KDE.news 

As a longtime KDE user forced to use Windows, is the recent announcement and availability of a port of KDE for Windows a dream come true? "KDE 4.0.0 was released and there again was much joy. More importantly an actual honest to goodness Windows port is released." Blogger MrCopilot gives us a hands on review with 50+ screenshots of KDE in action on that other operating system and tries to answer that question. KDE on Windows is not yet ready for the masses but hopes to be declared stable for KDE 4.1. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Heavy refactoring and work on merging translation branches in Lokalize (which is renamed from "Kaider", and moved from playground to kdesdk). Work on a question editor in KEduca. Work on real-time cloud imagery in Marble. An initial implementation of a new undo stack in KWordQuiz. The start of a KAlgebra, Rot13, KWorldClock, and Pastebin Plasma applet, with the inclusion of more functionality from KDE 3.5 (such as the multi-row taskbar panel) in Plasma. Progress in scripting support and functionality in Plasma. The "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the fuzzy-clock Plasma applet move into kdereview. Viewports support declared "complete" on the KDE desktop. "FlipSwitch" window-switching effect in KWin. The start of a KIO slave for handling arbitrary NEPOMUK resources. Draft implementation of a KABC resource based on Akonadi. Wholesale merges from the enterprise branch of KDE-PIM back into the main KDE branch. Move to complete support for the MPRIS media player interaction standard, and support for Video CD's and Audio CD's in Dragon Player. Dragon Player moves from kdereview into kdemultimedia for KDE 4.1. Last.fm streaming radio now works in Amarok 2. Work on gradient editing in Karbon. The Kooka scanning application finds a new maintainer, with various initial improvements. KSystemLog moves from playground into kdereview. Krone, a simple expense manager for KDE 4, is added to KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Linux Tech Daily has an interview with Sebastian Kügler. The e.V. board member talks about his work on the Marketing Working Group, what was exciting about the release event, the improved release process and what he is looking forward to in KDE 4.1. On how you can help market KDE he says "It might sound a bit scary, representing KDE in your local LUG, but it’s really what KDE is about. Everybody comes from a local community, that is where our grassroots are." Read More

Computerworld interviews Aaron Seigo on life, free software and reinventing the desktop at this week's Linux.conf.au conference. He talks about some of KDE's successes, the targets of the 4.0.0 release, the future of Plasma and Nokia's purchase of Trolltech. He concludes that "The KDE project has never been more exciting". Read More

During a tutorial today on-stage at linux.conf.au, Sun Microsystems and Frontline donated a server to the KDE project, available for shipment within hours. Aaron Seigo, Plasma developer and KDE e.V President, accepted a certificate from Ross Cunningham of Sun Microsystems and David Purdue of Frontline on behalf of the KDE project. Read More

Today, Nokia and Trolltech announced that Nokia will be purchasing Trolltech. Nokia will continue with Qt's dual license model, which was updated to GPL 3 only last week. In an open letter to KDE, the chief Trolls and Nokia VP asked for ideas and comments on improving their relationship with the open source community. Nokia will be applying to become a patron of KDE e.V. and the FreeQt foundation is being maintained to guarantee the continued freedom of the toolkit KDE depends upon. This change should help ensure both the continued longevity of Qt and KDE as well as give the platform a boost in industry, particularly in the consumer electronics industry. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Taskbar and KMenu functionality from KDE 3.5 returns to the Plasma panel, and work on clocks in Plasma, with the move of the binary-clock Plasmoid to kdereview. Improvements in annotation handling in Okular (which has been officially capitalised). Essential support for viewing bug contents in the rewrite of KBugBuster. More data export options (CSV, HTML, etc) in Kalzium. The CVS implementation in KDevelop moves to the Model/View framework. The start of JavaScript functionality in Kst plugins. Usability refinements in Konsole. Mailody begins to be ported to the Akonadi service. A "mirror search" plugin for KGet. IPv6 work in KTorrent. Colour docker improvements across KOffice. Optimisations in KDevelop and NEPOMUK. Various work in KJS and KHTML. Support for the MPRIS multimedia player interaction specification in Dragon Player, with Dragon Player moving from playground/multimedia into kdemultimedia for KDE 4.1. The Kopete Bonjour protocol moves to kdereview. The copy of Qt within KDE SVN is updated to be GPL version 3 compatible. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Amarok Insider is the newsletter previously known as Amarok Weekly News (AWN), and is now hosted on the official Amarok website. The new issue covers the freshly released Amarok 2.0 Technical Preview, Amarok's Media Device architecture, the Context View, Playlist, Service Framework, the MS Windows version, recent happenings inside the Amarok team, and much more. Read More

After the star studded talks of the main event day, the final day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event returned to the un-conference format of small group talks, demos and discussions. KDE Dot News listened in to some of the sessions, read on for brief summaries. Read More

On Friday, January 18th, Aaron Seigo, President of the KDE e.V. gave the keynote at the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California about KDE 4, presenting KDE to the world and the world to KDE. The keynote was recorded, and is now available for streaming through Google Video. Continue reading to watch the keynote! Read More