KDE.news 

On February 9th 2010 the KDE community released the a new major version of the KDE Software Compilation to the world. As this provided an excellent excuse for throwing a good party, the last 7 weeks have seen hundreds of KDE enthusiasts gather at over thirty release parties around the world. Most parties featured demos and talks about the new release and the majority included beer, other drinks, food (including KDE cake!), some had karaoke and all of them were about meeting cool people and having some fun.

Read the full announcement for more information on this beta and look in the changelog for details.

KDE will begin accepting student applications on March 29th, and interested students should check out the KDE Community wiki for a list of potential ideas. Of course, individual ideas not on that page are encouraged as well, so submitting a proposal based on a new KDE application or feature is great as well.

This is the first article in a series of articles that wrap up achievements, work in progress and some background of what happened during Tokamak4, the Oxygen, KWin and Plasma sprint. Tokamak4 took place from 19th to 26th February 2010 in Nürnberg, Germany in the openSUSE premises and was kindly made possible by Novell and KDE e.V. During the sprint, 26 hackers gathered to work on various aspects of the KDE user experience. The combined sprint of the workspace and window manager teams and the Oxygen artwork team made cross-collaboration possible across these KDE software components.

The KDE and GNOME communities are looking for a host for the Desktop Summit 2011, the combined annual conference featuring KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC events. Following up on the successful Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the second edition of the combined event in 2011 will be the premier place to learn about, discuss, and work on free software on the desktop.

Oh and a new Amarok Insider is out with some tips and tricks including how to search your music collection easily.

It's Sunday now in Deventer and, except for Lukas Tvrdy, all Krita hackers have gone home -- or, in the case of your author, stayed home. Time for tea and writing a recap of the whole sprint and hackfest!

Part of the repositioning of the KDE brands was choosing an appropriate 'KDE Software Label' for developers working on applications outside the main KDE Software Compilation. Technology developed by KDE is used far and wide, as can be witnessed on kde-apps.org and other sites. Some of these applications are developed by people closely entrenched in the KDE community, others by developers who just happened to like KDE technology and don't feel part of the KDE community in any big way. To allow authors to express their connection to the KDE community, the KDE community has chosen three appropriate labels.

The KDE España association is organizing Akademy-es 2010 in collaboration with Itsas (the Free Software group of the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU) and the Department of Culture of the Basque Goverment. This event gathers contributors to and users of KDE software and will be held in the Engineering Technical School of Bilbao from the 7th to the 9th of May.

Berlin, probably one of the most frequented KDE hacking locations in the world, saw another hack sprint from 13th to 21st of February. This time four of the KDevelop and five of the Kate developers shared a week of very productive programming. Additionally team members from Okteta and KDE on Windows joined the meeting.