KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Added support for images in the "Pastebin" Plasma applet, drag and drop support added to the "Quick Launch" Plasmoid. All comic providers for the "Comic" Plasmoid moved to kde-files.org to be solely accessible through the GetHotNewStuff mechanism. Security improvements in KWallet. Support for Mono-based KIO-slaves. Addition of a historic map (from 1689) display to Marble. Improvements in scripting in KTorrent. Experiments to allow acquiring images using the TWAIN interface under Windows in kipi-plugins (Digikam, etc). A small Konqueror NEPOMUK annotation plugin, enabling annotation of web pages. A new NEPOMUK Search KRunner in Plasma, added straight to kdebase/workspace. "Partition Manager" moved from playground/sysadmin to kdereview. Kolor Manager configuration panel imported into playground/graphics. Following work on statistics, support for importing cached album art from Amarok 1.4 into Amarok 2, with new and improved library-based last.fm interface code imported. Amarok 2.0 Beta 3 (1.94), KDevelop 4 Alpha 3, and KDE 4.1.3 tagged for release.Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

KDE 4 saw the introduction of NEPOMUK, the foundations for the "Social Semantic Desktop". The idea behind Semantic desktops is to make it possible for computers to identify meaningful relations between files and real-world people and relationships. These relations can then be exploited to help the user find their data. Read the full MIT Technology Review article on the project to learn why it "might be the semantic desktop that actually survives" and see how its inclusion in KDE is making it accessible to end users during its development process, and read on for a brief overview of how NEPOMUK works. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for MTP devices, a script-based integration of the "Free Music Charts", and beginnings of a "first run tutorial" added to Amarok 2. More steps towards supporting other planets than Earth in Marble. GetHotNewStuff support in the "Comic" applet, a configurable auto refresh interval in the "Web Browser" applet, and a first version of a configurable "Pastebin" applet in Plasma. KsCD is connected to the "Now Playing" applet using D-Bus. Support for Python-based Plasmoids. QEdje's wallpaper plugin reaches an almost-working stage. Shade and unshade buttons added to the Oxygen window decoration, with a new scrollbar design in the Oxygen widget style. RESTful web service access possible in Lokarest framework. Improvements in the Details view of Dolphin. Source Browser usability improvements, and less interface lockups in KDevelop. Work on a GeoNames annotation plugin for NEPOMUK. Support for refreshing diffs in Kompare. New syndication plugin (superceding the RSS plugin) added to KTorrent. Spellchecking returns to Lokalise. Initial commits to KPackageKit. Kapman moves from kdereview to kdegames. "System-monitor" Plasmoid moves to kdereview. Continued porting of KDETV to KDE4. Import of a first version of the Skype text protocol for Kopete, ported to KDE4. KNewsTicker removed as superceded by Plasma-based RSS applets. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

openSUSE 11.1 is now out (screenshots), featuring KDE 4.1.3 and a string of KDE improvements. The release brings back the much-loved KDE-PIM suite, and includes new games, the KSCD CD player, KSystemLog to keep track of system changes, improvements to Dolphin, Konqueror (including Webkit part), Plasma (including auto-hide panel, folder view), Marble integration with OpenStreetMap, and much more. The release is available as an installable live CD, or on a DVD with KDE 3.5.10, GNOME, Xfce, and many more applications. Read More

Today is the day of beta releases: Qt Software has released betas of Qt 4.5 and Qt Creator — two Qt releases just in time for the holidays! Read More

Two days later than initially scheduled due to yours truly preparing for coming year's desktop summit on Gran Canaria, KDE's release team has made availabe KDE 4.1.85, a.k.a. KDE 4.2-Beta2 to testers and reviewers, codenamed "Canaria". KDE 4.1.85 is not suitable for production use but meant to invite feedback and bugreports from the community. The KDE community is in massive bugfixing mode, showing a focus on stability and feature-completeness in the KDE 4.2 series. But behold, 4.1.85 is not a boring release. It brings many visible improvements to KDE 4.1, and will ultimately follow up the KDE 4.1 series as a stable release this coming January. So get your testing gear ready and help us squash those bugs for a 4.2.0 that makes Redmond see flying chairs all over. There's a changelog over at TechBase, and the brave and bored can go for the more detailed feature plan. As 4.1.85 is the last release before Christmas, we strongly recommend using Wade's Christmas wallpapers and the KWin compositing snow plugin while testing. Read More

After two years of intense development, Amarok 2 has become a reality! Some of the highlights that are included in the 2.0 release are a completely redesigned user interface, tight integration with online services such as Magnatune, Jamendo, MP3tunes, Last.fm and Shoutcast. There is an overhauled scripting API and plugin support to allow better integration into Amarok. Much of the work has gone into migration from the KDE 3 to KDE 4 framework using core technologies such as Solid, Phonon, and Plasma. Read more about the new release in the release announcement and start Amaroking! Read More

KDE4Daily is an attempt to lower the barrier to entry for people who would like to test KDE trunk in the run-up to 4.2, consisting of a Qemu VM image containing a Kubuntu 8.10 base and a comprehensive set of a self-compiled KDE4 modules from KDE trunk (all at r888587, initially), along with an updater system inside the VM itself. After an unusually rocky round of development, it is time to (finally!) announce the release of KDE4Daily 4.2! Read More

Moving towards the 2.0 release with monthly increments of improvement-goodness, the KOffice team has once more honoured its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the time is right for a release-candidate release. So, before the news of the previous beta has had a chance to scroll off the Dot news page, we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across the board. Incremental as it is, we think it is a genuine and important step towards a final release. So here it is: full announcement and changelog. Read More

On Saturday 29th of November 2008 LinuxDay was held for the 10th time already in Dornbirn, Austria. Organised by the LUG Vorarlberg in cooperation with HTL Dornbirn, the well-received event is a platform for open source projects to answer questions and show off their latest and greatest versions to a broad public, but also for the students at the HTL Dornbirn to show what they achieved and created by using software libre. KDE was there to show off KDE 4. Read More