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The KDE project is happy to announce the selection of 40 KDE projects for the Google Summer of Code 2007. This is the third consecutive year that KDE is participating in the initiative. Though Thiago Macieira, KDE's Summer of Code co-ordinator, states that reviewing the 213 submissions was difficult, Aaron Seigo, member of the KDE e.V. board, has the "highest confidence in the final list, with ambitious and exciting new technology and functionality set to grace the KDE desktop, which is very fitting with what we are trying to achieve with the KDE 4 vision". Read on for more information about the selected projects. Read More

D-Bus 1.0 ("Blue Bird"), the Freedesktop.org inter-process messaging system has just been released. A collaborative effort between industry and open source developers, D-Bus was created to allow arbitrary applications to easily communicate with each other and exchange data. An additional system daemon allows for communication with system services. D-Bus is known to work on all Unix platforms and has also been ported to Mac OS X, while a Windows port is in progress. This makes D-Bus the ideal messaging system for KDE 4. Read More

About two weeks ago, several KDE developers gathered at FrOSCon, the Free and Open Source conference in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany. Hosted by the Computer Science department of the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, the conference also provided rooms for free software projects. One was seized by the KDE project for discussion and hacking. Additionally, representatives of the KDE project gave two talks at the official conference programs, as well as two other talks that directly related to KDE. Read on for the full report. Read More

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. Read More

A group of enthusiastic KDE users and developers met last week at the FOSS.IN conference in Bangalore, one of the largest Free and Open Source Software meetings in the world, to combine their efforts in various regions of the country under a common banner and build a central platform for all things KDE in India. Along with spreading KDE awareness in India, especially in colleges and with local businesses, KDE.in has a few more practical goals. KDE.in will provide Indian KDE developers and users with a community hub to coordinate with and support each other. Read More

This year's aKademy saw a whole new innovation: The KDE Appreciation Awards, also known as the "aKademy Awards". Their purpose is to recognize outstanding contribution to the KDE community. The awards are for best application, best contribution to KDE and the Jury's Choice Award. The jury consisted of the well-known KDE hackers Aaron Seigo, Brad Hards, David Faure and Matthias Ettrich. If you want to know who the winners are, read on! Read More

One of the "missing LinuxTag stories" should be telling about the FreeNX presentation done by Fabian Franz and Kurt Pfeifle in the biggest hall with 500 visitors present. The talk culminated in the official release of FreeNX-0.4.1 (download here). Read More

Today the KDE project previewed a new technology that allows arbitrary KPart-based KDE applications to be embedded into Mozilla's FireFox. Thus, KDE applications can soon be used to show rich content such as PDF files using KPDF or display multimedia files with KMPlayer or Kaffeine. Read More

After two years of hard work, the Kolab Groupware Project has released Kolab 2. It allows for sharing of personal folders, calendars and contacts and comes with improved spam and anti-virus capabilities. With Kolab 2 installation is now an easy two-step process, and the admin web interface has many improvements. KDE recently started supplying Kolab for its contributors. KDE Kontact is the project's official groupware client on GNU/Linux and Unix derivates. Read More

Today, Apple Computer announced the immediate availability of the WebKit Open Source Project. It includes full access to the CVS of WebKit as well as an open bug database. "We're looking forward to working more closely with KDE and the rest of the open source community" said Safari developer Maciej Stachowiak. KHTML developer Dirk Müller added "We're happy to see the development of WebCore opening up to the public, so that KDE can benefit from work that has been done in the WebCore fork of KHTML". WebKit is the system framework used by the Safari web browser, Dashboard and other Mac OS X applications. It contains WebCore and JavaScriptCore, the Apple forks of KHTML and KJS, the KDE JavaScript implementation. Read More

This month's issue of Linux Magazine features an article about working with Konqueror 3.4 (PDF). It presents the new features of this release and highlights the most interesting tricks of KDE's universal browser. Learn how to read man and info pages, how to customize Konqueror with view profiles and how to get the most out of KIO-Slaves. Read More

