Rjohnson 

Qt Centre is announcing its second edition of their Qt Programming Contest. This contest is focused around the Qt and Qtopia communities and starts today and continues until September 30th. This year's categories include collaboration, education, project management, automation, demo, plasmoid, and newcomer. If you are interested in reading more about this contest then please review the contest page and the contest rules. Read More

Ars Technica is reporting on the tagging of KDE 4.0.0 in an article titled, "KDE 4.0.0 tagged in preparation for release." In this report, Ars Technica briefly explains the importance of the tagging process as well as what one can expect with the upcoming KDE 4.0.0 release. "Although the 4.0 release has many rough edges, it also showcases a tremendous number of innovative new features and technologies." 4.0 is scheduled for release at the end of next week. Read More

"Born last millenium", KDE and openSUSE's very own Stephan Binner gets interviewed for this week's People of openSUSE. Stephan talks about his beginnings starting with a Commodore 64 with Ghostbusters, to today's hacking on KDE and openSUSE. "During my studies I maintained the KDE installation on the faculty’s Solaris network (most played day-time game then was XBlast) and started in 2001 to directly contribute to KDE (C++ programming and other stuff)." Read More

The Radio Amarok Team is looking for a new design, and they have decided to leave it up to you on how it should look. *** Bruce Byfield, of Datamation has written a several page article titled, 12 Tips for KDE Users. Bruce covers the KDE Printer Dialogue to using Klipper and configuring virtual desktops. *** Asustek Computer Inc's KDE based low-cost laptop, the Eee PC, nearly sold out its first day on sale in Taipei according to the article Eee PC posts hot sales on first day in Taipei. *** Need a new book for the holidays? Look no further than Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt: The Definitive Guide to PyQt Programming, by Mark Summerfield. This book is aimed at a much broader audience than the author's C++/Qt books and is also a great introduction to GUI programming and the Qt 4 libraries in general. This book is now available on Amazon. *** Rudd-O looks at KDE 4 Beta 3 and has a cursory look into Dolphin. Read More

Within the past couple of weeks two Linux distributions came out with new releases, featuring the K Desktop Environment. On October 9th, Mandriva Linux 2008 released their latest version to the masses. KDE 3.5.7 and Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 are just a couple of the updates with this latest release. Head on over and take a Mandriva Linux 2008 Tour. On October 18th, Kubuntu 7.10 was released, marking its 6th major release. Kubuntu includes the last KDE 3.5.8, making it the first distribution to release the 8th maintenance update to the KDE 3.5 branch. There were many other updates in this latest release as well. Mandriva is the first distribution to include QtJambi, while Kubuntu adds Qyoto C# bindings. Read More

LinuxWorld.com.au spoke with our very own Sebastian Kügler, and is reporting about the future of porting KDE 4 and its applications to Windows in an article titled KDE's Windows Weapon: KOffice 2.0. "With OpenOffice.org receiving a lion's share of commercial support and market awareness for a free office suite, KOffice 2.0 has the potential to challenge its dominance with innovative features and a leaner code base." The article discusses the pros and cons of porting free software to proprietary platforms noting, "there is a community building around KDE on Windows and KDE e.V. sponsored a meeting to help people get the port to Windows going." Read More

...but now Blue-GNU is showing you the way with Kontact, in an article titled Stay In the Know With KDE's Kontact. The author says "I finally settled on Kontact to keep me in touch with the reality of my hectic daily schedule." Blue-GNU breaks down their use of each application integrated into Kontact, starting with KMail and then going through KAddressBook, KOrganizer, and KNotes. It concludes, "...Kontact is one of the best PIMs I've seen. I even prefer it to Outlook, which I used to prefer over the GNU/Linux tools in the past." Read More

LWN.net has taken a look at the world via Marble in an article titled Geographic display and input using Marble. Impressed with the fact that Marble is only 9MB in size, does not require OpenGL or any high-end hardware support and has a future with embedded devices, games and the incorporation of OpenStreetMap data, LWN.net speaks highly of the 0.4 release, and even provides a little information on what you can expect with the 0.5 release. "...unlike the others, it does not rely upon enormous data sets accessed via the internet; it is, instead, self-contained and fairly lightweight." Read More

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. Read More