KDE.news 

This week we'll take a brief look at some of the many features that are making their way into Amarok 2, which is the development branch for Amarok in KDE 4. The features discussed are all in-progress features which have reached varying stages of completion. Read on for information about Amarok's engines (including Phonon), UI changes, changes to the Magnatune music store, OS X support, and more. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: The Oxygen iconset is moved from playground to kdelibs, changes made throughout KDE to support the new icon names specification. The Crystal iconset is moved from kdelibs to its kdeartwork retirement home. More work on the Oxygen widget style. Security fixes in KTorrent. Initial work on "uninstall" functionality for the KDE Windows installation utility. New "Snowish" theme for the Kamion user information migration utility. Continued graphics improvements across kdegames. Improved wireless network encryption support in Solid. Further work on the Amarok 2.0 porting, with particular attention to the Music Store integration elements. KPilot is to make a surprise return for the KDE 4.0 release. Read More

"One of free software's premier applications, KDE's CD and DVD burning suite K3b, is about to hit the big 1-0. This milestone touts rewritten DVD video ripping and a refocused interface design. The new release represents a level of feature-completeness and stability that surpasses all previous K3b releases and, perhaps, all free software competitors." Read more at Linux.com, including plans for KDE 4. Read More

One of the big visual changes just happened in KDE 4, the transition of kdelibs to the Oxygen Icon set. This transition is still in progress, and it includes a massive icon naming scheme change that affects thousands of files. But, the Oxygen artwork project much is more than just an icon set, it's a unified way to do artwork for KDE 4. SVG an essential part of Oxygen, so many applications that are now capable of SVG display are also using Oxygen styled artwork. Read on for more... Read More

The fourth quarterly report from KDE e.V. is now available. It covers the board meeting in Darmstadt, the fate of the technical working group and the status of the SQO-OSS research project. As usual there are reports from the working groups, including business cards, a branding meeting, an active HCI group and 27,478 commits. New members and finances are also covered. If you have been contributing to KDE for some time and want to get involved in the administrative side, do consider joining KDE e.V. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KSplashX, a potential replacement for the KSplashML engine is imported into KDE SVN. Continued progress in the Solid and NetworkManager integration. More refinement, including better keyboard shortcuts, in Konsole. New keyboard layouts in KTouch. Icon and undo support in Step, the educational physics simulation package. KBounce becomes the latest game to move to a scalable interface and graphics. More work in KSquares, Konquest, KSpaceDuel and KReversi. KSudoku starts to be ported to KDE 4. Initial support for input fields and other form elements in okular. A co-ordinate grid and Wikipedia entries for cities comes to Marble. Further improvements, including the addition of Tree View functionality to the Dolphin file manager. New features in Mailody. Initial video support in Amarok, with heavy interface redevelopment underway for version 2.0. Last stages of an interface overhaul for the next version of KTorrent are completed. Proxy support added to the KDE Windows installation utility. Strigi is moved from playground to the kdesupport module. Read More

The seventh issue of the Amarok Newsletter is out. We talk about Amarok's success in the LinuxQuestions.org yearly poll, new features in the upcoming Amarok 2, and continue to point out interesting related projects. Read on for some Amarok lovin' from Wil Wheaton. Read More

For the next interview in the fortnightly People Behind KDE series we switch continents, travelling to Brazil to meet a cool-headed draftee with a 'cooler' pet, someone who keeps it in the family and who loves to both play and create games - tonight's star of People Behind KDE is Mauricio Piacentini. Read More

As some of you who monitor the KDE news sphere may have noticed, there has been a recent addition to the kdebase module. The Dolphin File Manager has been added to complement Konqueror's browsing capabilities. Read on for more information about this new File Manager and its relationship to Konqueror and the rest of KDE. Read More

Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt toolkit has become the second Patron of KDE. Trolltech itself should not need an introduction, since they have worked together with the KDE project since its inception ten years ago. Knut Yrvin, the community manager for Trolltech points out that "KDE does an excellent job of making UNIX-based desktops easy to use. Trolltech gains from feedback, bug reports and the spread of Qt through the success of KDE". Read More