Recently it came to my attention that Chris Howells could not make the expo date next week to run the KDE booth, and I have taken over trying to sort something out in time so KDE is properly represented.

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.

Helio Chissini de Castro of Conectiva recently gave a KDE speech at Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and was kind enough to write up his experiences for the rest of us. In recent years, Rio Grande do Sul has become a GNU and consequently GNOME stronghold, so prepare yourself for an entertaining if not graphic read!

It is with sorrow that I have to inform you of the death of Alan Eldridge this weekend.
Alan, or 'alane' as he was known within the Open Source community, was a core member of the team which packages KDE for FreeBSD, and a respected member of the Open Source community outside of KDE.

The KDE Developers' Conference is a meeting of KDE contributors from
all over the world. It will feature three days of technical talks and
tutorials. Do you have a particular expertise related to KDE programming that
could be useful for your fellow developers? Do you want to present a
particular programming pattern, a tool, a development strategy, or
anything else that helps KDE developers become more productive? Then
consider talking about it or giving a tutorial at the KDE Developers'
Conference.

After Charles' report on Paris Linux Solution 2003, you can now read my own account of the event. The most interesting part is certainly the tea episode with Stallman, arranged by the French KDE team.

This is the first announcement of the official KDE Developer's
Conference 2003! The conference kicks off on Friday the 22nd of August and will take place at the Zamek
("Castle") in Nové Hrady (PDF) in the southern part of the Czech Republic in Central
Europe. Compared to previous KDE
conferences, this one will be bigger, in terms of number of
participants, scope and time. We will start with two days of
technical talks in at least two parallel tracks, and end with an

CeBIT 2003 kicks off tomorrow and as usual KDE will be present. The KDE team will be showcasing current developments scheduled for KDE 3.2, Rainer Endres will be giving a talk on KDE on the corporate desktop and Martin Konold will be presenting the latest and greatest on the KDE Kolab Groupware Solution.

The KDE Promo Team and kernel concepts are bringing you more shirts featuring your favourite desktop. The shirts are dark blue and feature an embroidered 4-color blue KDE gear about 5.5cm in size. They are available in polo shirt, t-shirt and girlie shirt versions. Polo shirts are especially targeted at KDE members who do public promotional work at expos and so on.

KDE-France held a booth at the Solutions Linux 2003 show in Paris recently. For an account of our activities as well as some pictures, be sure to check out our report.