The developers of digiKam and the Kipi project came together in Essen, Germany on November 13-15 for the second coding sprint for KDE photography applications. With digiKam preparing for the 1.0 release shortly before Christmas, plans were discussed and work began already in feature branches for the following release. A lot of work was put into polishing Windows support, with collaborative testing and bug fixing.

If you read PlanetKDE, you may have noticed that there was a combined Booth, Web and Marketing Sprint in Stuttgart last weekend. While those blog posts discussed the fun to be had in getting a load of KDE contributors together in one place, the event was really about having some important discussions and getting a lot of serious work done so that our presentation of KDE matches the quality of our products. Read on for details of the many things we got up to.

Do you have a special story about how you or your organization has used KDE to break free from proprietary software? If so, enter the Camp KDE "Be Free" Contest and tell us your story!

Camp KDE, in conjunction with the KDE e.V., will be flying one lucky individual to Camp KDE 2010 in San Diego. Camp KDE attendees can meet the KDE community, participate in KDE talks, take free Qt developer training (normally not free), and join our hacking and planning sessions.

Amarok version 2.2.1 has been the released by the Amarok team. It includes a lot of improvements to podcast handling, much faster collection scanning as well as the ability to automatically update scripts.

Head over to the release announcement, download it and enjoy rediscovering music.

If you haven't heard yet, you've probably been under a rock since Thursday, but openSUSE 11.2 was released with KDE 4.3.1 as the default desktop.

openSUSE 11.2 KDE on a Intel 945GM netbook

The deadline for requesting to give a presentation/talk at Camp KDE 2010 has been set for 0:00 on December 5th.

As indicated in the open registration announcement, if you wish to give a presentation, please indicate this preference when registering for the event. The organizers will look at the topics and handle any duplicates, and then ask for more detailed abstracts.

One of the few utility programs that are used every day on mobile devices is a wireless networking tool, but somehow this is one of the last applications to appear for KDE 4. With the autumn 2009 crop of Linux distributions, a usable client for the widely used NetworkManager system finally makes its debut.

Matthias Ettrich.

Today at 4pm CET at the Center for Economics, Technology and Women’s Issues at the Berlin Senate, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software. Matthias was awarded the medal in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good. The award was presented by state secretary Almuth Nehring-Venus. She mentioned that not only is Matthias among the younger recipients of the award but also that this is the first award ceremony where young children of the family were present. Also attending was Eberhard Gienger, member of the Bundestag for the county Matthias grew up in. Read on for more!

Akonadi working in KMail

The second Akonadi sprint this year took place in Berlin, Germany on October 16-18. With a confrontation between the local punks and the law simmering on the streets below, the KDE PIM team and others worked to port applications, add polish to the libraries, and complete PIM software that will raise sparks on the desktop without burning out your CPU. Read on for an overview of what happened there!

The Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). This move allows donors to give tax-deductible donations in the US, and it increases transparency in the spending of Amarok's funds. At the same time, we will not loosen our ties with the KDE project. Amarok is, and will always stay, a fully committed project under the KDE umbrella. Read on for more!