KDE.news 

While preparations for aKademy 2006 are in full swing, next year's annual meeting of the KDE community, aKademy 2007, is sending out a Call for Location and Organisation. aKademy is made possible mainly because of financial contributions by corporations. These corporations prepare their budget for 2007 in autumn of 2006, in order to be able to secure funding for aKademy 2007 we need to start organising aKademy 2007 early to be able to apply for sponsorship soon.

On September the 9th and 10th (Saturday and Sunday) the Essener Linuxtage will take place in the University of Essen in Germany. KDE will have a stall there, but needs more representatives. If you are interested in helping us man a stall or giving a talk, then please contact us. Read the programme (in German) for more information.

Prentice Hall has published a new book, C++ GUI Programming with Qt 4, authored by Jasmin Blanchette and Mark Summerfield of Trolltech. Billed as "The Only Official Best-Practice Guide to Qt 4.1 Programming", readers will discover the most effective Qt 4 programming patterns and techniques as one masters key technologies ranging from Qt's model/view architecture to Qt's powerful new 2D paint engine. The authors provide readers with unparalleled insight into Qt's event model and layout system. Then, using realistic examples, they introduce superior techniques for everything from basic GUI development to advanced database and XML integration. You can read a sample chapter on the book's webpage.

Last Saturday, a representative from the Galician Government in Spain met members of the Trasno project. This project includes Free Software volunteer translators for the Galician language, from a wide range of Free software projects including KDE. The government representative was Mr. Antonio Pérez Casas, Adviser for the Information Society of the Industry and Innovation Councillor.

It's hot and you're melting? The KDE.org hardware infrastructure owned by KDE e.V. is melting as well! Out of the desperate need to upgrade our current disk RAID, we need new hard drives. If you have visited bugs.kde.org any time the last couple of months, you've noticed that this site often responds extremely sluggish. To improve the situation, we need to employ a new server, but need some more money for the hard drives for this beast! If you can help us with that, please consider to donate to the fundraiser. All amounts happily accepted through Paypal and other means.

The first Season of KDE has started. The Season of KDE is a follow-up project to Google's Summer of Code, giving all the applications that did not make it into the final selection a chance to be implemented anyway. We are happy to announce that 14 students have agreed to work on their projects even without the financial support from Google. See the Season of KDE homepage for more information and a complete list of the projects.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Unity, a project to re-synchronise KHTML with WebKit, has begun, with work continuing throughout the week. Support for suspend and resume on KIO jobs. KSpread gets support for scripting with Python and Ruby. One Summer Of Code project, "C# parser for KDevelop", reaches the feature-complete stage, with progress in the "Advanced Session Management", "GMail-style conversations for KMail" and "WorKflow" projects. Fixes made to support the German language in KLettres, with large-scale refactoring work in Kiten.

At the recent KDE Four Core meeting Aaron Seigo interviewed a number of the developers. You can hear them now on the new KDE://radio (listing) site. Subscribe to the podcast feed in Ogg or MP3. The interviews cover the new liveui framework, Akonadi PIM Storage Service, the Human Interface Guidelines and many more. Thanks to OSU Open Source Lab for sponsoring the KDE://radio bandwidth. In related stories Newsforge gives us a wrap up of the blogs from Trysil and here's the group photo you've all been waiting for.

The KOffice team today released the second bug-fix release in their 1.5 series. Several crash bugs were fixed, as well as a PowerPC issue in Krita and of course many smaller issues. There are also updated languages packs and a totally new language: Traditional Chinese. You can read more about it in the full announcement. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and SUSE.

OpenWengo has launched its first Code Camp. As OpenWengo GUI uses Qt 4 some of the projects involve Qt programming including building a "Round trip XUL editor using Qt Designer" and "Writing a Qt widget able to embed several different web browsers engines". Winners will get a €3500 reward.