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Today, the KDE team invites interested testers and reviewers to give KDE 4.2.0-Beta1 a go. The release announcement lists some significant improvements. The purpose of this release is to get feedback from the community, preferably in the form of bugreports on the new bugs.kde.org bugtracker. Beta1 offers critical features like the Eyes applet (an XEyes clone), but also a more streamlined user experience all over the workspace and applications. With the KDE team being in bug fixing frenzy after the recent hard feature freeze, now is the time to help us smoothing the release for your pleasure starting in January. Read More

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Change" (also known as KDE 4.1.3), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. Change is a monthly update to KDE 4.1. The info page points to the sources and the distros quick with their packaging: Debian, Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read More

The KDE Community today launches the new KDE Forum. The new forum uses the bulletin board software MyBB offering users, developers and people interested in KDE a place to help each other, discuss KDE-related topics and exchange ideas. The KDE Forum complements KDE's UserBase, the home for KDE users as a valuable support resource. Read More

Two days later than initially planned, "Codename" (or more traditionally KDE 4.1.2) was released just a few minutes ago. The delay was caused by binary incompatibility issues in the branch. Those have been resolved so we are now looking at a stable release. 4.1.2 is another one of those monthly bug fix and translation updates. No new features are allowed into the 4.x/ branches, so no new features went into KDE 4.1.2, but some nice bug fixes instead. David Faure has fixed a long-standing and annoying performance issue when deleting files using KIO, so you can now accidentally delete your home directory 32 times faster For the more faint-hearted, it will also work well with other files. You can read about all the changes that went into Codename in the changelog which offers links to the comprehensive SVN log files. KDE 4.1.2 is a recommended upgrade for everybody running KDE 4. The next feature release of the KDE workspace and applications will be in January 2009 when 4.2.0 will be upon you. Read More

After last week's update to the KDE 3.5 series, today's KDE release updates the stable KDE 4.1 branch to KDE 4.1.1. It bears the codename "Cebidae" referring to an in-joke often made during Akademy 2008. With only a good month of development time -- and Akademy in between -- the changelog is still impressively long. Pretty much all applications have received the developers' attention, resulting in a long list of bugfixes and improvements. Read More

The KDE community has finalised another update to the 3.5 series. While not a very exciting release, 3.5.10 brings numerous bugfixes and translation updates to those who choose to stay with KDE 3.5. The fixes are thinly spread across KPDF with a number of crash fixes, KGPG and probably most interesting various fixes in Kicker, KDE 3's panel. Read More

Free Software Foundation Europe welcomes the adoption of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement by the KDE project. The FLA is a copyright assignment that allows Free Software projects to assign their copyright to a single organisation or person. This enables projects to ensure their legal maintainability, including important issues such as preserving the ability to re-license and certainty to have sufficient rights to enforce licences in court. Read on for more details. Read More

On Monday at Akademy, KDE's yearly world summit, the KDE e.V. held its general assembly, covering a wide range hot topics, regarding licensing and community scalability. While part of the meeting is dictated by intricacies of German association law, the AGM also provides a way of effectively solving issues arising in the KDE community and deciding on ways to move forward as an organisation. This year's KDE e.V. General Assembly endorsed a Code of Conduct, the Community Working Group and a Fiduciary License Agreement for KDE contributors. Read More

Fabrizio Montesi of italianaSoftware showed at Akademy how JOLIE brings new ways of interaction through the network to KDE. One of his examples is the ECOS media controller that organises control of your multimedia player (in our case that's Amarok of course) through web interfaces, handheld devices and other applications. JOLIE takes care of synchronising and concerting all those different interfaces. Read on for more details. Read More

In the final presentation of the talk days at KDE's yearly world summit, Akademy 2008, the KDE-PIM hackers surprised the KDE community with a couple of announcements, covering nearly all aspects of PIM-related data handling. After demonstrating the Kontact suite on Windows and Mac OS during this year's LinuxTag, the KDE-PIM team continues to raise the bar for competitors on the enterprise desktop. Read on for more details. Read More

At Akademy 2008 in Belgium, Qt developers Simon Hausmann and Andreas Aardal Hanssen announced dramatic improvements in the web browser engine in Qt and the canvas that is used by, for example, the Plasma desktop shell. Video support, animations and transitions, optimisations to speed up painting and animations, and new graphical effects open up nearly endless new possibilities for developers to present their user interfaces with. Read on for more details. Read More

