LinuxTag started today. Many of the usual exhibitors can be seen, and the floor is quite busy. Especially noteworth is the crowded KDE booth where they are excited about the 2.2 Betas. kazekiri sent us a report from Slashdot/Japan which you'll need to translate to read, but apparently one of the hotels was closed for hygiene reasons, and many of the developers are without a place to sleep. So now they are staying in a gymnasium! Fortunately for me, my hotel is open and I got a good nights sleep (after 36 hours without any) and am preparing for my keynote Saturday afternoon, and a Q&A session Sunday afternoon. If you're in Stuttgart, check it out, just don't try any of that Deutsch on me, I barely passed that class.

Moritz Moeller - Her writes: "Evidently Adobe -- yes the Adobe that has not ported a single application apart from its PDF Reader to Linux -- sees a threat in KDE. They claim that the Koffice vector based drawing program Killustrator violates their trademark for Adobe Illustrator. Here is the mail on koffice-devel. The company demands 2500 EUR from the developer, maybe someone can help with the legal expenses here? The web site for Killuistrator has been put down for the moment. Shouldn't generic descriptive terms like 'explorer,' 'illustrator' 'word' and 'paint' be free for all to use? Nobody called the program Kadobe! I think it is time for some pressure on Adobe ... "

A reader writes " Looking for an xmms-kde RPM, I've stumbled across rhcontrib.bero.org - looks like Red Hat is building up a new contribution area. Looks quite interesting, but sloow."

drachen writes: "Trolltech has announced that Qt/Windows will now be available under a non-commercial license. To sum it up: 'Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt for evaluation purposes; and Developers may use a Non-Commercial License of Qt on a personal basis to create free programs, and the source code must be made available.'" There's also talk of this at dot.kde.org.

accountant asks: "A very close friend of mine is a qualified usability tester. She gained her Master's Degree last September and now has a good job with a mega corporation. Unfortunately, times being what they are that mega corporation is looking at a mega merger and mega job cuts. It's tough finding jobs in usability at the moment (a lot of companies haven't grasped the concept of usability, nor usability specialists, and a lot of dot coms have no cash to take on more staff). It's especially tough if you have less than one year of experience. Usability, especially on the desk top, is a major priority for Open Sourced environments like KDE and Gnome. Who's doing the testing in such Open Source environments? Are they doing sizeable studies, running focus groups and doing statistical analysis on user test results? Money is handy, of course, but there must be opportunities to feed a resume and help the Open Source community. Your thoughts and URLs please?"

An anonymous reader writes: "One important aspect of Free software is open collaboration and the pooling of efforts. There are several open source word processors available and they all need to import and export the ubiquitous MS Word format. To try and avoid duplicating efforts, developers from the Abiword, wvWare and Kword projects have been talking with regard to pooling their efforts in writing filters."

navindra writes: "While KDE and GNOME often grab the headlines, other projects are silently making progress. Dennis Leeuw tries to make sense of the situation in this interesting GNUstep article featured on LWN Daily."

John Buswell wrote a little opinion thing wrt Mandrake's Donations Page. He raises the arguable point: why would you donate money to a for-profit company? I've written my response too which is full of all sorts of pompous rhetoric to go along with it.

Gatha writes: "The recently concluded Bang!inux conference was a great place to meet some Open Source developers. Among those speaking at the event was Martin Konold, veteran KDE developer. We managed to get an interview with him. Excerpts follow. Interview here on FreeOS.com" Konold (along with Matthias Ettrich) began the KDE project several years ago, and in this too-short interview he touches on the project's origins as well as improvements bound for the stable release, like network transparent sound and anti-aliased fonts. (And a lot more apps -- soon.)

_iris writes: "As reported on the Dot, gesture control (apparently all the rage with the kids after the latest Opera release) is coming to KDE. You can find a _very_ early release of KGesture here." Sounds like a recipe for carpal tunnel to me.

Reader Torulf contributed the below review of Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface .Though the book does not spend much time on Open Source software, it emphasizes ideas that every programmer probably ought to bear in mind -- at least if they wants hisprograms to have users. (And yes, he takes explicit exception to some UNIX truisms.)

JigSaw writes: "BeNews has a very interesting interview with Kurt Skauen, the AtheOS creator and almost its sole developer. In the interview, Kurt is discussing the design of his OS which features a (nearly) micro-kernel, memory protection, 'true' multitasking, real C++ OOP design from the ground-up and all the rest of these buzzwords. AtheOS uses its own GUI, it does not rely on X or KDE libs, so porting Konqueror to his OS was a bit of a challenge."

Philippe Fremy writes: "After the Poll on what kde needs in priority suggests speed is an area of improvement, Core kde developer Waldo Bastian has written an paper where he explains why a C++ (or Kde) application is slow to start and how the community could improve that."

Marko van Dooren writes: "Waldo Bastian wrote an interesting paper on the GNU ld.so linker and C++. It seems not only KDE is slow. At least now I know what the kdeinit process is for."

keithp writes: "XFree86, Gnome and KDE are sponsoring the first XFree86 Technical Conference to be held concurrently with ALS in Oakland this November. We're looking for people interested in presenting novel and exciting stuff they're doing with XFree86 at all levels -- from X server hacks to toolkits, applications, theming and 3d graphics. There's also space for tutorials, BOFs and working groups -- if you're involved in an X-related group interested in getting together for non-electronic communication, we've got just the place."

frknfrk writes "i stumbled across the IBM developerWorks KDE theme contest. apparently there are three prizes, $3000, $2000, and $1000 which entrants can win for the non-profit OSS group of their choice. and Sam Lantinga (SDL, Loki) is one of the judges. they also have a tutorial on building KDE themes for Linux." I've been running KDE on my laptop since I melted the old hard drive, and have been disappointed by the existing choice of themes. Hopefully this contest will change that, as well as hook up an open source group with some cash. Get gimpin' people!

Boban Acimovic writes "New Mandrake 8.0 is finally out. Official announcement will come today, but new ISO files are already on some of mirrors. Main improvements are kernel =2.4.3, KDE =2.1.1, GNOME 1.4, Nautilus 1.0, Evolution 0.9, XFree86 =4.0.3, RPM 4.0, improved installer with pictures and other nice stuff. Enjoy!" Thanks to Gael Duval, from Mandrake for letting me know - the main features are listed as well as the new features page. But one of the cooler parts is a new part with Mandrake-Linux that will let you donate to the Free Software project of your choice in Mandrake - that's at at Linux-Mandrake.com. Update: 04/19 12:27 PM by H :Newsforge has got a article with more mirrors as well.

Updates and revisions for you on various and sundry stories you've seen here recently, from Parrot to Linux on handhelds to the recent judgement against MP3.com and more. Read on below to find them.

TheKompany has released a few programs that will surely interest KDE users and Linux users in general. Click below to read about their new software releases. (If you don't know what -- or who -- TheKompany is, you can read Linux.com's interview with TheKompany president Shawn Gordon.)

Bob Young prefaces his answers to your questions by saying, "You may notice I've ducked some of the answers below - there is a reason for this. My role at Red Hat these days is as Chairman of the board. Matthew Szulik is Red Hat's CEO and will be a better person to answer some of the specific issues that these questions raise....