KDE.news 

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KBoard, a game canvas, gets several new chess-based themes, whilst KSokoban gets many new levels. KPhotoAlbum imports the winning entry from its Splashscreen Contest. Krazy and apidox (parts of the EBN test suite) move from playground into the kdesdk module. KBlog, a library to interface with various blogs, is imported into the PIM playground in KDE SVN. Work begins on a GStreamer backend for Phonon. More work on Yahoo Chatroom support in Kopete. Kexi Query Designer supports data sorting in design and SQL view. Painting experiments with Chinese brushes in Krita. Read More

Trolltech has announced the release of version 4.2 of Qt. The main features of this release are CSS-like desktop stylesheets, a new graphics view class, Qt/Mac look-and-feel improvements including the ability to host Carbon widgets inside Qt widgets and tighter cross-desktop integration. See the Qt 4.2 intro for a detailed list. The source can be downloaded for X11, Windows or Mac. Read More

The Amarok Project is giving away an iPod Nano during its current fundraiser to celebrate the month of Roktober. Anyone that gives the equivalent of $10 or more is automatically entered in a random drawing to win a 2GB iPod Nano. Amazingly, a year has passed since the last fundraiser. Having the ability to spend some money on project resources and hardware made a big difference to the project's productivity. The past year has seen much progress on the Amarok front with a 1.4 release that saw a whopping 64 new features, a very successful developer meeting in May and basic groundwork laid for the port to KDE 4. Plans for 2007 include at least one more meeting to hack on Amarok 2.0. There is a PayPal link and more information on the Amarok website. Read More

Yahoo Business reports on ODF Day at Akademy which brought together developers from KOffice, OpenOffice, IBM, Intel and government. "Dr. Barbara Held, presently serving as Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission Program for Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA), stated in her keynote address, 'In the view of the European administrations and Member States, the ODF standard is at the very top of the pile by far from all other proposed open standards.'" Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: KPersonaliser, the new installation greetings wizard, has been removed from KDE 4. Solid is imported into kdelibs for KDE 4. Marble, a generic geographical widget with wide-ranging possibilities, is imported into KDE SVN. Work begins on supporting Telepathy in Kopete. Experimental eyecandy in the Kate editor, with a new, non-obtrusive search bar implementation. User interface experiments in Krita. Development of Krossrunner in KOffice, a command-line OpenDocument format manipulator. KArm has been renamed to KTimeTracker, to better represent its functionality. The kde.org website, along with many related sub-sites, has changed over to the Oxygen style. aKademy 2006 draws to a close. Read More

With aKademy now at a close Aaron Seigo spoke to Linux.com for a podcast. "aKademy's conference track, which ran Saturday and Sunday, was different from those of past years, Seigo says. In the past, Seigo says aKademy has had a user-focused conference, but 'this year, we've decided to focus acutely on the technical side of life.' Most of the talks have focused on KDE 4, and speakers have been able to not only discuss their new applications and technologies, but also to demonstrate them." Read More

Last Wednesday the KDE regional groups Birds of a Feather session took place at aKademy 2006, Dublin. The focus of this BoF session was to share experiences that regional KDE-groups have had in building a community. A regional group is generally country based, e.g. KDE-IT for Italy and KDE-NL for Netherlands. Read More

The Kommander team is proud to announce a new development release which has some bug fixes but most importantly a new text editor. Along with this we are releasing two new plugins for databases and HTTP forms. We have also updated our site with an article and tutorial section starting out with an Introduction to Kommander. We also have a development news section. More is in the works to be released in the coming week. Remember Kommander is developed almost entirely through sponsorship funding and actually saw little development for several months partly due to funding shortages. Your financial support is welcome. Read More

Konversation developer Eike Hein noticed KDE appearing on new US drama Heroes. This follows previous outings on 24, Alias and the making of Lord of the Rings. Kopete is the star of the episode, but you don't have to be a hero to make use of KDE's multi-protocol instant messenger. Read More

This week the People Behind KDE series is featuring Philip Rodrigues. He mostly is active as a documentation contributor, but he also does user support and some coding. Enjoy the interview with tonight's star. Read More