KDE.news 

High level languages are increasingly being used in preference to C and C++ in new desktop software. One of these languages best supported in KDE and Qt is Python. To find out about the history and current state of PyQt, KDE Dot News talked to Phil Thompson, author and maintainer of the bindings.

Julian Seward, father of the the famous Valgrind, an opensource tool for debugging and profiling your applications, won this years Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award for "Best Toolmaker". This years ceremony was the second of the annual event. Congratulations, Julian! In other news, Valgrind 3.2 has been released. The two most notable changes are huge speed and memory gains in Memcheck (up to 30% faster) and the addition of the popular Callgrind. Additionally, the valgrind-based profiler frontend KCacheGrind is available as a seperate package.

A VMware Player image of KDE 3.5.4 with KOffice 1.5.2 running on SUSE Linux 10.1 is now available. The image is fully functional and can be upgraded and tweaked as needed. The VMware Player necessary to run it can be downloaded for free and is available for Microsoft Windows and Linux.

The Amarok project has announced an artwork contest for their upcoming live CD, Amarok Live, for fancy new version 1.4. The contest includes among other things bootsplash screens, wallpapers and Amarok splash screens. Also the Amarok Live team would like to have a complete set with similar style for all the items listed in the Amarok wiki. This artwork contest will be opened for submission until midnight UTC ending September 1st. Amarok Live 1.4 will feature the latest Amarok release from the 1.4 'Fast Forward' series and about 20 songs from Magnatune and artists, who are distributing their music in a free way.

Today we received confirmation that we have been successful in obtaining a booth at LinuxWorld Conference and Expo. The two-day event is taking place on the 25th and 26th of October in London's Olympia 2 conference hall. Following last year's success we are hoping to have a bigger presence this year to demonstrate our efforts at Akademy 2006 as well as the progress that will have been made with KDE 4. Anyone interested in helping out at the KDE booth should please contact the kde-gb list for further details.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for PostScript page deletion and editing of metadata in KViewShell, and for using a SQL backend with KPhotoAlbum (feature derived from KexiDB). Strigi gets support for inotify. Plasmagik, an application to assist developers in making "Plasmoids" (Plasma applets), is imported into KDE SVN. Rendering development work continues in the Unity web rendering engine. Work stars on a "Magnetic Outline Selection" tool for Krita.

KDevelop is the premier Free integrated development environment. The project is currently working towards KDevelop 3.4 with a bunch of new features and a major new version KDevelop 4. To find out what's coming up in one of KDE's most important projects KDE Dot News spoke to three of the authors about their current work and future plans.

The Linux Link Tech Show has interviewed Amarok developers Max Howell and Ian Monroe in their latest show. Max talks about Amarok's many features and what they plan for KDE 4, while Ian explains what the main goals of the Amarok project are. Start 12 minutes in to skip the technical problems and listen to the interview.

The Ark Linux team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the KDE centric desktop distribution Ark Linux 2006.1 - including KDE 3.5.4, Amarok 1.4.1, Kopete 0.12.1 with a hotfix for connecting to ICQ after the latest protocol change, a fully KDE-ified OpenOffice.org 2.0.3, and X.org 7.1.1. Another highlight in this release is the KDE based "rpmhandler", a tool that makes installing 3rd party packages easier than ever before.

The KDE Project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.4, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. Even while KDE 4 is being prepared, improvements to KDE 3.5 have been made and this release makes them available. The new features were subject to rigorous quality testing so that KDE 3.5.4 is as stable as the maintenance releases that precede it.