KDE.news 

The KDE Community is happy to announce the first preview for the upcoming KDE 4.1, due in late July. KDE 4.1 is based on Qt 4.4's goodness, bringing performance improvements, WebKit, widgets-on-canvas and other goodies. Also new is Dragon Player, a KDE 4 port of the codeine video player which is famous for its simplicity and ease of use. KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 ships with Akonadi, the new data storage framework for our beloved PIM applications. KDE-PIM will also see its first KDE 4 release with 4.1, but is not yet based on Akonadi. More planned and already implemented features can be found in the KDE 4.1 Feature Plan. The Plasma desktop shell has just undergone major surgery, so expect some additional breakage there. Read More

Following our interview covering KDE in Japan last week, we now turn to South Korea. Cho Sung Jae tell us about the Korean KDE Users Group, including some of the problems of using KDE with Korean and just how fast their broadband is. Read More

Piacentini blogs from FISL with information on Brazil's Ministry of Education ProInfo project. The project provides computers and internet connectivity to as well as open content to students in public schools. They are using a Debian based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games and have deployed it in 29,000 labs with plans for a total of 53,000 labs by the end of next year. Read More

Google have announced the projects and students for this years Summer of Code. We received the biggest number of students allocated to a project with 47 taking part. Applications which will be worked on include Amarok, KOffice, Marble and entirely new features such as a collaborative text editor. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Complete source rewrite, with many improvements, in KInfoCenter. Important work on the "Quick Launch", "Folder View", and "RSSNOW" Plasma applets. Initial work towards future support for a list of timezones tooltip for the digital-clock Plasmoid. KMoon is obsoleted by the Plasma "Luna" applet. "Ozone", a fork of the Oxygen window decoration style which respects system colour preferences. Get Hot New Stuff support for icon themes in KDE. KNotify notifications interface now conforms to the Galago specification. Screen selection in "presentation" mode in Okular. Work on tooltips in Dolphin. Enhancements, including theming, for error pages in KHTML (Konqueror). WebKit adaptations for various applications with HTML rendering widgets. Support for the "Space Navigator" hardware device in KOffice. Work on duchain support for QMake in KDevelop. New "PIMOShell" tool for administration of data in NEPOMUK. Backup functionality and work on the system tray application in Akonadi. Initial import of WordKubes, and Parsek, a game implementing the Thousand Parsec framework. Various improvements in Kubrick, which moves from kdereview to kdegames. Skanlite moves from kdereview to extragear/graphics. KBoggle moves to the "unmaintained" module. Amarok 1.4.9, a bugfix edition fixing Amazon cover art downloading, is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Preparations for Akademy 2008 are in full swing, but KDE e.V. is already looking forward to next year and asks potential hosts to submit proposals for Akademy 2009. For the first time we also invite proposals to hold Akademy and GUADEC, the GNOME community conference, in the same location. More information can be found in the Call for Hosts for Akademy 2009 below or in the joint press release of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation. Read More

Tokamak, the first International meeting of Plasma was held in Milano in northern Italy over the last weekend. 14 people joined the fun and spent some days hacking on the KDE 4 desktop shell. For the most part, it was like meeting friends, only that some had never met each other in person before. The meeting was filled with small sessions, such as discussing target users for Plasma to optimise the Plasma interface for. Topics were target users, underlying technology, scripting, integration with other parts, webservice integration, visual presentation, porting of Plasma to new technology in Qt, Italian profanity and how everybody loves pizza. Read More

Despite their prominent position in the world as leaders of technology, we hear from oriental countries quite rarely in the free software world. To find out what happens to KDE in the East, we asked some questions to Daisuke Kameda (亀田 大輔) of the KDE Japan Users Group. Read More

The Dutch NLnet foundation aims to financially support organisations and people that contribute to an open information society. Some time ago they decided to help KOffice in two exciting ways: to sponsor the design of a new logo for KOffice, with matching logo designs for all KOffice applications, and to sponsor Girish Ramakrishnan to improve the ODF support in KWord 2.0. The KOffice team is deeply grateful to NLnet for this support! Read More

The KDE BugSquad is pleased to announce itself! Come and learn the fine art of bug triage. How might one do so? Join us for a BugDay on April 20th (0:00 UTC to 23:59 UTC). The last one was a great success, with 355 bugs triaged, and almost a third of those closed. We would like to finish off more bugs, and could use your help! All you need is a recent version of KDE4, although 3.5.9 could also be useful. That is it! We will provide all the training and support. No programming knowledge is needed. Join #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net anytime to find out more details. Also, we have a spiffy new mailing list, lots of new documentation on techbase, and are already discussing T-shirts. Surely world domination is next? Read More