KDE.news 

With an avalanche of last-minute commits, the KOffice Google Summer of Code students finished yet another great Summer of Code. We had some very exciting projects this year, and most of them were as great a success as last year. Read on for details of the achievements. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: "Pencils down" marks the end of the Summer of Code for 2007. Python highlighting support, with work on a new, handwritten lexer in KDevelop. A data engine and associated Plasma applet for KGet. Start of the Plasma-based Wikipedia and Service Info applets for Amarok 2. Wikipedia integration, and other improvements in the Step physics simulation package. A console added to KAlgebra. New graphical themes for KGoldRunner. XMP metadata support in Digikam. More progress in the unobtrusive search dialog for Kate. Usability work across many applications. No mixer functionality in Phonon for KDE 4.0. The start of development on KChart 2. Read More

You might remember, that a little over a year ago kde.nl graciously hosted the KDE multimedia meeting (or k3m for short). Whilst we were there, hacking away, the folks from Source21 joined us to do some interviews for their open source software vidcast. If you take some time to watch the video, you’ll hear from Martijn Klingens (KDE marketing, KDE.nl), Matthias Kretz (Phonon) and myself (Amarok) speaking about our respective areas of expertise. Don’t be put off by Martijn speaking in Dutch, Matthias and I both interview in English and subtitles are available for the Dutch pieces, put the subtitles in the same directory as the video for Kaffeine to pick them up. Get the video (mirror). Read More

FrOSCon is due to start this weekend, and KDE will have our own room and give several talks. The KDE room will be shared with developers from Amarok and Kubuntu DE. There will be talks on Marble, Amarok 2, Kubuntu in Deutschland and in the main track one on KDE 4. If you are in the Bonn area, drop by Sankt Augustin this weekend and meet the developers and community. Read More

A research study on failure sampling in KDE is scheduled for September. We are now looking for skilled C++ developers to test one or several C++ classes. The developers at KDAB have already provided some code for the occasion from kdepim. Discussions have been held with the SQO-OSS project on adding the sampling method's basics to Alitheia, the successor to the English Breakfast Network, if the outcome of the study is promising, now all we need, is you... Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The Summer of Code for 2007 nears its end. Implementation of more features in the Step physics simulation package. More graphical game themes in KMahjongg, KWin4 KShisen, KGoldRunner and KJumpingCube. The start of a new game, KDiplomacy. More development in the Blitz graphics library. Lyrics Plasma applet and other interface work for Amarok 2. The start of the implementation of panels, and a clipboard engine in Plasma. More features in the ODBC Data Sources KControl module. Animation support in the Raptor menu. KCacheGrind is ported to QGraphicsView. MusicXML import function in KOffice. Ability and an application for viewing statistics in KPixmapCaches. KGraphEditor imported, an application to edit "dot" graphs. A new architecture for KMobileTools. KTrace renamed to Inspektor. Read More

The KDE centric distribution Ark Linux has announced the 2007.1 release, which includes KDE 3.5.7, the newly released Amarok 1.4.7, much better support for encrypted wireless connections out of the box, in addition to a large number of updates to software and drivers. This will be the last release with KDE 3, from the announcement: "The Ark Linux team already has plans for KDE 4 and Ark Linux 2007.2, one of our goals is to integrate KDE 4 as deeply into the system as we can; for example by rewriting our hotplug system to integrate with KDE's 'Solid' and using KDE 4 to give the user immediate access to a newly plugged in device." Read More

People Behind KDE releases the second interview in its series of four interviews with students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - meet Bertjan Broeksema, Carlos Licea, Pierre Ducroquet and Gavin Beatty! Read More

When picking a media center solution for your PC, it tends to be a matter of compromise. There are solutions that are visually attractive, solutions that are Free/open source software, solutions that are more complete than others and solutions that integrate well with a desktop environment. In the past there have been few, if any, that have been all of these things. After an extensive beta testing period a new version of LinuxMCE, release 0704, was recently made available to the public that shows how we can indeed have our media center cake and eat it too. Read on for details of this release and future plans for KDE integration. Read More

Amarok 1.4.7 was released with improved collection backend, new streams, altered icon and bugfixes. *** The annual Desktoplinux.org Survey is under way. *** MEPIS released a KDE 4 Beta 1 live DVD using packages from Kubuntu. *** The videos from Lugradio Live are up including Ben Lambs' Conquering the Desktop with KDE 4. *** Finally, following the 10th anniversary of the free desktop last year, congratulations to another project which has gained double figures in age, but whatever did happen to those Scheme applets? Read More