While the KDE community busied itself with preparations for the 4.3 release, KDE 4 continued to spread to new platforms with ReactOS user Davy Bartoloni reporting (machine translation of original Italian) some success in running KDE applications on that operating system.

Read on for a little insight!

Today was Big Bang Day at CERN as the world's largest science experiment was turned on. Like all good technology enthusiasts the KDE developers have been keeping up with the progress of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. We are pleased to see that like all world class physicists the first ever ATLAS results come from KDE. Their impressive control centre is also making excellent use of KNotes. Just as good, the world has not yet been sucked into a black hole.

The IT Service Center Berlin has announced the development of a desktop system for the public services in Germany's capital (Google Translate to English). This is yet another public body making the switch to the Free Desktop system. The announcement talks about the good integration of KDE with their current infrastructure, which is partly based on Microsoft's software. According to the ITDZ's press release, the integration phase has successfully finished and the KDE-based client for Berlin's administration is now ready for prime time.

At LinuxTag, a big German Free Software conference and fair, the "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik", Germany's national information security group, announced their successful porting of KDE's Email and Groupware client to the three major platforms, Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Finally, the "Auswärtiges Amt", responsible for German embassies in more than 200 countries also showed their KDE based desktop client at LinuxTag, which has been deployed to their employees already.

Piacentini blogs from FISL with information on Brazil's Ministry of Education ProInfo project. The project provides computers and internet connectivity to as well as open content to students in public schools. They are using a Debian based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games and have deployed it in 29,000 labs with plans for a total of 53,000 labs by the end of next year.

A secondary school in Melbourne, Australia, is using KDE on Kubuntu, with KDE's own Kiosk tool to lock down its library workstations. Implementing a kiosk mode Kubuntu setup allowed Westall Secondary School to save money, exact greater control over security measures, and extend the life of older and previously abandoned hardware without sacrificing performance. The school's IT support manager said the Kiosk admin tool was chosen as there was not enough flexibility with other desktops to allow "decent" lockdown. He was also surprised to discover that Kubuntu desktops ran some applications faster on Linux than when they ran on Windows.

Ubuntu's Fridge is reporting that Kubuntu is taking the Canary Islands. KDE is being installed on all of the school computers in the Canary Islands by the way of mEDUXa and in their universities with Bardinux, both derivatives of the Kubuntu GNU/Linux operating system. KDE's Aaron Seigo and Jonathan Riddell toured the schools in which mEDUXa is in use and spoke with the developers during the Jornadas de Software Libre conference. During that conference, Aaron Seigo presented KDE 4 and its exciting capabilities as well as an introduction to KDE and Qt programming.

The Education, Culture and Sports Department of the Spanish Canary Island's regional goverment have released mEDUXa 1.0. mEDUXa is a Free Software GNU/Linux distribution developed for educational purposes based on Kubuntu. It will be deployed on 35,000 computers in 1100 schools, which represents 325,000 possible users (25,000
teachers and 300,000 students) in the Canary Islands state schools. mEDUXa comes with different profiles, configured thanks to KDE's Kiosk mode. One of mEDUXa's major feature is the profile for young pupils (from 4 to 8 years old).

KDE together with the Athens University of Economics and Business and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and other partners has launched SQO-OSS. This is a two-year multi-million euro project that aims to develop new tools and techniques for measuring Open Source quality.

There are many ways to support and contribute to the KDE project. Traditional contributions have seen the fusion of code, artwork, translations and documentation that has come to define KDE. As the project celebrates its 10th anniversary, we can all reflect on the enormous success achieved when people and organisations with a vast variety of different backgrounds and skills join forces. For people and organisations who wish to contribute to KDE by providing financial support in an ongoing manner, the KDE e.V. now offers the new Supporting Members scheme. KDE e.V. is both excited and proud to announce Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, as our first Patron of KDE.

ZDNet reports on a recent German Linux migration by the tax authority in Lower Saxony which has made the decision to migrate an impressive 12,000 desktops to SuSE Linux using KDE. The project, which is now in process converting 300 desktops daily, moves
systems from Solaris x86 version 8, which the organisation has been running since 2002. The migrations are reported as going well thus far.
KDE's Kiosk desktop customisation, source code access and licensing costs were cited as key reasons for the decision. Congratulations to all involved, and best of luck going forward with this effort!