KDE.news 

The first Nigerian conference on Free and Open Source Software was held this week in Kano, Nigeria. The conference featured local speakers, consultants, network engineers, system administrators and academics, and international guests from KDE for three days at Bayero University of Kano. Over 500 students and professionals attended, filling the hall to capacity.

The honourable commissioner for science and technology Dr Bashir Galadanci opened the conference on Friday morning, referring to his experiences with Free Software in Italy in the 1990s; he expressed hope for the future of Free Software in Nigeria and encouraged all those present to develop their technical skills. The director of the Centre for Information Technology, Dr. Muntari Hajara Ali, echoed these sentiments and stressed that the attendees are in the forefront of the effort to domesticate IT and giving Free and Open Source software a place in the Nigerian economy.

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In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: An example Phonon-based video player in 5 lines of javascript code. Beginnings of a D-Bus interface for the Plasma "System Tray" daemon. Start of support for retrieving contacts from Akonadi through the Plasma DataEngine. Improvements in the "Converter" and "System Monitor" Plasmoids. Continued development of multi-language spellchecking support in Sonnet. Support for "hybrid suspension" in Solid. Continued development of Amarok 2, including filtering by date. Further work on LinTV. Support for recordings added to Kaffeine. A new puzzle table texture selector in Palapeli. Consistent keyboard shortcuts added to all KIPI import/export plugins (used by Digikam, Gwenview, etc). Hover buttons to rotate left and right added to KRuler. Foundations for a microblog resource for Twitter and Identi.ca. Initial 7z plugin added to Ark. Various SVG import improvements in Karbon. Get Hot New Stuff (linked to kde-look.org) support added to deKorator. Various polishing in KWin-Composite. Search capabilities (matching System Settings) added to the KDE 4 port of KControl. The "Calendar" Plasma DataEngine moves to kdebase. KTron moves from playground/games to kdereview. Import of KALEngine to playground/games. Initial import of Blazer, a "simple desktop shell for use with thin clients and virtualized remote desktops", and "a KIO-slave listing the network from a device centric point of view" to KDE SVN. Read More

The Amarok team is proud to announce the release of Amarok 2.0.2, codenamed "Only Time Will Tell". It is a maintenance release that fixes some critical bugs while we are working hard on the next major version. A list of all changes can be found in the release announcement.
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The KOffice developers have released their seventh beta for KOffice 2.0. This release may be the last of the many betas. A decision on whether there will be another beta or if the next version will be the first Release Candidates will be made next week. Read More

It has been a little more than a month since you were able to install the latest and greatest KDE on release day. Today is another one of those with KDE 4.2.1 (codenamed "Cream") hitting the shelves. Read More

Qt Software has made Qt 4.5 and the Qt Creator 1.0 IDE available for download. For the first time, Qt SDK is available, a convenient bundle of the two. Qt Software will be opening up their development process by making it easier for people to contribute patches and add-ons in the forthcoming weeks. Both Qt and Creator now come with the an LGPL licensing option along with the current GPL and commercial licenses. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Amarok 2 reached cue sheet feature parity with Amarok 1.4, a first draft of a playlist layout config editor, and various other improvements across Amarok. C# bindings for Phonon. Beginnings of an effort to deliver a working debugger for KDevelop 4.0. Write support added to kio_svn. A Kross scripting backend, and Postgres support is added to Kamala. An initial D-Bus interface added to parts of Marble. Further development work on KHotKeys and the LionMail widget. Text-to-speech support added to the Translatoid Plasmoid, and a new Plasma widget: Fortunoid (fortune quotes). Continued improvements to Sonnet and KWin. Progress on the Virtuoso backend for NEPOMUK. Basic support for importing for SVG patterns in Karbon. Work on porting KControl and Konversation to KDE 4. Initial import of the "Peg-E" game, a "Google data Akonadi resource", KDE 4 versions of the SLP KIO-slave and Filelight, and "plasma2jolie". The Nuvola iconset moves back to kdeartwork from an unmaintained state. Eigen 2.0.0 is tagged for release. Read More

In the latest People Behind KDE interview, we cover someone who has been with us for a long time. Alternately known as "Evil Genius" or "Rock Star with an International Fan Club". He still has his plushy lion, but has to now rectify his work on KWin with a dislike of fancy graphics and reveals the story behind his blue hair appearance. These are the publishable parts from our interview with our current star of People Behind KDE: Luboš Luňák. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Initial support for adding video and audio previewing (similar to the file dialog) to Dolphin's metadata panel. A new "highlight window" effect for KWin-Composite. Filtering support in the "FileWatcher" Plasmoid, work on the "Welcome" Plasmoid, and initial import of "OpenBrain" and "Translatoid" Plasma widgets. Experiments to make a screensaver using KGLEngine. First approach on integrating an "interactive graphs concept" in KAlgebra. Initial code for an object-oriented KTurtle. Initial work on a 3D view completed in Kolf NG (a rewrite effort). Improvements in ReplayGain and bookmark support in Amarok 2. Major improvements to the Facebook photo download/import KIPI plugin (used in Digikam, Gwenview, etc). Support for LZMA decompression added to Strigi. More work on porting Konversation to KDE 4. Work on KPackageKit and the "DynaDraw" painting mode of Krita. Start of work on a Kexi-ODBC bridge. Fixes of many "release critical" bugs for the "Chart" shape in KOffice. Initial import of LinTV. Restart of development work on automatic language detection and switching for Sonnet. KTorrent 3.2 Release Candidate 1, and KDevelop 3.9.91 (first beta) are tagged for release. Read More