KDE.news 

The KDE e.V. welcomes a new Supporting Member, OSN Online Social Network GmbH, a company based in Düsseldorf in Germany. Supporting Members help the community with financial support, their contribution is used for example for sponsoring developer meetings you often read about on the Dot. *** The Nepomuk KDE project that is creating the social semantic desktop on top of KDE has launched its new website. Go there for numerous tutorials integrating Nepomuk features like "who sent me this file?". *** The German Kubuntu team has an interview with Amarok release dude, Harald Sitter. *** The team developing the Raptor-menu has just launched their website. Raptor aims to deliver a new launch menu for KDE. *** We were sent an interview with Hal Engel of LProf the only open source ICC profiler, made in Qt. *** FOSDEM is Europe's biggest Free Software conference and will be held this weekend in Brussels. See the KDE and Cross Desktop rooms for exciting talks and say hi to us at Friday's beer event. Read More

KOffice 2 Alpha 6 has been released. This preview release improves the OpenDocument infrastructure, adds snap guidelines to several applications and sees major improvements in Krita, Karbon & KPlato. See the changelog for more details. Download it from source or get the packages for Kubuntu or openSUSE. Read More

The KDE community is happy to announce another update for the KDE 3 branch. KDE 3.5.9 is the latest bugfix and translation update for those who cannot or do not want to switch to KDE 4 yet. While currently no subsequent release for KDE 3 is planned, we will make sure to provide updates as they are needed to run your KDE3 smoothly also in the future. Read More

KDE 4 is seen by many to be the next big step on the free software desktop, while many do not yet advise it for everyday use. Either way, it is an innovative release and in line with Fedora's goal of providing the latest and greatest free software it is set to be the default KDE environment in the next major release of Fedora. We caught up with a few members of the KDE Special Interest Group for an interview about the work they are doing to get it ready for release, their own opinions on the software and what they think about the progress made by Fedora in embracing KDE. Read More

To Southern Californians February means several things. Winter storms bring snow to the San Gabriel Mountains. Most college students will have returned to school for another semester. Early flowering plants have started to bud and bloom, attracting bees. Most important of all however, is the coming of SCALE, the annual Southern California Linux Expo. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma applets can now be dragged from the desktop to the panel. More internet data sources for the Picture Frame and Comic Plasmoids. Configuration dialogs are added to many Plasmoids. The in-development "WorldClock" Plasmoid supercedes the KWorldClock standalone application. A new Plasma applet: Conway's Game of Life. KRunner becomes completely plugin-based. Support for editing GPS track lists in Digikam. More work on expanding theming capabilities across KDE games. A variety of enhancements in KOrganizer. Initial work on a web interface to control downloads in KGet. Work on paths and snap guides in Karbon. A HTML part plugin in the scripting application creator, Kommander. Mono (C#) KDE bindings reach a usable state. Python support in KDevelop4. A return to development work on Decibel. KMail gets a new maintainer, with already-noticeable improvements. KBluetooth and KRecipes begin to be ported to KDE 4. The game Kollision moves from playground/games to kdereview. A new game, KDiamond, is imported into KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Custom legend entries and the beginnings of the Mercator map projection (and evidence of exciting other things to come) in Marble. Support for multiple online dictionaries and the start of a vocabulary Plasma applet in Parley. Kross scripting engines (supporting various scripting languages) in Plasma, and the much-anticipated return of the ability to resize the panel. Support for multiple "Picture of the Day" providers in the "Picture Frame" Plasma applet. More work on the redesign (code and visuals) of KWorldClock. Work on theming improvements across KDE games. Image information now displayed in fullscreen mode in Gwenview. Continued maintenance work in the Kooka scanning application. Support for HTML signatures in KMail. Continued development on the IRC Kopete plugin. Work on snap guides and a threaded tile backend in KOffice. A migration plugin for Sybase ASE in Kexi. Various efficiency improvements in KLinkStatus, KGet, and some KDE games. KDE 4.0.1 (bugfixes) is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

It is the time of the yearto gather and spend some time on our favourite IDE. Continuing the tradition to meet in cities famous for alcohol-based beverages and oversized servings of meat, Munich was the obvious pick. Pretending to be a civilised crowd, we managed to convince the boss of the Trolltech's Munich office to generously provide us with a room, a 4MBit SDSL line and lots of coffee. Read on for the agenda and how any interested KDevelop helpers can join. Read More

Amarok project founder Mark Kretschmann was interviewed for "Not the Gentoo Linux Newsletter". He talks about Amarok and what makes this project special, its community, beer, more beer and other things of importance to him. Amarok headquarters is also pleased to announce Amarok 2 Technology Preview 1 for Windows, complete with an easy to use installer! More juicy details at the Amarok blog. Read More

While the world is still recovering from the work on KDE 4.0.0, we are ready to announce the release of KDE 4.0.1, the first bug fix update of the KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.1 contains numerous bugfixes such as stability improvements, performance improvements and, as in every point release, updated translations for most components. Lots of work has been put into shared components making the life of most applications easier. Particularly striking is also the high number of bugfixes in KHTML. Have a look at the change log for a more detailed, if maybe not 100% complete list of improvements. KDE 4.0.1 is already translated into 48 languages with more coming soon. Read More