Available for memory sticks on Windows or Linux, the new release KDE-PIM/Platform independent lets you carry around your favourite KDE applications and your personal data in the palm of your hand. This device independent software can import your data directly from Outlook and sync it with KDE-PIM running on other computers. Read More

Kubuntu, which saw its first release in April of this year, is a highly integrated Linux distribution featuring the KDE desktop. OSDir has declared Kubuntu "project of the week" and is carrying an interview with two of the project's primary contributors, Andreas Müller and Jonathan Riddell. They share insights on Kubuntu's creation, its current state and their plans for the future. Read More

On LinuxPlanet, Kurt Pfeifle explains details about Tenor, a framework that will facilitate new ways to locate and otherwise manage content. Learn about the background of Tenor, what differentiates it from "desktop search tools" and why this new approach is needed in a world of ever growing disk space. Additionally, the article provides some insights from Scott Wheeler, one of Tenor's authors and primary designers. Read More

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. Read More

The KDE tradeshow team will be previewing KDE 3.4 at this year's Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, coming up this weekend. Based on the recent Release Candidate 1, the team will present the features of the new version at the KDE booth, which is prominently located in the front of the exhibition area. Talks include Kurt Pfeifle elaborating on KDE Tips and Tricks and Martin Loschwitz (of Debian fame) giving an insight on Kalyxo, the Debian KDE efforts. Kurt Pfeifle's FreeNX workshop is already sold out. See you in Chemnitz! Update: All talks will be available as live streams. Read More

Today QtForum.org, a site dedicated to Qt development discussions, presented the winners of the QtForum.org programming contest award, sponsored by Trolltech. The contest selected the best educational software written with the Qt libraries, and these two programs from the KDE Edutainment Project took first and second prize, while third place was shared among two also KDE-based applications. Read More

For the third time, the town of Osnabrück was the place for a lot of KDE PIM hackers to hold their annual meeting, kindly hosted by Intevation. While the participants were primarily focused on fixing bugs and getting the various PIM applications in shape for the KDE 3.4 release, some discussions also targeted post-3.4 development. Read More

Almost unnoticed, our favorite Desktop Environment has turned eight. This posting by a young and daring student called Matthias Ettrich started it all. Since then, KDE has come a long way. It did not only evolve technically, but also has one of the greatest communities, where people are not only terribly productive but friends. Thanks to all contributors and happy birthday KDE! Read More

In a longstanding tradition of fostering the KDE web of trust, this year's KDE World Summit in Ludwigsburg will again offer another opportunity to get your PGP key signed by numerous KDE developers. Conducted by KDE veteran Matthias "Kalle" Dalheimer, a keysigning session will take place on Monday 23th. Read More

In its current issue Linux Magazine published an article (PDF) about playlist management with JuK. For starters: JuK is KDE's outstanding playlist-based jukebox application with a lot of unique and powerful features. The article talks about playlist management, advanced tag guessing with musicbrainz and how to keep your music collection consistant easily. Author Scott Wheeler has also been interviewed earlier by Andreas C. Diekmann. Read More

The KDE Germany Team was exhibiting the KDE team's achievements at the world's largest computer trade show CeBIT in Hannover, Germany from 18.03 - 24.03. Hosted at the booth of Linup-Front, the team presented KDE 3.2 as well as a recent developer snapshot of KDE PIM on an Athlon64 system. Most people asked to see the KDE/Qt integration for OpenOffice.org and GTK as well as Kontact. They were impressed to learn how fast KDE is implementing the promise to become the "Integrative Desktop Environment" that lets you use a wide variety of popular applications while still maintaining consistency in look and -to some extent- even feel. Another focus of interest was KIOSK, which is now even easier to handle thanks to Kiosk Tool. Read on for the full story about KDE at CeBIT 2004. Read More

