization, billing and accounting support, print queue migration with possible adaptation of the print settings to the new printer's capabilities, per-printer print quotas, per-user print authorization and printer list filtering for restricting the printers which are listed in individual users' printer selection dialog.

As KDEPrint provides a command-line interface, the framework, including the GUI configuration elements, are accessible by any non-KDE application which permits users to configure a printing command, such as StarOffice, OpenOffice, WordPerfect 2000, Netscape, Mozilla, Galeon, Acrobat Reader, gv and many other applications.

Internationalization. KDE 3.0 is shipping in 50 languages and additional languages are expected for the future KDE 3.1 release. All speakers of yet unsupported languages are encouraged to translate KDE into their native language using KDE's advanced translation tools, without the need for any programming skills. Please visit the KDE i18n server for details and coordination.

KDE's impressive internationalization is largely possible due to its use of Unicode (including Unicode 3) throughout its libraries. In addition, KDE provides support for "right-to-left" languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. And multiple font encodings and directions can be displayed in the same document, even to a certain extent when no Unicode fonts are available.

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.

Its extensive message management capabilities include powerful filtering, background message sending/receiving (including new, fast POP3 message pipelining), selective message retrieval from POP3 servers using the powerful new filter mechanism on the message headers, fast IMAP header retrieval (new), nested mail folders, drag'n'drop organization of mails and smart mailing-list folders. Its powerful email handling includes support for reading HTML emails, message sorting, inline attachments, auto-email-address completion, distribution lists and aliases (new), and the ability to import existing mail folders from various popular mail agents. Its user-friendly mail editor offers spell-checking, undo/redo, searching, and (new) improved auto-selection of suitable charsets and encodings for messages.

For protecting the privacy of emails, KMail supports OpenPGP encryption via PGP and GnuPG, including automatic encryption of outgoing messages whenever possible ("opportunistic encryption") (new). In addition, KMail supports SLS/TLS for accessing POP3 or IMAP4 mail servers and SMTP and DIGEST-MD5 authentication, most of which can be auto-configured by KMail (new). The KDE Project is proud that the federal government of Germany has sponsored KMail to participate in Sphinx, its project to provide secure email facilities.

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).

Paragraph style settings include borders, alignment, spacing, indentation, bullet points, tab stops, page breaks, and font type, style, color and size. KWord provides a stylist to edit, add, remove and update styles, and ships a number of predefined styles.

Page-level features include multiple columns per page, headers and footers (including different first page headers/footers) and numerous preset as well as custom page sizes.

Document features include tables, embedding of text frames, images and clip-art (.WMF files) as well as other KOffice components; templates; auto-generation of table of contents; auto-correction and spell checking; chapter numbering; and document variables, such as page number, company name, user name, document summary, date and time or a custom variable.

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.

KSpread also provides powerful formula support, including over 100 formulas (such as standard deviation, variance and present value of annuities); sorting; and series (days of week, months of year, numbers, etc.).

Its table/cell capabilities include cell data validity checking with configurable warnings/actions; conditional coloring of cells; multiple chart formats for graphically displaying data; row and column customization (size, show/hide, font type, style and size, etc.); and cell customization (data/number format, precision, border, alignment, rotation, background color and pattern, font type, style and size, etc.).

Presenter. KPresenter is a presentation application. It provides basic operations such as inserting and editing rich text (with bullet points, indentation, spacing, colors, fonts, etc.); embedding images and clip-art (.WMF files); and auto-forms. KPresenter can set many object properties, such as background, gradient, pen, shadow, rotation and object-specific settings; manipulate objects, such as resizing, moving, lowering and raising; group and ungroup objects; and assign effects for animating objects or changing slides.

On the document level, KPresenter supports templates; headers and footers; advanced undo/redo; configuring the slide backgrounds (color, gradients, pictures, clip-art, etc.). It also provides a Presentations Structure Viewer.

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, which aims to be a complete solution for organizing your personal data. KOrganizer supports the two dominant standards for storing and exchanging calendar data, vCalendar and iCalendar.

