KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Furious last-minute application of polish across the board in preparation for the tagging of KDE 4.0 Final next week. Work towards threading GDB operations support in KDevelop. Support for media players employing the MPRIS standard in the Plasma "Now Playing" data engine, with the import of a Flickr Plasmoid. A style manager, support for Karbon gradients and lots of colourspace work in Krita. Various improvements in the Eigen2 math vector library. Continued progress in the KBugBuster rewrite. Revived support for .tar, .tar.gz, and .tar.bz2 files in Ark. More work on KCabinet, a library to support the MS Cabinet format. A printing framework in Okteta. System Settings moves from a custom view to Dolphin's KCategorizedView. Finishing touches in the Oxygen widget style and colour schemes. Work from the "newssl" branch is moved back into kdelibs. Various unfinished features hidden in Konsole for KDE 4.0. The Trolltech Phonon backends are moved from kdebase to kdereview for KDE 4.0. The unmaintained "regexpeditor" moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Trolltech-sponsored development continues on Phonon backends. Support for saving to remote URL's in Gwenview. A "Now Playing" data engine and applet, and the train clock returns in Plasma. "Switch Tabs on Hover" can now be disabled, and other refinements in Kickoff for KDE 4.0. Work on a debugger (with a SpeedCrunch-inspired interface) for KHTML. Work to support the most recent release of the Flash (version 9) multimedia plugin in Konqueror. SOCKS support in KTorrent. Device handling fixes in KPilot. More work on music services in Amarok 2.0. Further work on the KChart Flake shape in KOffice. More panorama work, amongst other developments in KOffice. Support for the Bonjour protocol in Kopete. Initial import and development of a MS Cabinet format archive reader. The temporarily-named Video Player, formerly-known-as-Codeine, has been finally renamed to Dragon Player. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 23-24 February 2008. FOSDEM is a European meeting of free software developers, to listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software. We are looking for people to give a talk in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A Sonnet-based spellcheck runner, and icons on the desktop in Plasma. Continued work revamping KBugBuster, more work towards KDevelop 4. GetHotNewStuff support for downloading maps in Marble. Image and audio dockers in Parley. The start of Glimpse, a new scanning application based on libksane. The beginnings of a generic resource display framework for NEPOMUK. Various work in KHTML. Music Service configuration work, and the integration of last.fm code in Amarok 2.0. Printing work in KOffice. A Sybase database driver for Kexi, panorama work in Krita, and ODF work in KChart. Kompare becomes usable for KDE 4.0, and gets a new maintainer. The confusingly-named game KWin4 is renamed KFourInLine. Trolltech-supported Phonon backends for all major platforms (Quicktime 7, DirectShow 9 and GStreamer) are imported to KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

LinuxLinks has another review of the KDE using, Eee PC. *** ZDNet introduces the KDE 3 desktop. *** EarthWeb IT Management looks at KDE 4 Beta 4 while Ars Technica takes a first look at RC 2. *** Logs are available from Kubuntu Tutorials Day including an introduction to PyKDE 4. *** Trolltech released Qt 4.3.3. *** Support your favourite open source organisations on Facebook. KDE and Amarok are now on facebook - tell your friends! Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The "simple menu" (similar to the menu found in the KDE 3 series) becomes usable. The clock receives a popup-based calendar widget, with KRunner becoming multi-threaded in Plasma. Work continues the long-awaited update of KBugBuster, with important development milestones reached. Version Control and other general work in KDevelop. Start of a DirectShow (for Windows) backend for Phonon, and the integration of this backend in Amarok 2.0. Continued work on the BitTorrent plugin for KGet. KBlogger gets KWallet integration. The beginnings of a simple vector text shape with support for text-on-path and exact positioning, and the start of another painting framework in KOffice. A bitmap (BMP) export filter for Krita. Support for SVG animations in KDM. Important work on the KNewStuff2 framework, through the work of a new maintainer. Adjustments in colour schemes intended for KDE 4.0, more work on adapting icons to the FreeDesktop.org icon naming standard. Abakus, a calculator application, begins to be ported to KDE 4. KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 2 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More

Trolltech announced today that the Phonon backends, which they have been developing for inclusion in Qt, are being transferred into the KDE source code repository. Phonon is the KDE 4 API for multimedia and is also set to be part of Qt 4.4, scheduled for the end of Q1 2008. You heard it right folks, a part of Qt will be officially hosted and developed inside KDE's very own Subversion repository, from whose loins Phonon first sprung, and be freely available to all under the LGPL. Read More

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second release candidate for KDE 4.0. This release candidate marks the last mile on the road to KDE 4.0. This release sees increasing participation from distributions, you can download packages for Debian, Kubuntu, Mandriva, openSUSE & Fedora or grab the live CDs from Kubuntu & openSUSE. Read More

Last weekend the members of the KDE-Edu team met in Paris for a meeting about the Education project. The meeting took place at the Mandriva office, where the members got to know each other and started vivid discussions about their applications, life in general, as well as the future and vision of the Edu module. Read on for the report. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The beginnings of screen hotplug detection in Plasma, KRunner gets history support. Fifteen Pieces puzzle becomes the first Plasma applet in the game category. A block of bugfixing in KDevelop, with various other developments in areas such as a threaded debugger. Support for inequality constraints in Step, continued progress in the port of KEduca to KDE 4. Work on printing in okular. Work on Solid-based network management through NetworkManager. Various work towards Amarok 2. Milestones reached in the BitTorrent plugin for KGet. Subsystem rewrites (SSL, SFTP) in KFTP. OpenDocument format loading and saving work in KChart. Colour work in Krita, with Krita becoming one of the first applications to be able to paint in HDR. New Oxygen-themed sound effects, Oxygen icons are optimised for small sizes. New colour schemes added for KDE 4.0. Ruby language bindings based on the Smoke2 framework. Experiments in KBugBuster and on a Plasma "applet designer" application. Read the rest of the Digest here. Read More