After a hard week's discussion and hacking the Akademy attendees took a relaxing trip along the river Dijle towards Antwerp. The KDE discussion continued of course but most of the KDE contributors took the chance to rest from hacking and enjoy the countryside of Flanders. KDE://Radio has been updated with some short video interviews which will introduce you to your friendly KDE contributors.

This year Akademy held a dedicated day for mobile and embedded talks. With Trolltech being owned by Nokia, mobile is suddenly a hot topic for KDE and several variants of Qt and KDE on mobiles were in progress at Akademy. Read on for an overview of the talks.

An important topic at Akademy 2008 is modularisation and integration. It has been the main topic of one talk, but you will find it comes up in many others. It is clearly on the minds of many developers here. Read on for more of what is discussed here.

During the Emsys-sponsored Mobile and Embedded day at Akademy 2008, Nokia distributed 100 N810 internet tablets to KDE developers, and gave around 50 more for the project to distribute to worthy sub-projects. Read on for more.

The second day of Akademy 2008 started a bit later in the morning than the previous one, yet somehow most visitors managed to look much more tired. Maybe the social event (read Nokia sponsored beer) from yesterday has something to do with that. Although tired, people visit the talks and write code, so you can expect more code, discussions and blogs today. Read on for more!

Akademy 2008, the annual KDE desktop summit, officially kicked off on Saturday, 9th August in Sint-Katelijne-Waver, Belgium, with a schedule packed full of talks, discussions, and development. Read on for the highlights of the first day of the conference.

I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week. Aaron Seigo spoke for us all when he said "Uwe had a deep love for and belief in Africa and the role that technology can, and should, play on that continent. He put his back into it and was a great advocate for Free software in his area of the world". Our thoughts go out to his family and friends at this irreplaceable loss, we are all a little less than we were yesterday.

Akademy 2008 has published the programme of talks. Track themes include research, applications and community. There are keynotes from Frank Karlitschek of the Open Desktop sites, Sebastian Nyström of Nokia, Cliff Schmidt of KDE users Literacy Bridge. Lightning talk sessions include a Plasma Frenzy and an Akonadi Rumble with KDAB's Till Adam. It is a packed programme to start off the week, the rest of which will be filled with BoFs, Tutorials and an Embedded and Mobile Day. Register now.

To celebrate the release of KDE 4, the KDE French contributors and the Toulibre LUG organised a two-day event on January 25th and 26th 2008 in Toulouse, France. On the 25th, Kévin Ottens made a general presentation of KDE 4, and on the 26th there was a day of technical conferences featuring speakers such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Alexis Ménard, Kévin Ottens, Aurélien Gâteau and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. The videos of all these talks, in French, are now available for download.

KDE was very busy at LinuxTag this year. We were present with two main booths - Amarok and KDE -
and a whole bunch of talks within our own track. Additionally, Aaron Seigo gave a well-received keynote on Wednesday, painting a vibrant
vision of the desktop in a mobile world, and the direction KDE is heading in.
Read on for a more detailed coverage of the event.