The major new feature in this release is support for group scheduling according to the iTIP standard. This addition supports appointment sharing, meeting requests, responses to meeting requests, and more. The group scheduling is based on a peer-to-peer architecture using email as the communication medium. It interoperates with other scheduling applications implementing the iTIP standard, such as Evolution or Outlook.

KOrganizer 3.0 also has a new plugin interface for extending KOrganizer with additional date based information like holidays or new views on the calendar data like the project view, permits pinning contacts to appointments and tasks and provides an innovative way to indicate the current date and time in the agenda views ("Marcus Bains Line").

Address book. This release introduces a new KDE address book library which provides a central address book to all KDE applications. The new library is based on the vCard standard and has provisions for being extended by additional backends like LDAP or database servers.

Reminders. KAlarm is a new application in the KDE 3.0 version of KDE PIM. It allows to quickly setup reminders when the full functionality of a scheduling program isn't needed. KAlarm shares the alarm daemon with KOrganizer.

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.

File, document and data access. KDE provides a network-transparent file, document and network protocol access architecture using the KIOSlave I/O objects. When a new KIOSlave is "dropped in" a system its services are automatically available to all KDE-compliant applications. This modular, plug-in nature of KDE's data architecture makes it simple to add additional protocols (such as IPX) to all of KDE.

A large number of protocols have already been implemented, from HTTP, SFTP/FTP, telnet/SSH, POP/IMAP, NFS/SMB/NetBIOS, LDAP, WebDAV (new) and local files to man and info pages, SQL queries, audio CDs, digital cameras, PDAs and even shell commands. All requests can be bookmarked for simple and quick retrieval of often-accessed data.

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.

KDE Kiosk. Some environments, such as kiosks, Internet cafes and enterprise deployments, demand that the user not have full access to all of KDE's capabilities in order to preclude certain undesirable actions. To address these needs, the KDE Kiosk project was launched to supplement standard UNIX permissions.

KDE 3.0 gives birth to the new lockdown framework, which is essentially a permissions-based system for altering application configuration options. The kiosk framework supplements KDE's configuration framework with a simple application API which applications can query to test authorization for certain operations.

Both the KDE panel and the desktop manager already employ this system, and by the KDE 3.1 release the other major desktop components, such as Konqueror and the Control Center, should also have this technology enabled.

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.

I/O and Virtual Filesystems. KIO implements application I/O using KIOSlaves running as a separate process, thereby enabling a non-blocking GUI without the use of threads. The class is network and protocol transparent and hence can be seamlessly used to access data using the whole gamut of data formats and protocols provided by the installed KIOSlaves. KIO also implements a trader which can locate handlers for specified mimetypes; these handlers can then be embedded within the requesting application using the KParts technology.

IPC. DCOP is a client-to-client communications protocol intermediated by a server over the X11 ICE library. The protocol supports both message passing and remote procedure calls using an XML-RPC to DCOP "gateway". KDE 3 greatly expands on DCOP usage and the base KDE applications expose substantial functionality for other applications to exploit. DCOP bindings for C, C++ and Python, as well as experimental Java bindings and a shell-script interface, are available.

Components. KParts, KDE 3's proven component object model, handles all aspects of application embedding, such as positioning toolbars and inserting the proper menus when the embedded component is activated or deactivated. KParts can also interface with the KIO trader to locate available handlers for specific mimetypes or services/protocols. This technology is used extensively by KOffice, KHTML and Konqueror.

Web technologies. Konqueror's Internet capabilities are actually derived from KHTML. KHTML is available to all KDE applications, both as a widget and as a KPart component, and to all applications using X11 window reparenting, possibly in conjunction with DCOP.

Multimedia. KDE's multimedia system is based on aRts and includes the players noted in the multimedia summary. ARts is a modular media framework with full streaming support which can create sound and play audio and video. Example modules include filters, mixers and faders, codecs, as well as modules for playing sounds on speakers or streaming sound over a network. With this release, aRts has improved its support for recording, MIDI and ALSA, and added support for IRIX.

