Qt Labs Americas being announced

Akademy is continuing here in Gran Canaria with many talks, BoFs and announcments.

One of the big announcements was for Qt Labs America. The team at OpenBossa are working with Qt Software to promote Qt development in Latin America, starting with Brazil. They want to find students to work on KDE as a means to learning development, similar to the methods tried by the university in Toulouse. They will sponsor KDE developer sprints, and are looking for KDE teams to invite out to Brazil.

The New Conference Location

At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit much cross-desktop work has been done. The days we have are being used for the Cross Desktop Tracks and during the talks there are KDE and Gnome developers mingling everywhere. Cross desktop sessions included bug triage, metadata sharing, instant messaging and sharing personal data cross-desktop with CouchDB. Read more about the results!

For those following the development of KOffice, one of the first reviews of KOffice 2.0 has appeared at the Tech Radar website. KOffice 2.0 is the platform release for the KOffice 2 series, and as such, is not yet appropriate for all users. From the article: "Free software is often developed with the mantra 'release early, release often'. This is a great idea, because new tools can be tested, trialled and critiqued as they're developed [...] Many of the elements in KOffice 2.0 show great promise and we look forward to testing the suite once more when it's ready."

The KDE Team has released another release candidate for KDE called "Canteras". It contains only few changes compared to RC1 which suggests that the 4.3 is stabilizing and shaping up well for the 4.3.0 release on 28th of July. KDE 4.3.0 will be followed up by a series of monthly bugfix and translation updates. Testers are asked to report bugs in this release so 4.3.0 becomes a release as smooth as possible.

KDE's Release Team has already opened KDE SVN's trunk for development to allow for new features to be developed during the currently ongoing Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Fixes will be backported to the KDE 4.3 branch to stabilize the desktop further. After KDE 4.3, the next release, KDE 4.4 will be released in January 2010.

KDE e.V.'s Annual General Meeting was held today during the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. The KDE e.V. is the association that provides representation, support and governance to the KDE community. After former board member Klaas Freitag and KDE e.V. president Aaron Seigo stepped down and vice president Adriaan de Groot's term ended, three open positions had to be filled. Adriaan de Groot was re-elected as vice president of KDE e.V. and two new board members have been elected.

Celeste Lyn Paul, the leader of KDE's usability efforts, and Frank Karlitschek, the man behind KDE community web services such as KDE-Look.org and KDE-Apps.org. Karlitschek is also known for his efforts to introduce the Social Desktop to KDE. The new president of the KDE e.V. is Cornelius Schumacher, and Frank takes over the role of vice president and treasurer from Cornelius.

The conference auditorium

The Desktop Summit is continuing with talks in the Cross Desktop tracks and the start of the Akademy tracks. Between the talks developers can be spotted huddled in groups discussing everything from problems with their code to building community. The tracks covered metadata, community, infrastructure and multimedia. Read on for some of the talks.

Award Winners David Faure, Celeste Lyn Paul and Peter Penz accepted by Sebastian Trueg

The Akademy Awards for 2009 have been announced, celebrating the best of KDE contributors. As always the winners are chosen by the winners from the previous year. Read on for the winners.

Robert Lefkowitz's Keynote

Today the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit has started, bringing KDE and Gnome developers together in the biggest conference of its type. It is situated on the beautiful Atlantic island of Gran Canaria and housed in the spectacular Alfredo Kraus Auditorium which dominates the skyline of Las Palmas, capital of Gran Canaria. The conference was opened by a series of talks from various people in the Canaries local government and the organisation. After that the keynotes started with star speakers and impressive announcements including an Open PC developed by the community and Maemo switching to Qt. Read on for an impression of the GCDS!

Free t-shirts were popular

Tonight the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit was opened with a party sponsored by Kubuntu's very own Canonical. Stickers, t-shirts and beer were all given out to contributors and users of KDE, Gnome and any other free software environment. Some converts were made from the local Canary island population who were enthused by the spirit of freedom.

Heavy metal and free software do mix

Conversation ranged from the essential cross desktop collaboration issues to the question of whether it ever rains in Las Palmas.

More photos on Flickr.

It is that time of the year again. Akademy 2009 is about to begin in only a few days. Held in the Alfredo Kraus Auditorium close to the beautiful beaches of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, this event is shaping up to be a special conference.