During this weekend (and after almost 24 hours of work), the KDE Community Forums have undergone a complete overhaul, resulting in a much improved look and additional features. The first and most user-visible change is the new forum theme. It is heavily inspired by "Air", the default Plasma theme in the soon to be released KDE 4.3.

Also, the board is now powered by the phpBB forum software and has gained a number of extra features, including but not limited to:

• Improved KDE Brainstorm section, with a new user interface;
• A "friends connection" system that enables people to mark other users as
  friends and easily interact with them;
• Improved user reputation system;
• Topic tagging;

The changes are quite numerous and deep, so some bugs may have slipped through our tests. The whole KDE Community is encouraged to visit the forums and report issues.

As a final note, thanks go to the people who made this possible: the KDE Community Forums administrators (Ben Cooksley, Ingo Malchow, Sayak Banerjee), the phpBB developers Chris Smith, Ashley Pinner and Nils Adermann for their continued assistance and support and to the entire phpBB team.

The student application period for Google Summer of Code begins at 19:00 UTC today, and closes at 19:00 UTC on April 3rd. Students should be sure to seek feedback from their mentors as early as possible, to ensure that their application is in top shape for the grading period.

Good luck to all students!

With a donation of a new Poweredge server from Dell Inc., and a successful hardware fundraiser for disks last month, the long-suffering ktown.kde.org site gets a welcome upgrade, and a new hosting package from the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum. Read on for the details on the new server, Immanuel.

I'm happy to announce that KDE Dot News is now fully hosted and supported by the OSU Open Source Lab. OSUOSL have graciously provided us with both server and network hosting, although of course, OSUOSL has long been hosting us on their network while we had been sharing the Ark Linux webserver. As we outgrew the Ark Linux server and ran into resource limitations however, OSUOSL also graciously offered us new server hosting. The dot is now significantly more responsive and we should definitely be seeing an improvement in uptime as well. A big thank you to OSUOSL and all the great guys on their support team -- it's been a true pleasure working with you.

I am pleased to announce that KDE Dot News has gained new hosting sponsors. We are now hosted on the Ark Linux server through the OSU Open Source Lab network, having successfully completed the transfer little more than a week ago. As some of you may know, we have a long history of having been hosted and co-hosted with Ark Linux, so it is great to be back with our old friends.

The KDE Kiosk is a framework that has been built into KDE since version 3. It allows administrators to create a secure and controlled environment for their users by customising and locking almost any aspect of the desktop. It is an essential element for deploying KDE in the enterprise environment. Barry O'Donovan has written an article (to appear in the June edition of Linux+) which outlines the features of the Kiosk framework and gives some examples for implementing it.

Due to severe problems with the scheduled migration of KDE's massive source code repository from the CVS revision control system to Subversion, the KDE project has decided to opt for the BitKeeper source control system as the more pragmatic choice. The full press release follows; further details on what this will mean to KDE developers and contributors requiring repository access will be posted shortly to the KDE Wiki.

I'm pleased to announce that the KDE Wiki has been moved to
a new hosting solution sponsored by our very own href="http://www.jasonbainbridge.com/">Jason Bainbridge of the
the KDE Web Team. As you might have noticed, we had outgrown the previous server which had been hosting both the Dot and the Wiki. After extended downtime
and performance issues often related to having both services on the
same machine as well as limited administration resources, href="http://navindra.blogspot.com/">Navindra Umanee and I decided to
search for an alternate host for the Wiki.

Due to the unfortunate fact that Dirk Doerflinger, the old maintainer of the German KDE Forum has way too little time for the forum at the moment, we are pleased and grateful to announce that §igma from www.linux-web.de has graciously adopted it. We moved the forum to his server a few days ago and are expecting the domain to be fully transferred; there may still be some annoyances with referring mails until the transfer is complete. This will soon be (or already is) history.

With bug number 100,000 reported, the hard-working href="http://bugs.kde.org">KDE bug tracking system reached a milestone today. However, not everyone knows what goes on behind the scenes and how to help. In this article, I take a short look at using the bug reporting system, and how you can help KDE improve.