Database access. KDE 3 provides a new database-independent API for accessing SQL databases, which provides support for ODBC as well as direct support for Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL databases (custom drivers may be added as well). In addition, new database-aware controls provide automatic synchronization between the GUI and the database.

Dynamic GUI. The XML GUI framework employs XML to create and position menus, toolbars and possibly other aspects of the GUI. This technology offers developers and users the advantage of simplified configuration of these user interface elements across applications, as well as simple and automatic compliance with the KDE Standards and Style Guide irrespective of modifications to the standard.

Regular Expressions. Finally, KDE 3 offers a powerful new regular expression class. While compatible with, and as powerful as, Perl regular expressions, the Qt regular expression classes additionally provide full support for international (Unicode) character sets.

IDE. KDevelop is the leading free Linux IDE with numerous features for rapid application development, including a setup wizard, a GUI dialog builder (with Qt Designer), integrated debugging (optionally using KDbg), project management, documentation and translation facilities (with KBabel), built-in concurrent development support, a console, man page support, syntax highlighting, and a number of new project templates, including KControl modules, Kicker (panel) applets, KIOSlaves, Konqueror plugins and desktop styles.

With KDE 3.0, KDevelop has benefitted from a greatly improved Qt Designer, which now supports interactive construction of the application main windows with menus and tool bars in addition to dialogs. It supports KDE, Qt and custom widgets, including preview, and integrates smoothly into KDevelop.

In addition, KDevelop has added auto-code-completion for class variables, class methods, function arguments and more; full cross-compiling support, with the ability to specify different compilers, compiler flags, target architecture, etc.; and support for Qt/Embedded projects (such as the Zaurus and iPAQ);

Other development tools. Other KDE development tools include:

Language bindings. A number of languages have bindings for KDE. In particular, full C, Objective C, Java and Python bindings are available for KDE 3, which look and behave identically to a C++ version, including in most cases access to the signal/slot architecture. In addition, C# bindings for Qt 3 are available and C# bindings for KDE are planned.

Qt integration. KDE 3 improves the integration of pure Qt applications into KDE by applying the KDE widget style plugins to pure Qt applications. In addition, the Qt style engine has been extended to support a wider range of standard widgets, including progress bars, spin boxes, and table headers. Consequently, developers can benefit from Qt's cross-platform support without sacrificing the KDE "look-and-feel" when running in KDE.

Porting to KDE 3. Since KDE 3 is mostly source compatible with KDE 2, porting applications from KDE 2 to KDE 3 can usually be done with only minor adjustments. Even large and complicated applications have been ported in a matter of just hours. Instructions for porting KDE 2 applications to KDE 3 are available separately for the KDE libraries and the Qt libraries. The entire series of KDE 3.x releases will remain source and binary compatibility with KDE 3.0.

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:

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:

Basic Help/Manuals
  • Qt 3.0.3 (required)
  • an X Server (required) with various optional extensions (XFree86 4.2.x, which includes all the enumerated extensions, is recommended)
    • the RENDER extension for beautiful anti-aliased fonts
    • the DPMS extension Energy Star display power management
    • the Xinerama extension for modern multi-head displays
    • the XVideo extension for enhanced video playback
  • GhostScript for PostScript/PDF support (preferably 6.50 or later)
  • MySQL, PostgreSQL, or unixODBC for database support
  • Berkely DB II is highly recommended for KBabel, the KDE translation tool
  • Python for scripting in some KOffice components
  • Perl for scripting in KSirc and automating updates of configuration files for new releases
  • gzip and bzip2 for data compression
  • TeX and for LaTeX document processing
  • libxml2 >= 2.3.13 and libxslt >= 1.0.7 for reading documentation
  • ht://dig for indexing and searching documentation with KDevelop
 
Hardware Networking
  • CUPS >= 1.1.9 for enhanced printing administration, options and usability
  • gphoto2 >= 2.0.1 devel for accessing images on digital cameras
  • SANE for scanning support
  • lm-sensors for monitoring motherboards
  • mtools for accessing a floppy disk as floppy:/ from Konqueror
  • pppd for dialup networking
  • libsmb for browsing Windows/NetBIOS shares
  • libldap for LDAP address book support
  • FAM for efficient file/directory change notification
 