6 months after the release of KDE 4.0, the KDE community today announced the released of the second feature release in the KDE 4 era. Lots of changes have gone into this release and the KDE community hopes to be able to make most early-adopting users happy with this release. Lots of feedback from people trying out KDE 4.0 has gone into KDE 4.1, filling most of the gaps people experienced with the 4.0 releases. Highlights of KDE 4.1 are the KDE PIM suite, which has returned in its KDE 4 incarnation, a more mature Plasma desktop and many, many new features and applications. Make sure to take some time to read through the high-level changelog or even the more detailed feature plan on Techbase. Before you try KDE 4.1, please read the KDE4 End User FAQ and make an educated guess whether KDE 4.1 is for you. Read More

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page. KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th. Read More

As a response to recent negativity on the Internet, we've been working with Groklaw to get a story running detailing facts about questions such as "Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake", "I am forced to use the kickoff menu", "The whole KDE4 desktop interface is radically new". among others. Thanks go out to Pamela Jones for giving the KDE community a chance to rectify certain points that have recently been said in public. This way, we hope to make it easier for journalists to put KDE's direction, recent decisions and put simple myths into the right light. Read More

The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade. "The GNOME community is very excited about the co-hosted GUADEC and Akademy" says Behdad Esfahbod, president at the GNOME foundation, "GUADEC has traditionally been a very important chance for our community to meet in person, build great working relationships and make new friends. We're looking forward to having the opportunity to extend those relationships to our KDE colleagues at Akademy/GUADEC." KDE e.V.'s vice-president Adriaan de Groot adds "KDE e.V. is looking forward to a co-located conference, where the GNOME and KDE communities can mingle and cooperate as never before in one location. Gran Canaria is uniquely located at the junction of Europe and Africa, close to the Americas and is a fitting place for a historic 'meet-your-neighbours' conference." Read More

Another milestone on the road towards KDE 4.1 has been packaged and put online for testing. The release notes highlight some features in Dolphin and Gwenview, as well as additional information on where to get the release, make sure you also check your distributor's websites as well. While there are some bugs left, the release already works quite solidly on most people's machines. Performance problems on NVidia chips remain, but we are confident that those will be solved by the teams over at NVidia in one of the next releases of their graphics driver. In KDE 4.1, there is also some preliminary Mac and Windows support coming up. Several apps can be tried by a wider audience on those proprietary platforms this summer already. On the side of Free operating systems, support for OpenSolaris is coming along nicely, but is not free of bugs yet. Read More

The KDE Community has today made available the fifth update to KDE 4.0. Although the changelog is not particularly long, the release should be worthwhile to upgrade to. KWin (according to some pronounced "quinn" instead of Kay-Win) has gotten some clipping fixes, also some dim and fade effects work on cards that can only do compositing via XRender. Juk, the lightweight music player has received some fixes regarding keyboard shortcuts, playback and cover art. Kopete, the instant messenger in 4.0.5 has some crashes fixed. The changelog has the details (although probably not all bugfixes have been recorded here). Overall, we expect to make the users' experience with this release a bit nicer. Read More

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. Read More

Another month, another update to the KDE 4.0 series. This time, we are presenting KDE 4.0.4, dubbed File-Not-Found to the audience. KDE 4.0.4 brings improvements to KHTML, Okular and various other components. We recommend that people who are already running KDE 4.0 releases update to 4.0.4. The emphasis of this release lies, as usual in stabilising, bugfixing, performance improvements and updated translations -- no new features. The developers have again squashed quite some bugs which you can find some of in the changelog. With this release, the KDE community continues to support the KDE 4.0 series that has been released for brave users earlier this year. KDE 4.1, to be released this summer (in the northern-hemisphere) will bring new features and applications. KDE 4.1 is based on the recently released Qt 4.4 while KDE 4.0.4 is still based on Qt 4.3 as is the case with the whole KDE 4.0 series. So put on your update shoes and install 4.0.4 today. Read More

The KDE Community is happy to announce the first preview for the upcoming KDE 4.1, due in late July. KDE 4.1 is based on Qt 4.4's goodness, bringing performance improvements, WebKit, widgets-on-canvas and other goodies. Also new is Dragon Player, a KDE 4 port of the codeine video player which is famous for its simplicity and ease of use. KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 ships with Akonadi, the new data storage framework for our beloved PIM applications. KDE-PIM will also see its first KDE 4 release with 4.1, but is not yet based on Akonadi. More planned and already implemented features can be found in the KDE 4.1 Feature Plan. The Plasma desktop shell has just undergone major surgery, so expect some additional breakage there. Read More

Tokamak, the first International meeting of Plasma was held in Milano in northern Italy over the last weekend. 14 people joined the fun and spent some days hacking on the KDE 4 desktop shell. For the most part, it was like meeting friends, only that some had never met each other in person before. The meeting was filled with small sessions, such as discussing target users for Plasma to optimise the Plasma interface for. Topics were target users, underlying technology, scripting, integration with other parts, webservice integration, visual presentation, porting of Plasma to new technology in Qt, Italian profanity and how everybody loves pizza. Read More

