KDE.news 

The second day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California, was a very busy day. Reporters and users joined the hackers, peeking over their shoulders, asking questions and generally trying to figure us out. Talks were given - most notably the keynote by Aaron Seigo, but also covering KOffice, the KDE-Edu project, and multimedia. Read on for more details. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A whole set of bugfixes and feature additions in Plasma, and various optimisations across KDE. Usability improvements in Blinken. More work on the timeline tool, including fuzzy selection in Digikam. Support for XComposite translucency in the Konsole KPart. QtScript can now deal transparently with all scripting backends supported by Kross. Improvements in KWin Composite effects. Support for an old feature request, "parenthesis highlighting as an expression" in Kate. Continued interface work in the KHotNewStuff2 library. Progress in the Bonjour protocol implementation in Kopete. Support for stroke gradients, and adding and removing rows, columns and cells in the new Table Flake shape in KOffice. Initial import of kio-giobridge, a bridge interface between the KDE and GNOME I/O methods. Work is resumed on the CIA Plasma applet. A Luna Plasmoid (moon phase display) is added to KDE SVN. Dragon Player (formerly Codeine) is moved from playground/multimedia to kdereview, with a view to moving into kdemultimedia for KDE 4.1. The KDE 4 version of Yakuake, essentially a rewrite, is imported into KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

The first day of the KDE 4.0 Release Event in Mountain View, California, got off to a great start on Thursday, with attendees fuelled by a hearty breakfast provided by Google. Then, the "un-conference" was ready to get underway, and within minutes the first topics were added to the whiteboards. Meanwhile, the room filled with people from across North America and worldwide, all with an interest in KDE. Read on for more details. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Final commits for KDE 4.0 Final before the tagging freeze. KDE 4.0 Final tagged for release. Lots of optimisations and bugs fixed across KDE. Kickoff menu items can now be added to the Plasma desktop or panel. Improved resize and rotate for Plasma applets. Document list sorting in Kate. Various progress in KDevelop. Mailody moves towards using Akonadi for its IMAP functionality, various improvements in Akonadi. Start of a KHotNewStuff2 implementation in Kalzium for downloading molecular files. Experimental IVTV support in the Kalva video player. KGet uses more of the shared implementation of BitTorrent from KTorrent. Printing support for the DVI backend in okular. Improved text handling, support for printing multiple page sizes in a single document, and a much-anticipated Table Flake shape in KOffice (with further work on the Music Flake shape). Lots of work on colour manipulation for KOffice. Kile begins to use Kross as its scripting framework. Start of a new KDE game, KTank. GetHotNewStuff support disabled in okular, search runner disabled in Plasma for KDE 4.0. KHexEdit moved to the unmaintained module. The new Oxygen wallpapers, splashscreen, and sound theme are imported into KDE SVN for KDE 4.0. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Several years of design, development and testing came together today for the release of KDE 4.0. This is our most significant release in our 11 year history and marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the start of the KDE 4 era. Join us now in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate or come to the release event in person next week. Packages are available for all the major distributions with live CDs available currently from Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read on for details or take the KDE 4.0 Visual Guide to find your way around.

The KDE 4 Libraries have seen major improvements in almost all areas. The Phonon multimedia framework provides platform independent multimedia support to all KDE applications, the Solid hardware integration framework makes interacting with (removable) devices easier and provides tools for better powermanagement.

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Announcing itself today is KOfficeSource GmbH, a company that will sell services around KOffice. The founders comprise a small group of members of the developer community, as well as outside talent. They share an interest in furthering KOffice by supporting it commercially in addition to the non-commercial support that can be found on the mailing lists and IRC. As the name suggests it has been created in Germany but will operate across Europe and further afield. Read More

Markus Mauder on his blog posts a look at the soon to be released KDE 4.0.0 complete with screenshots and a review of some of the significant changes. "I hope you enjoy this preview and come to share my opinion that KDE 4 is going to rock!" He also has an album of screenshots on Picasa that expand on the ones in the article. The big release happens on Friday, join us in #kde4-release-party on Freenode to celebrate. Read More

Ars Technica is reporting on the tagging of KDE 4.0.0 in an article titled, "KDE 4.0.0 tagged in preparation for release." In this report, Ars Technica briefly explains the importance of the tagging process as well as what one can expect with the upcoming KDE 4.0.0 release. "Although the 4.0 release has many rough edges, it also showcases a tremendous number of innovative new features and technologies." 4.0 is scheduled for release at the end of next week. Read More

When most folks think of February they muse about hearts and roses. But in Southern California, free software enthusiasts look forward to the Southern California Linux Exposition. KDE will once again be represented at SCALE 6x (February 8-10, 2008) showing off the newly released KDE 4.0. KDE's usability guru, Celeste Lyn Paul, will also be there, giving a talk on user centred design in open source on the Saturday. For those KDE experts in the Southern California area who would like to participate, there are a couple of openings for booth duty. Prospects should contact Aaron Johnson <aaronforjesus@gmail.com> for more information. Read More

Two years ago the QtCentre site was launched. The goal was to provide the leading forum on the internet for encouraging the exchange of Qt experience and to provide a meeting point to the community. The response to this has been beyond our wildest expectations - all thanks to all our visitors and contributors. Read More