Browsing/Internet Encryption/Security
  • Java Virtual Machine >= 1.3 for Java applet support
  • a recent version of Lesstif or Motif for Netscape Communicator plugin support
  • WINE for executing certain MS Windows controls and applets
  • Crossover Plugin for Quicktime, Shockwave Director, Windows Media Player 6.4 and MS Office viewer support
  • OpenSSL >= 0.9.6x for HTTPS, SFTP, SSH, VPN and more (versions 0.9.5x are no longer supported)
  • GnuPG or PGP for email/document encryption/decryption
  • JSSE 1.0.2 for Java applets requiring SSL/HTTPS (common with online banking) - included with a JVM 1.4
  • PAM for services (such as login) authentication
 
Graphics Multimedia
  • OpenGL for some 3D screensavers and some 3D graphics programs
  • SDL >= 1.2.0 for some Noatun plugins
  • libtiff for viewing facsimiles
  • libmng, libpng and libjpeg for viewing images
  • imlib 1 for using Kuickshow for viewing a wide variety of image formats
  • freetype 2 for anti-aliased font handling and manipulation
  • PDFinfo for enhanced PDF file browsing

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.

KDE Sponsorship

Besides the superb and invaluable efforts by the KDE developers themselves, significant support for KDE development has been provided by MandrakeSoft and SuSE. In addition, the members of the KDE League, as well as individual sponsors (donate), provide significant support for KDE. A special thanks goes to the University of Tübingen, for so graciously hosting the KDE projects all these years. Thanks!

About KDE

KDE is an independent project of hundreds of developers, translators, artists and professionals worldwide collaborating over the Internet to create and freely distribute a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop and office environment employing a flexible, component-based, network-transparent architecture and offering an outstanding development platform. KDE provides a stable, mature desktop, a full, component-based office suite (KOffice), a large set of networking and administration tools and utilities, and an efficient, intuitive development environment featuring the excellent IDE KDevelop. KDE is working proof that the Open Source "Bazaar-style" software development model can yield first-rate technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

General Contributing
KDE 3 Major Projects

Press Release: Written by Andreas Pour of the KDE League with the invaluable assistance of numerous volunteers from the KDE Project.

Trademarks Notices. KDE, K Desktop Environment, KDevelop and KOffice are trademarks of KDE e.V. Acrobat Reader, FrameMaker and PostScript are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated. AOL is a registered trademark of America Online, Inc. Compaq, Alpha, iPAQ and Tru64 are either trademarks and/or service marks or registered trademarks and/or service marks of Compaq Computer Corporation. HP is a registered trademark of Hewlett-Packard Company. IBM and PowerPC are registered trademarks of IBM Corporation. Intel, i386 and i586 are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Java and Sun are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. JavaScript is a trademark of Netscape Communications Corporation in the United States and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. MS Windows, Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer, MS Office, Windows Media Player, ActiveX and MSN are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Netscape and Netscape Communicator are trademarks or registered trademarks of Netscape Communications Corporation in the United States and other countries. QuickTime is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. RealAudio and RealVideo are trademarks or registered trademarks of RealNetworks, Inc. Shockwave and Flash are trademarks or registered trademarks of Macromedia, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Trolltech and Qt are trademarks of Trolltech AS. UNIX and Motif are registered trademarks of The Open Group. Zaurus and Sharp are trademarks of Sharp Electronics Corporation in the Yahoo! is a registered trademark of Yahoo! Inc. All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.


Press Contacts:
United States: Andreas Pour
KDE League, Inc.
pour@kdeleague.org
(1) 917 312 3122
Europe (French and English): David Faure
faure@kde.org
(33) 4 3250 1445
Europe (German and English): Ralf Nolden
nolden@kde.org
(49) 2421 502758
Europe (English): Jono Bacon
jono@kde.org