KDE.news 

At the Decibel Hackathon sponsored by NLnet and basysKom GmbH in Darmstadt, Germany last weekend, hackers from the KDE community met to discuss the handling of contact data in KDE 4. Read on for a summary of the event. Read More

Well, so far I've published a dozen articles about KDE 4 over the last 12 weeks. A lot of content has been covered, but there is rapid progress still being made on those topics. So, in no particular order, this week's issue deals with addenda and updates to the last 12 articles, so that you can see some of the rapid progress happening as KDE races forward. Read on for details. Read More

The KDE Community and the release team have put together a release plan for the long anticipated version 4.0, which is planned to be released in October 2007. KDE 4.0 will be a major milestone for the Free Desktop, as it offers a new foundation and set of frameworks that will shape the desktop user experience for years to come. Users will benefit from improved speed through Qt 4, integration of hardware through Solid, multimedia performance via Phonon, usability enhancements by close collaboration with OpenUsability, new real-time communication options with Decibel, spell-checking with Sonnet, comprehensive desktop search through Strigi and Nepomuk, a new desktop metaphor through Plasma and, last but not least, a completely new artwork experience called Oxygen. Read More

Robert Knight, lead maintainer of Konsole has launched a Konsole Usage Survey. 28 questions are waiting for your answers. Use this chance to give useful feedback about a vital and often-used base application of KDE to enable Robert to make Konsole the best console application for KDE 4. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Interface experiments in Amarok 2.0, with the aKode engine shown the door. Initial work on incremental parsing functionality in KDevelop. Further functional development in the Step educational physics simulation package. More refinement of the Oxygen-themed KDE Games artwork, revised sounds in the Oxygen sound theme and more work done on the Oxygen widget style. The Oxygen iconset is dual-licenced as Creative Commons and LGPL. Support for the Plucker document format in okular. Zoom work (ViewBar) and Coverity fixes in KOffice. Basic Phishing protection and the start of user documentation in Mailody. Optimisations in KJS (JavaScript interpreter) and KSysGuard. Import of Athec into playground/games and KBackup to playground/utils in KDE SVN. First NEPOMUK-based GUI elements appear. KSplashX displaces KSplashML as the splash screen engine for KDE 4. Read More

The KDE Project will present itself at CeBIT, the world's largest computer trade show, taking place in Hannover, Germany, from March 16th to March 21th. KDE will be presenting the latest release KDE 3.5 and give a preview of current developments for KDE 4, the next major KDE-version. You will find numerous KDE-developers and other contributors in Hall 5, booth G64/6. The KDE team would like to thank the LinuxPark for the booth and KDE e.V. and its supporting members for financial support. We would also like to thank Canonical, Fedora and Novell for providing CDs featuring the latest and greatest KDE. Read More

I am proud to announce the release of K3b 1.0. After years and years of development, all the sweat (actually in the summer it can get sticky in front of the screen), all the tears (ok, admittedly, not that many), and all the countless hours I spent on a single application finally we have what I think is worth the big 1. K3b has come a long way since the early days in 1998 when it started as a dummy project for me to learn C++ and Qt development. The reason for that (besides my hacking) is the amazing feedback I got from the open source community and especially all the KDE worshippers. Give yourself a hand. Without all of you K3b would not have lived this long. I also want to thank Mandriva for supporting the K3b development these last few months. Their KDE support makes a big difference. A ChangeLog is also available. Read More

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we travel back to Europe, visiting Italy to meet someone who wants to enable you to read your documents and help you to do the math, who's "fiery" passion for KDE may be linked to his location - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Pino Toscano. Read More

Trolltech has released version 4.2.3 of Qt. This is mainly a bug-fix release, with updates to numerous classes across all platforms. Changes include a new unofficial Portuguese translation, three fixes to lupdate including one which brings a 400x speed increase, and a fix to a bug in QTextEdit which caused the bottom lines to become unreachable after adding the scroll bar. Meanwhile Qt 3.3.8 has been released, quite possibly the penultimate in the Qt 3 line with support for Qt 3 ending in July. Get them from the Qt download page; both qt-copy trunk and branch have been updated in KDE's repository. For those wanting to live on the edge, documentation is now available for Qt unstable snapshots. Read More

KDE is happy to be participating in the Google Summer of Code program for the third consecutive year! As usual, we are looking for mentors and students to take us singing through the summer. Whether you have been part of the program in previous years or not, we need your help and fantastic ideas! Read More