KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Significant progress in Colour Mixing in Krita. A new, more usable sidebar for okular. International Date Line support, and the merge of Summer of Code work in Marble. Solid is used for hardware detection in Digikam. KRunner uses Strigi for filename-based searches. The ability to switch cursor themes without restarting KDE. Timelines for multiple timezones, rich-text support and other journal improvements in KOrganizer. Support for storing bookmarks in Akonadi. Initial porting of the Kollision game to QGraphicsView. Support for KNewStuff2 in KWordQuiz and KVocTrain; KNewStuff2 support (and the spectrum viewer) removed in Kalzium until KDE 4.1. Initial import of Blitz, an improved graphical effect and filter library for KDE 4.0. Read More

KDE oldies may remember this interview with Stephan Kulow from back in 2000. Well the folks at openSUSE have clearly been watching us, not only have they started their own openSUSE news site, they have also started their own interview series with a brand new interview of Stephan Kulow. Stephan has been release dude for much of the KDE 3 series and now shares the same honoured title for openSUSE. Read More

Trolltech have announced the release of Qt 4.3.1. This release adds bug fixes and performance optimisations. More significant however is the new licence exceptions added to their Free Software edition. This means Qt software can be used along with a larger range of other Free Software libraries and dependencies. The Trolltech blog is celebrating the release with photos of the Trolltech support teams. Read More

aKademy 2007 hosted two mini-summits, one for Schools and Education and one for Text Layout. The Text Layout Summit was a true cross platform event, and followed from the one last year at the Gnome Summit. Text layout is a complex area requiring advanced knowledge of dozens of different writing methods. With funding from The Linux Foundation they brought together people from Pango, Qt, IBM ICU (Intl. Components for Unicode), SIL Graphite, Unifont.org, m17n, W3C and DejaVu. Getting the various widget sets to have the same high quality support for all scripts is a problem the summit hoped to solve. Read on for details of what they discussed. Read More

Ars Technical points out that the first KDE 4.0 beta has hit the streets. "A major milestone release such as 4.0 is a long time in the making. Here follows a number of things to look forward to for those of you brave enough to try this early beta." The lengthy review covers the portability improvements, new build system, new multimedia framework, new artwork from Oxygen, the new Plasma desktop and composite effects in KWin. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work in Plasma, with extra sources for the Weather data engine, work on the applet browser, and the start of SystemTray and RSIBreak plasmoids and a "next generation" application launcher, named Lancelot. Cut-down versions of Korundum and Smoke libraries for writing scripted Plasma applets. More interface work for Amarok 2. More work on XESAM (a shared metadata specification) integration in Strigi. An Akonadi resource for Facebook information. Support for compressed documents, and more work on DjVu support in okular. Several new features in the KRDC Summer of Code project, including bookmark support, sound output, and toolbar options. Custom text shaping in KWord, and significant progress in the colour mixing capabilities of Krita in KOffice. Various optimisations in KBounce, KPixmapCache, KDevelop, Marble and KOffice. KOffice 2.0 Alpha 2 (1.9.92) is tagged for release. Beginnings of a D-Bus interface in KTorrent for KDE 4. KNotes and Kompare begin to be ported, Kenolaba completely ported to KDE 4. Reworkings in Phonon, with the Phonon-NMM backend moved to playground/multimedia, as it is not ready for KDE 4.0. The Kaboodle music player is removed from the kdemultimedia module, whilst kaudiocreator moves to extragear for KDE 4.0. Read More

The Oxygen team has announced a wallpaper contest. Send in your wallpaper and it might become part of the default set of wallpapers for KDE 4.0. The Oxygen team is solliciting contributions from the community. The jury is nobody less than Icon GodFather David Vignoni, The Mad Scientist Nuno Pinheiro, The Loud American Ken Wimer and Oxygen Swiss Army Knife Riccardo Iaconelli. Read More

The People Behind KDE series takes a temporary break, as we talk to students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - in the first of four interview articles, meet Aleix Pol Gonzàlez, Piyush Verma, Mike Arthur and Nick Shaforostoff! Read More

A few quickies again this week: the 4th Trophées du Libre (International Free Software Awards) contest is open. Please consider submitting your favourite KDE applications since the award is some €3000 in each category. Also new this week: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen has announced that he is being hired full time to work on Amarok, courtesy of the Magnatune music store. (Don't worry, this doesn't exclude support for other music stores). PyQt released a new version of their bindings. And every once in a while, we stumble upon an old piece of KDE history that just needs to be shared. Check out this 1998 Interview with KDE's grand-daddy: Matthias Ettrich. Read More

The KDE Community is happy to announce the first Beta release for KDE 4.0 is available now. This release marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications. Simultaneously KOffice have released the second Alpha of KOffice version 2. Highlights are improved text rendering and layout and the new Flake library. Read on for more details. Read More