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The aKademy 2006 organisation team is please to announce that registration for this year's conference in Dublin, Ireland, has now opened. KDE welcomes registration from anybody interested in the future development of KDE, including developers, translators, other free software projects, representatives of the software industry and ISVs interested in using free desktops and the KDE application framework.

The KDE4 build system is now centered around CMake. If you are a developer, CMake will be much easier to learn, handle and maintain than what you are used to so far. Alexander Neundorf, who took upon himself a big share of the actual work required for the switch, has published Why the KDE project switched to CMake -- and how on the LWN.net development pages. He outlines the considerations that led to choosing CMake over competing tools, shows why CMake is a better fit than the autotools used in KDE 1, 2 & 3, provides a short introduction into CMake file syntax. He even allows some insights into the current KDE4 development state. Hot on the heels of KDE, Scribus is switching as well.

The deadline for aKademy 2006 submissions is fast approaching. We are still looking for technical contributions, community success stories, tales of interoperability, industrial innovation and integration and cross-desktop creativity. The Call For Papers says that a 300 word abstract and a short bio is needed to secure your place for consideration by the programme committee. Send them in!

UbuntuOS have launched their new extended Podcast with an interview of Kubuntu developer Jonathan Riddell discussing the plans for the next release, Kubuntu Edgy. 100MB download, get it directly from Mirror 1, Mirror 2. The interview starts 1 hour 10 minutes in.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for the Encapsulated PostScript format in KViewShell. Important progress in Strigi desktop search. The beginnings of LastFM support for Amarok, whilst the experimental interface layout is reverted - for the time being, at least. Import into KDE SVN of the "GMail-style conversation view for KMail" project, with breakthrough progress in the "OSCAR (AIM) File Transfer" project, both for the Summer Of Code. Ingredient substitution functionality in KRecipes.

In another event in the series of meetings leading to the KDE 4.0 release, the developers of the core libraries will meet in the Norwegian woods (this bird has flown) from July 1st to July 7th. This meeting, co-sponsored by Trolltech and SUSE, is labelled KDE Four Core, as it is intended to be the direct successor of the KDE Three Beta and KDE Three meetings, that led to the refining of KDE releases 2.0 and 3.0 respectively. But, unlike those, this meeting is only one in a series of "KDE Four" meetings, that started with KDE Four Multimedia.

On June 5-7th the Korean version of the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo series opened its doors for the first time in Seoul. The visitors could learn about various Asian distributions which use KDE including Haansoft. The Korean team of translators with its head Cho Sung-Jae ran a booth showing the current KDE as well as distributing the brand new Kubuntu Dapper CDs to people - which was a great success. Next to the KDE booth Kolab.org was present where Bernhard Reiter explained their Kolab server and KDE's Kontact groupware software to interested visitors.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: work begins on 3D molecule visualisation features for Kalzium. More progress in the Kopete "OSCAR (AIM) File Transfer" and "KDevelop C# Parser" Summer Of Code projects. An enhanced version of the custom iconset developed during the 1.4 phase is re-enabled as the default option in Amarok. Following the brand clarifications of last week, oKular is now known as okular. Kitten is renamed Strigi. Two security issues are addressed.

In the good spirit of cooperation between Novell and KDE, Novell Poland contributed a large number of translations of KDE documentation to the Polish localisation team. The contribution contained 119 translation files and over 5700 translated messages (see this commit). Due to the long queue of translations it took us a while to process them, but we got them in to the recent KDE 3.5.3. We would like to thank Novell Poland for this contribution. We hope to see more cooperation in the future to bring the best desktop environment closer to the needs of non-English speaking users.

KDE made two security announcements today, the KDM Symlink Vulnerability is a potential local exploit on systems using KDM as their login manager. Artswrapper return value checking vulnerability affects Linux 2.6 systems that have artswrapper installed SUID root. A separate update was made for the wv2 library used in KWord to import MS Word files to fix a boundary check error. Your distribution should have updates for these issues.