More than 200 members of the KDE
community, related projects, industry partners, and interested users
will be gathering on Friday for aKademy 2006 at the
Trinity College Dublin
to work on the next-generation KDE 4 desktop and cross-desktop standards.
See the official press release for the full announcement.

KDE's legal body KDE e.V. has published its second 2006 quarterly report. Topics covered include progress organising Akademy 2006, activities from the working groups and sysadmins, events organised and attended and seven new members. If you have been helping KDE for a while, do consider joining the e.V. membership.

Today, KDE releases a first developer snapshot of the
upcoming KDE4 release. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers
who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE4 will provide, those
who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE4 platform and
for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE4. This
snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable,
the interfaces are subject to changes at any time. The changes that have gone
into the development version this snapshot is based on have all happened under
the hood, little is visible yet. Now it is up to application developers to use
the new possibilities. While this snapshot will probably not be what kdelibs
will finally look like, it should give a fair idea of what to expect.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.4, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Even while KDE 4 is being prepared, improvements to KDE 3.5 have been made and this release makes them available. The new features were subject to rigorous quality testing so that KDE 3.5.4 is as stable as the maintenance releases that precede it.

The first Season of KDE has started. The Season of KDE is a follow-up project to Google's Summer of Code, giving all the applications that did not make it into the final selection a chance to be implemented anyway. We are happy to announce that 14 students have agreed to work on their projects even without the financial support from Google. See the Season of KDE homepage for more information and a complete list of the projects.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.3, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Unusually for a maintenance release, new features were implemented due to the long release cycle of the eagerly-awaited KDE 4. Stability and speed were also improved, along with increasingly complete translations in 65 languages. The complete release announcement is available from the KDE website. Significant enhancements include an improved startup time, over 800 minor issues fixed thanks to code checking by Coverity and small new features in Akregator, KMail and KAlarm. Finally, new translations have been added for Vietnamese and Kazakh. Packages are available for Archlinux, Kubuntu, Fedora and SUSE Linux or compile with Konstruct.

The KDE e.V.'s first Quarterly Report for 2006 has been published. Those reports are used by the KDE e.V. to report its activities to the public. The highlights in this report include updates from the Working Groups, a report from the last KDE e.V. board meeting and a couple of other updates. The Technical Working Group for example announced a planned technical preview of KDE 4, the Human-Computer Interaction Working Group informs about progress in developing plans for usability, accessibility and artwork for KDE 4. The Marketing Working Group gives updates about the status of the promotional community around KDE 4 and different other aspects regarding marketing-related efforts.

The position of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was today strengthened by the K Desktop Environment (KDE) joining the ODF Alliance. KDE joins other partners such as Oracle, SUN Microsystems, Mandriva, IBM and Junta de Andalucia in promoting the OpenDocument Format as a market leader in document exchange and storage.

KDE e.V., the organisation that represents
KDE in legal and financial matters, and
the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) are proud to announce their
associate status, working together for the promotion and protection of
Free Software on users' desktops in Europe and worldwide. "Together with the KDE e.V. we seek to break the stranglehold on the desktop, give people freedom, and explain to them why this is important, and why they should not give it up again," said Georg Greve from FSFE. See the full press release for details.

Today, the KDE Project announces the release of the K Desktop Environment 3.5.2. This second update release in the KDE 3.5 series brings an improved user experience and stability by focusing exclusively on translations and bug fixes. See the Changelog for the major changes while the info page lists the ways to download with packages currently available for Arch Linux, Kubuntu, Pardus, Red Hat and SuSE. Kubuntu have made a live CD featuring KDE 3.5.2.