KDE.news 

The second day of FOSDEM 2007 was as busy, if not more, as the first day. Many face-to-face interactions, of great benefit to cooperation between developers and projects, and time spend on hacking on and promoting KDE. The KDE developer room was well used, first by an Educational workshop, well led by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, followed by some more talks. Topics included Krita's present and future by Bart Coppens, a KDE 4 talk by Jos Poortvliet and a KDE e.V. talk by Sebastian Kügler. Read on for a report on day two. Read More

Linux.com is reporting that the New KDE 4 preview shows progress. The article has comments from developers Will Stephenson and Aaron Seigo about the new additions to the pre-release and the improved release process which should see more frequent updates. It also discusses what will happen to the KDE 3 branch and even asks when KDE 4 will be released. Read More

The Faces of KDE takes a look at some of the developers working on KDE 4. "In this stage of development it’s a lot of pain for very little glory, re-designing the next generation KDE from the ground up. It’s a task that separates the core developers from the hangers on, and the architects of the new desktop are a pretty dedicated group. There are far too many developers currently active in KDE for me to introduce them all, but here’s a quick glance at what a small handful of them are working on for the next major version of KDE." Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Solid gets support for NetworkManager. Support for changing the font colour of the taskbar. File format import work in KVocTrain. More KDE 4 porting takes place in KTorrent. Noatun now uses Phonon as its only backend. Work is begun on refactoring the user interface of Amarok 2.0. The Codeine video player is imported into KDE SVN and ported to CMake, Phonon and KDE 4. Progress in the 'krunner' element of Plasma. KAlgebra is imported into KDE SVN into the playground/edu module. Search improvements in Kate, with a move to the kdesdk module. Read More

The first day of the annual Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting in Brussels was very busy for the KDE team: attending talks by other talented hackers, hosting KDE related talks in the developer room, representing KDE at the booth, mingling with other hackers, bug hunting and work on new features. KDE had a strong presence this year, at least twice as many KDE people attended including a very strong showing from the Amarok developers. Speakers in the KDE developer room included Jos van den Oever, Stephan Laurient, Flavio and Sander Koning. Read More

The KDE project announces the availability of the third development snapshot of the upcoming KDE 4. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE 4 will provide, those who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE 4 platform and for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE 4. This snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable, and the interfaces are subject to changes at any time. Read More

This weekend, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting will be held at the Université Libre in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM, being one of the biggest European Free Software events usually attracts several thousand people each year. The schedule for the KDE devroom is now published. Highlights this year include talks about the semantic desktop, a workshop on educational software and naturally an overview of the status of KDE 4. For the first time we are running a series of cross desktop talks together with Gnome where you can hear how desktop search engine Strigi works. KDE and friends also make appearances in the Lightening Talks track with topics including CMake, OpenWengo and Amarok. If you are planning to visit FOSDEM, add your name to the FOSDEM 2007 Wiki Page. Read More

The KOffice team today released KOffice 1.6.2, the second bug-fix release in their 1.6 series. Although this is a maintenance release, there are some new features in Krita (new filters and a smudge paint operation) and Kexi (a new User Mode to deploy Kexi applications). Many bugs were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs with no less than 4 new languages. You can read more about it in the announcement, and the release notes. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and SUSE. Read More

When a project with the size and scope of KDE gets to be as big as it is, sometimes changing a decision established almost a decade earlier is very difficult. KDE has relied on autotools to build most of the project since its inception, but for the last year, KDE 4 has been building with CMake, a newer build system that is rapidly becoming a heavyweight contender in the world of buildsystems. Read on for more... Read More

A joint KDE and Gnome meeting is taking place in Spain next month called Guademy. The objectives are to create new projects and initiatives of collaboration between both Desktops and allow new developers to get started. Aaron Seigo will give an update on KDE 4 and Albert Astals Cid will talk about Okular. Meanwhile in India Pradeepto Bhattacharya of KDE India will be talking at FOSS MEET in NIT Calicut about KDE 4 and why you should develop with Qt. Read More