Combining bug fixes with new versions of applications, the new KDE version 3.5.1 rolled out to the public last week. Available in 63 languages, this free open-source desktop environment combines more than a dozen office, multimedia and network applications into a friendly user interface. Version 3.5 was released back in November 2005 and this new version fixes several bugs along with some security vulnerabilities.

The first version of KDE was released back in 1997 and it, along with its main competitor GNOME, has become the most popular desktop environments for Linux users. While the differences between the two environments, at least from the end user perspective, are mainly cosmetic, back-end development is significantly different. Both have different sets of libraries and programming tools. GNOME uses GTK, while KDE uses Qt.

Last week, an exploit was discovered in the Javascript interpreter for KDE versions 3.2.0 to 3.5. By sending a specially crafted packet to the Konqueror web browser, attackers could gain control of vulnerable systems. A patch was quickly released and is included in KDE 3.5.1.

KDE 3.5.1 is available in binary formats for several Linux distributions including Slackware, SuSE and Gentoo. As always, the source code download is available for the hard-core users to compile themselves.