This week we saw finishing of work on new color management code; updating of libraw to stable 0.8.1 (28 new cameras comparing to previous 0.7.x stable release, API extension and fixes); optimizations in thumbnails display; preparations for 1.0-beta4 (released on 31st August).
Read the rest of the digiKam digest here!

In 1996 when KDE was first announced, it had only a handful of developers and the project could manage the source code without using a revision control system. More and more developers have begun to contribute to KDE over the years, and while there has been some attrition, the total number of active developers working on KDE has been steadily growing.

In order to get a pulse from the current contributor community, Simon St. James and Arthur Schiwon produced and plotted two basic metrics that show the continued growth within the KDE community.

Active KDE Contributers 1997-2009 (small version)

During the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Frank Karlitschek announced the open-pc initiative. The aim of this ambitious project is to cooperatively design a Free Software based computer by and for the community. Read on for more information about this initiative from the team.

Congratulations everybody, we rock! KDE was again able to secure the precious LinuxQuestions.org desktop environment of the year award for 2008. The prize is a testament to the great and innovative work done on the KDE applications, desktop and in extension the KDE platform. Put another way, it is a testament to a community that based on excellence and technically sound solutions manages to be a beacon for innovation in the Free Software world.

A little bit in late to release this article, but important to let know KDE community about our involvement to spread KDE to Italian people. Last October, three members of KDE Italia gave talks in three different Italian cities. Daniele Costarella in Salerno, Salvatore Brigaglia in Sassari and Diego Rondini in Castelfranco Veneto (TV).

KDE4Daily is an attempt to lower the barrier to entry for people who would like to test KDE trunk in the run-up to 4.2, consisting of a Qemu VM image containing a Kubuntu 8.10 base and a comprehensive set of a self-compiled KDE4 modules from KDE trunk (all at r888587, initially), along with an updater system inside the VM itself. After an unusually rocky round of development, it is time to (finally!) announce the release of KDE4Daily 4.2!

The family of KDE websites has got a new member, the site for the fine utilities applications from the module kdeutils. Despite being one of the first modules, kdeutils has always been without its own website. No longer. At utils.kde.org you can now find a lot of information about the KDE Utilities. See for yourself the details of the current set of programs below.

Last weekend we hosted the KDE-Bindings and Kross meeting here at the KDAB Office in Berlin/Kreuzberg with the goal of organising, community building and of course hacking. It was the first meeting of its type for a bindings crew, with eight people representing
Ruby,
Python,
C#,
Lua and
PHP. The projects do not all share code bases, and so it was an opportunity to present and review the details of how the implementations worked.

This coming Sunday, June 15, BugSquad is hosting a BugDay to go triaging through old Amarok bugs. Come join #kde-bugs anytime to get training and help out! No prior experience is necessary, and you don't need any programming knowledge.

With the release of 4.1 on the horizon, and initiatives such as Krush days, recent call for help with documentation, and the perennial need for localisation it is very useful for end users to be able to easily get their hands on up-to-date builds of KDE4, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. As was the case with the run up to KDE4.0, KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.