Dave Hansen, the IBM programmer who organized this interview (questions were posted on May 28), says, "Perhaps I didn't make this clear enough during the call for questions, but myself and my group are kernel programmers. But, we were able to dredge up some responses for answers that we couldn't do ourselves. We haven't been able to get an answer to the ViaVoice question yet, but if there is real interest, I'll make sure that we do get some kind of answer back to Slashdot.

ace writes "Apple has released the source to JavaScriptCore, a JavaScript framework based on KDE's kjs JavaScript engine. 'JavaScriptCore is a private API which may be used by future Mac OS X applications such as Sherlock, and is provided as Open Source as part of our partnership with the KDE community. JavaScriptCore will be used by Sherlock in an upcoming OS release, and possibly by other Apple software in the future. Apple chose kjs as the basis of its JavaScript technology for its simple and efficient code.'"

MrOutlander writes "Gentoo Linux releases version 1.2 of their cutting edge distribution with many updates including KDE 3.0.1 (20020604) and GNOME 2 (beta, 20020607) support. I love emerge :)"

gigawattwarlock asks: "As an almost new Mac OS X user (I've been adminning my wife's Mac for a while now), I am used to writing Perl scripts for her Mac, which work just fine. Simply put, I have become spoiled with the GTk bindings for Perl on Linux. I love being able to use and abuse a robust GUI, quickly and easily. And to make matters worse, I find the Aqua interface near addictive ... enough so that the idea of installing another desktop environment (KDE, Gnome, et. al) just seems a little silly, and a bit of overkill, to me. Does anyone know if there are any perl bindings in the works for Mac OS X or maybe even an already existent alternative graphical library or interface within Mac OS X?"

benh57 writes "KDE has finally been ported to Mac OS X, by the Fink team. Source packages and pre-built binaries are now available. Read the announcement and instructions for installing. Woohoo!"

krez writes: "Lately I've been looking for info on open-source audio recording & processing software. Not an easy task really: Suites like Brahms for KDE, and GLAME for Gnome are a good start, but I've yet to find a program - or a series of programs - that even approach something as comprehensive as Cubase or Cakewalk on those other platforms. Anyway, here's something that might just prove to be a good start. The European Commission is sponsoring a distribution called AGNULA (A GNU/Linux Audio distribution). The distribution will come in two flavours: Debian-based, and RedHat-based. You can read about the project and it's goals at http://www.agnula.org." The Debian side of this project is called DeMuDi, and it's been mentioned here before.

Andreas "Dre" Pour writes "Short on the heels of the remarkably successful launch of the KDE 3 series with a very stable and complete KDE 3.0 last month, the KDE Project has announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.0.1. While primarily a translation release, it also squashes some bugs, including some minor security issues with the HTML engine. Read the (relatively short) announcement and the fairly complete ChangeLog for more info. Binary packages are already available from the stalwart KDE packagers at Compaq Tru64, Conectiva Linux, Mandrake Linux and SuSE Linux. As always, we hope you enjoy the latest and greatest KDE!"

hysterion writes "Just came across the nice Unix Porting Guide (pdf) posted by Apple earlier this month. Topics include NetInfo, using Project Builder with gnumake, autoconf, XFree86, Tcl/Tk, Qt ... it is a bit short on scripting languages, and they speak as if KDE were already ported, but other than that I found it an informative read." They also didn't mention fink, and they put "Unix" in all caps. However, they were honest about the shell scripting limitations of AppleScript, although they didn't mention that AppleScript -- especially via osascript -- is pretty buggy in Mac OS X right now (this is my annoyance of the week, so allow me to indulge myself).

The Register has a first look article on Suse 8.0 and KDE 3.0. Short story: they liked both, pretty much. I think the section on installation -- notably its length -- speaks volumes about the 'which is easier, Linux or MS' debate, too." There's also a review of the new SuSE up at Newsforge with some more details.

parking_god writes "MIT prof Stuart Madnick, testifying on MS's behalf, was caught out twice when a government attorney asked him to name an OS (other than one made by Microsoft) where the browser couldn't be removed. Madnick also faltered on several other questions." Basically he doesn't understand what GNOME and KDE are, and since we're all holier-than-thou know-it-alls around here, we might as well laugh at Microsoft's expense ;)

Lots of updates, amplifications and followups in tonight's Slashback. Clones are on the way, the Agenda Linux-based PDA isn't quite dead, Gates' testimony is online, (surprize!) Hollings' so-called privacy bill could have a very different upshot, and much much more. Read on below for the details.

