KDE.news 

After a short delay due to a heavy dosage of Real Life(tm), I return to bring you more on the technologies behind KDE 4. This week I am featuring Strigi, an information extraction subsystem that is being fully deployed for KDE 4.0. KDE has previously had the ability to extract information about files of various types, and has used them in a variety of functional contexts, such as the Properties Dialog. Strigi promises many improvements over the existing versions. Read on for more... Read More

Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica has a short article talking about Dolphin and KDE 4. "The Linux-based Dolphin file manager is now scheduled for official inclusion in KDE 4, the next major release of the KDE desktop environment. Dolphin includes several unique usability enhancements that aren't available in Konqueror, KDE's current file manager..." Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Bluetooth support in Solid. 'Breadcrumb" navigation widget from Dolphin is made more modular to allow use in other KDE contexts. Support for different caret (text cursor) styles in Konsole. Various bugfixes in TagLib. Better AIM protocol file transfer support in Kopete. KWord gets the ability (through Kross scripting) to use an OpenOffice.org instance to import from supported file formats. KPackage starts to be ported to the SMART package management scheme. The beginnings of user documentation for the Bovo game application, whilst the initial draft of the Mailody handbook nears completion. KMobileTools starts to be ported to KDE 4. Great reductions in the number of external dependencies for the kdecore library. The kplot library is renamed "plotting", plasmagik is renamed "uploader". okular moves back from the playground to the kdegraphics module. Kiriki is moved to kdereview. Kremas, an experimental image viewer, is imported into KDE SVN. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The beginnings of a KControl module for Decibel configuration make an appearance. Developments in the Subversion plugin for KDevelop. More optimisations in the KJS JavaScript interpreter. Further progress in the KBattleship rewrite. New country maps in KGeography. KRfb, a desktop sharing utility, starts to be ported to KDE 4. A new GStreamer backend for Phonon, and QSR, a search-and-replace utility, are imported into KDE SVN. Read More

This week's LWN looks at Get New Hot Stuff in KDE 4. Improvements currently being made by lead developer Josef Spillner include new options for uninstalling content, content synchronisation, the ability to rate content directly from the application interface, a dramatically faster interface and more. Get Hot New Stuff is now a specification on freedesktop.org and used throughout KDE in apps like Amarok and KOrganizer. Read More

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel to Spain to meet a focused developer who does not go off at a tangent. Someone with flashes of brilliance you may miss if you Blinken. With plans in abundance, tonight's star of People Behind KDE is KPDF maintainer Albert Astals Cid. Read More

We are here today to talk about the developers of the KDE-Edu Project. The purpose of this interview is to feature and present their work and motivation, which is often not as well-known or regarded as other, more prominent work within the KDE project. The KDE-Edu developers are developing high-quality educational software for the K Desktop Environment. Their primary focus is on school children aged 3 to 18, and the specialised user interface needs of young users. However, they are also have programs to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn! Read on for the interview. Read More

The first Guademy event finished yesterday at the university of A Coruña, Spain. Organized by the GPUL (Grupo de Programadores y Usuarios de Linux), the Linux User Group of A Coruña, it was an event which brought together people from the GNOME and KDE camp (thus the combination of "GUADEC" and "aKademy" that forms the name of the event). Read on for a short report of the event. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Final stages of Freedesktop.org naming compliance performed on the Oxygen mimetype icons. IMAP-related crashes targeted in KMail. Many KFilePlugins ported to use Strigi. Better zoom and preview size interaction in Digikam. Optimisations in KSysGuard. Better integration with NEPOMUK-KDE interface elements in Dolphin, NEPOMUK-KDE components move to the kdereview module. Further Kst documentation work. Continued interface experiments and code progress towards Amarok 2.0. "Flame" window destruction effect in the KWin Composite branch. KBackup is renamed "Galmuri" due to naming conflicts. Read More

As we reported last week, KDE will be taking part in Google's Summer of Code again. The deadline for student applications is approaching now, so be quick sending in your ideas before March 26th. If you are a student and would like to spend the summer on a cool Free Software project, do apply for one of the scholarships. For more information, please refer to the following pages: how to participate with KDE, KDE SOC ideas page, Google Summer of Code page. Read More