Chemnitzer Linux-Tag 2004, Germany's second largest Linux community event takes place March 6 and 7 on the campus of the University of Technology in Chemnitz, Germany. Other than offering an exhibition, workshops and talks, it will also be the hosting platform for a meeting of members of the KDE PIM team as well as members from the groupware projects eGroupware, Exchange4Linux, Kolab, and OpenGroupware. KDE will also have a booth in the exhibition area. Read More

Last year in January, Intevation invited the KDE PIM team to a meeting for a hackfest to their offices at Osnabrueck. This was such a great success, that everyone was glad Intevation invited several European KDE PIM team members a second time exactly one year later to polish and fix up Kontact and its components for the upcoming KDE 3.2 release. Last year the big decision was to make Kontact the successor to KolabClient. This year the plan was to make a a roadmap for future KDE-PIM Development. The developers took the opportunity to discuss complicated issues in detail and sit together for brainstorming or in order to fight evil bugs. Read More

Continuing the successful run of trade show presences, the KDE team used the opportunity of this year's Linux World Expo and Conference in Frankfurt, Germany to show off the latest K Desktop Environment. The booth staff presented the latest KDE pre 3.2 snapshots hot off CVS as well as the last stable release KDE 3.1, to a broad audience ranging from home users to system administrators, professional developers, IT managers and government representatives. The most common question from booth visitors: "I can't wait for 3.2 to be released, can you tell me the exact release date?" Read More

German-based relevantive AG, specialized in software and web usability, have released the English version (executive summary) of their Linux Usability Report today. The GNU/Linux setup was a SuSE 8.2 Professional with KDE 3.1.2 desktop and OpenOffice.org preconfigured by the experts of basysKom to resemble a typical corporate setup. The study is based on a broad test conducted with 60 people who had previous Windows knowledge but had never used Windows XP. For comparison, 20 other people were asked to try Windows XP for the first time. Both are possible migration scenarios as support for Windows NT is being dropped. The study is independent, as it was conducted without a client order. Read More

After a long phase of testing and bugfixing, Kolab, the result of the Kroupware project, has finally been announced. Kolab is a groupware solution that offers email, group calendaring, notes and tasks. Kolab Server is available as 1.0, the KDE Kolab Client is provided in an improved 1.0.1 version. Additionally, the Kolab Server can also be used with Microsoft Outlook™. This makes it an ideal tool for migrations to the GNU/Linux platform. Read More

The Nové Hrady program committee is proud to announce the schedule for the conference program of the KDE Contributor Conference 2003. From now on only minor changes are expected to happen. Conference registration for all attendees is still possible until 29th July. Companies are invited to support KDE and the conference with their attendance. If you're a KDE contributor and want to join the subsequent hackfest please drop an email to eva@kde.org. Also note that there will be a keysigning party on Monday. Read about the required preparations if you plan to attend the keysigning. Read More

As always, the KDE Team participated in this year's LinuxTag which took place in Karlsruhe, Germany. LinuxTag is a platform for Free Software projects and Linux related companies with an exhibition area and a wide range of talks. With more than 19,500 visitors, this year's LinuxTag has become the largest Linux event in the world. Even away from the KDE booth, there was a lot of KDE stuff to see. (Update: Pictures of KDE/GNOME dinner added.) Read More

For those of you who have been anxious: You can now register for the Nove Hrady conference ("Kastle"). The Kastle info pages have been updated to contain more details about arrival, departure and accommodation. Remember that places are limited, so better hurry! Active contributors do of course have precedence. Companies that would like to send employees to the event to learn about KDE development firsthand can find information here. Don't let this opportunity pass you by! Read More

In the past, the KDE infrastructure has several times suffered from extended downtime of our websites and mailinglists. That was due to the fact that master.kde.org ailed from old and failing hardware. Forget the past, and welcome our new master: ktown.kde.org! Read More