KDE e.V and Wikimedia Deutschland have opened a shared office in Frankfurt, Germany and have hired a joint employee for administration. As two charitable organisations that share similar cultural goals and organisational challenges, they hope that working out of the same space will strengthen and expand their links to the Free Culture community, as well as allowing them to share resources, experience and infrastructure. Read More

The third bugfix release of the KDE 4.0 series is available. KDE 4.0 is mainly targeted at users who live on the bleeding edge. As a dot-oh release it might have its rough edges. The KDE Community releases a service update for this series once a month to make those bleeding edge users' lives easier. The changelog for KDE 4.0.3 is, although not complete, quite impressive. Especially KHTML and with it the Konqueror webbrowser have seen great improvements in both, stability and performance. Read More

Sirius' Tom Callway interviews KDE's chief-hugger Aaron Seigo. He talks about KDE 4, communication within the project and what effect the 'new platforms' (Windows and Mac OS) have on KDE development. Seigo also talks about the KDE 4.0 release and how that compares to the 2.0 and 3.0 releases of KDE. About Kontact, he explains, "We are going to see some very interesting developments happening when Kontact is available on all platforms. For instance, finally there will be a groupware solution that looks and behaves exactly the same on all platforms (a support win) that lets you choose your groupware server (a server side win). Kontact represents the client side of the first realistically competitive threat to the Exchange-plus-Outlook hegemony. And that's just one application." Read More

Our friends over at OpenUsability have just started a call for students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design or related subjects for the Season of Usability. Season of Usability is a project that offers mentoring students that want to work on usability aspects of various projects, including KDE. Students are offered a stipend worth $US1000. KDE is involved in the Season of Usability with three possible stipends, two for students who want to work on the KDE 4 Human Interface Guidelines, another project aims for improving the toolbox and palette interaction KOffice. Read More

The KDE community has released another update to its cutting edge KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.2 has, along with the bugfixes some new features in Plasma. The panel can now be configured to sit somewhere else than at the bottom and UI options for changing its size have been added. Do not let yourself be distracted by those new things, there are also plenty of bugfixes, performance improvements and translation updates in there, among which support for two new languages: Persian and Icelandic. KDE 4.0.2 is thus available in 49 whopping languages, and more are soon to come. More highlights include rendering improvements in KHTML and lots of bugfixes in Okular and Kopete. The KDE community hopes you enjoy this release which should be hitting your favourite packaging system soon. See the changelog for more updates and info page for download options. Read More

The 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Award winners have been announced. KDE leads the popularity list in the category Desktop Environment with a rocking 52% percent of the votes leaving competing contenders in its dust. Among the users on Linuxquestions.org, KDE is being praised for its high level of integration, for the number of applications and of course for Konqui being the cute mascot it is. But also KDE applications have been very popular among the voters on Linuxquestions.org. Read on for more details. Read More

The KDE e.V. welcomes a new Supporting Member, OSN Online Social Network GmbH, a company based in Düsseldorf in Germany. Supporting Members help the community with financial support, their contribution is used for example for sponsoring developer meetings you often read about on the Dot. *** The Nepomuk KDE project that is creating the social semantic desktop on top of KDE has launched its new website. Go there for numerous tutorials integrating Nepomuk features like "who sent me this file?". *** The German Kubuntu team has an interview with Amarok release dude, Harald Sitter. *** The team developing the Raptor-menu has just launched their website. Raptor aims to deliver a new launch menu for KDE. *** We were sent an interview with Hal Engel of LProf the only open source ICC profiler, made in Qt. *** FOSDEM is Europe's biggest Free Software conference and will be held this weekend in Brussels. See the KDE and Cross Desktop rooms for exciting talks and say hi to us at Friday's beer event. Read More

The KDE community is happy to announce another update for the KDE 3 branch. KDE 3.5.9 is the latest bugfix and translation update for those who cannot or do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet. While currently no subsequent release for KDE 3 is planned, we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future. Read More

While the world is still recovering from the work on KDE 4.0.0, we are ready to announce the release of KDE 4.0.1, the first bug fix update of the KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.1 contains numerous bugfixes such as stability improvements, performance improvements and, as in every point release, updated translations for most components. Lots of work has been put into shared components making the life of most applications easier. Particularly striking is also the high number of bugfixes in KHTML. Have a look at the change log for a more detailed, if maybe not 100% complete list of improvements. KDE 4.0.1 is already translated into 48 languages with more coming soon. Read More

Several years of design, development and testing came together today for the release of KDE 4.0. This is our most significant release in our 11 year history and marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the start of the KDE 4 era. Join us now in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate or come to the release event in person next week. Packages are available for all the major distributions with live CDs available currently from Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read on for details or take the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide to find your way around.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better powermanagement.

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