EyesWideOpen writes "I just read a review of a beta version of Red Hat 7.3 (code named Skipjack) over at Linux Journal. It's not the most complete review (being a little KDE heavy and GNOME shy, as well as focusing mainly on the install and desktop components) but it's a decent read. From the article: '...if you are a desktop user like me and you like the latest software, you will be hard pressed to find a more complete and usable piece of software...'. If you're feeling adventurous you can download the latest beta from a Red Hat mirror site."

Anonymous Hero writes "Co-founder of Eazel and now vice president of Hancom Linux, Bart Decram gives his views on a whole lot of things related to desktop Linux in an interview at Linux and Main. He talks abour what went wrong with Eazel, why everyone should work together to build Microsoft Office filters, how anti-U.S. sentiment can be used to promote Linux throughout the world, and how he thinks KDE is 'butt-ugly.' Long read, but worth it."

Nat Friedman often seems to live in the shadow of his famous coworker, Miguel de Icaza, but today it's his turn to shine. You asked Nat questions last week. This week he answers, in detail, with lots of links, touching on subjects ranging from Gnome's future directions to how Microsoft is dealing with Linux as a competitor to Windows.

MobyTurbo writes "Well, it's technically a day late, but SuSE Linux 8.0 is now shipping. The increase from 7.3 to 8.0 is due to the inclusion of KDE 3.0, a SuSE-modified kernel version 2.4.18 (with Andre's VM), an improved firewall, among other packages that have been upgraded or added. (Including a couple of new games. :-) )"

Though it's been out for more than a year, most people have not gotten a chance to see Revolution OS ; luckily for those who'd like to, a video release is planned for later this year, and for California readers, the screenings page lists four two-night showings over the next several weeks, in Newport Beach, Pasadena, California, Santa Monica, and L.A. Reader AdamBa submits his impressions of the movie (below).

Daniel Stone writes "In results released by Project Secretary Manoj Srivastava today, Bdale Garbee was elected Project Leader ahead of Raphael Hertzog and Branden Robinson. Congratulations Bdale! And no CmdrTaco, the debs are not (quite) yet ready, but they *are* very close." The elections page has more information.

Philippe Fremy writes "Thomas Capricelli, Mickael Marchand and me are pleased to present the first ever stable version of KVim, finally bringing "the power of VIM with KDE's friendliness". This release contains a port of the standalone editor Vim 6.0 to Qt/KDE (2 and 3) and a KDE KPart Component. The component can currently embed either of GVim or KVim in Konqueror (screenshots), with out-of-process embedding. Further work is required before proper support for KDevelop, KMail and Kate is available, but things are moving forward." As everyone knows, Vim is the best (only?) text editor, and KDE is the best (only?) desktop system. Heh.

amix writes "After two years of hard work the final 1.0 of VDR (Video Disk Recorder) has been released under the GPL. VDR is Linux based VCR software for digital TV cards (DVB, the Linux driver supports cable, sat and terrestrial cards), the new TV standard in Europe and also in use at several places in the United States. VDR is a fully networkable digital video recorder (implemented as daemon on port 2001) with optional MP3, DVD and 'MPlayer' based video-codec replay plus much more. It features "timeshifting", an incredibly comfortable OSD, functions to make editing/cleaning-up the streams easier and is controllable by LIRC, keyboard, telnet/ssh, WWW (cgi) or dedicated utilities. It can be used natively on a TV, with standard v4l tools or the KVDR KDE frontend.. You have an old PC? Add one (up to four) DVB card and you got a cheap multimedia center. Here are the screenshots. " A very impressive project indeed.

fabiolrs writes "LinuxPlanet has a cool review on KDE 3.0. You can also view a changelog of version 3.0 here." Still no debs, but I'm looking forward to checking this thing out. I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out. Update: 04/09 16:58 GMT by M : EWeek also has their own review.