Question Compress/Minify jQuery in Kunena?

One of the things with my site is the template uses a fair amount of js and while trying to minimize and compress everything, I noticed that Kunena uses several different js files from the jquery toolkit. This adds great functionality to the software but unfortunately these are offered in several different files which are neither optimized (combined into a single file) nor minified (compressed to remove whitespace, comments, etc). I've come across a couple cool extensions on the JED:
www.kunena.com/index.php?option=com_kune...catid=6&id=2393#2521
extensions.joomla.org/extensions/style-&...scripts/6981/details

As you can see, one of these takes all your CSS and JS and compresses them into a single file and also gzips them. This is great and would really help reduce the http requests and just page load time in general. Unfortunately, I was unable to get either of them to work with Kunena out of the box. The CSSJS compressor just failed to include the jquery. The other extension includes Google's compressed, fast cache of the jquery library instead of a local copy. This too did not work - perhaps because it only offers jquery 1.2.6 and I see that Kunena uses 1.3.1.

Is it possible to enhance the javascript and css setup on Kunena, either by providing functionality within one of these plugins or by another solution? I think this would greatly help speed up the forum and increase the responsiveness of sites as a whole.

In the mean time you can make the site load faster (after first load) by telling the browser to use it's own cache for images, css and js.

How can I do that exactly? Is it a .htaccess setting?

Yes, .htacces setting by file names:

You can also use content types..