KDE.news 

The great work of the Oxygen icon artists is a much discussed and anticipated part of KDE 4. The new icons now follow the freedesktop.org naming specification which makes it easier to share icons between applications of several desktop environments. In the HIG hunt this week, we will check that this work lives up to its full potential by looking for missing icons and wrong uses. Read on for more details. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Umbrello gets a code generator for the D programming language. Further work in Plasma. Initial work to allow the Dolphin file view component to be embedded into Konqueror. More work in the KOrganizer Calendar and KRDC Summer of Code projects, with the start of the Icon Cache, TextTool Plugins in KOffice and Kopete Messenger update projects. Start of a Solid interface in Amarok, with breakthroughs in support for the Jamendo music service. KDevelop begins to be ported to the KDevPlatform structure. A return to progress on the Cokoon SVG window decoration engine, with the addition of PyQt4 bindings. A streamlined command-line screenshot utility, kbackgroundsnaphot, is created. The Gwenview image viewer moves to the kdegraphics module, whilst KPF, KWifiManager and KDict are removed from the kdenetwork module for KDE 4. Read More

The KOffice team today released the third minor release of the 1.6 series. As the development focus has shifted to the next major release, this new version was aimed at polishing and fixing bugs. With this new version, three new languages are added to the list of translations: Bulgarian, Low Saxon and Nepali. You can read more about it in the full announcement. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and openSUSE. Read More

The aKademy 2007 team is pleased to announce the keynote speakers for this year's conference. The opening talk will be from Lars Knoll of Trolltech who will tell us about their plans for Qt 4.4 and their relationship with KDE. Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical will be talking on the 10 Challenges to Open Source. On Sunday, Dan Kohn of The Linux Foundation will talk on the state of Linux Standardisation on the Desktop. Continuing the week the Edu and Schools Day will be opened by Sulamita Garcia with a talk on Intel's Classmate PC. Read More

Trolltech has announced the final release of Qt Jambi version 4.3 (corresponding to Qt v4.3.0), the Java binding for Qt. The bindings are available under the same dual licensing deal as Qt. The webstart demonstration gives you a feel of what it can do. Read More

Uploading pictures to Flickr via its Web-based interface can be a hassle, particularly if you have dozens of shots to upload. Linux users have a better choice, though, in the form of Kflickr, a simple application for uploading shots to Flickr that will have your family photos online in no time. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Start of the Oxygen Meeting in Milan, with a focus on the Oxygen widget style and window decoration. Continued developments in Plasma, with the addition of a second example Plasmoid, for accessing developer commit feeds. More work in Konsole, with the addition of a command-line tool to manage Konsole user profiles. Support for RockBox-based devices in Amarok. Initial work begins on a Wikipedia-based "Picture of the Day" and "This Day in History" plugins for KOrganizer. Work begins strongly on the KRDC Summer Of Code project. Marble becomes a library, with a plugin for Qt Designer created to allow application authors to include mapping functionality. Many module changes: Marble and KAlgebra move to kdeedu, KJumpingCube, KSudoku and Bovo move to kdegames, in accordance with KDE 4 development timelines. Read More

Qt Blog reports that Trolltech has released version 4.3.0 of Qt, its cross-platform development platform, and Qtopia Core, its basis for embedded application development. Major new features include QtScript, an ECMAscript standard application scripting engine, replacing QSA; SSL support; improved OpenGL engine; more flexible main window architecture; ability to both render and generate SVG images and a new font system.
More on the new features from Trolltech with full changelog available. Get it from Qt downloads. Read More

Liquidat has posted a nice overview of the technology known as NEPOMUK, a part of KDE 4. An excerpt reads: "Nepomuk-KDE is the basis for the semantic technologies we will see in KDE 4. Sebastian Trüg, the main developer behind Nepomuk-KDE, provided me with some up2date information about the current state and future plans". Read More

The Fedora Project has announced the immediate availability of their latest release, Fedora 7 (Moonshine) including, for the first time, a KDE live CD/DVD showcasing KDE and KDE applications, which can also be installed to the hard disk, resulting in a regular Fedora installation with KDE. Along with other current software, Fedora 7 includes KDE 3.5.6. Unfortunately, KDE 3.5.7 was released too late to be included in Fedora 7, however it will be made available as an update. The 32-bit version fits on a 700 MB CD, the 64-bit version needs DVD or special overlong CD media for space reasons. KDE is also included on the traditional installer DVD. KDE in Fedora 7 defaults to the default KDE look and feel, with Plastik as the widget theme and CrystalSVG as the icon theme. Read More