KDE.news 

Stephen Kelly

When did you first hear about KDE? I first heard about KDE when I installed Fedora Core 5 in March 2006. It was my first encounter with linux and during the setup I installed both KDE and GNOME environments. In the end I used the KDE desktop more so I stuck with that.

Recently the KDE PIM team had one of their regular face-to-face sprints. 15 developers met in the KDAB offices in Berlin for discussions, API review, development, and of course, community building (free dinner \o/!). The schedule shows the breadth of topics covered at the meeting, ranging from Nepomuk widgets to bugfixing. The focus in this meeting was stabilising and planning for the upcoming 4.5 release cycle. Apart from the regular members of the KDE PIM team, the meeting was also attended by two members of the MeeGo development team who are already using KCal and wish to work upstream in KDE with some modifications and improvements.

Every year, the KDE community in Spain organizes a local Akademy event: Akademy-es. This year's event was held in Bilbao from 7th to 9th of May. The event gathered around 80 KDE contributors, users and Free Software enthusiasts from all over Spain and even people from other countries such as France and Ireland.

KDE has issued another update to the 4.4 desktop, applications and development libraries. KDE SC 4.4.4 brings, in addition to its funny version number, mainly small bugfixes that further polish the user experience. Most notable are probably sorting fixes for natural sorting in Dolphin, our nice file manager.

The KOffice team is very happy to announce the arrival of KOffice 2.2.0, half a year after version 2.1 was released. This release brings an unprecedented number of new features and bugfixes as can be seen in the full list of changes.

KDE has released a first test version of the released that will be out this summer, in August. KDE SC 4.5.0 is targeted at testers and those that would like to have an early look at what's coming to their desktops and netbooks this summer. KDE is now firmly in beta mode, meaning that the primary focus is on fixing bugs and preparing the stable release of the software compilation this summer.

The Call for Locations for Camp KDE 2011 has been posted. If you are interested in Camp KDE 2011 being in your city, check out that page and send the requested information to the Camp KDE Organisers at campkde-organizers(at)kde.org. We look forward to seeing you in January!

Welcome back again to the KDE Interview series. Last time we spoke with Thiago Macieira, one of the old timers in KDE development.

Today we feature Thomas McGuire, the KMail maintainer. Italian readers may prefer the original interview.

Knut's got talent

Tonight is the final and Knut has made it to the last few contestants. The streets of Oslo will be silent as everyone will be eagerly watching the Norwegian Ant and Dec introduce the acts. Will Knut triumph or will the judges buzz him out? KDE will be backing him all the way.

KDE and FSFE drew in the crowds

The booth was rarely empty: all kinds of people, from small children (fascinated by Big Buck Bunny looping in a window) to seasoned Linux users (at least one of whom we could help by showing her how to make KMail behave) came by and stayed for a while to watch and talk. The team explained how the free-as-in-freedom aspect could help build a more just and equal world and how the free-as-in-beer aspect was useful for a tight church budget. In fact, the monetary question often didn't even come up as the social question was already reason enough for most people to be interested.