KDE.news 

KDE e.V., the organisation that represents KDE in legal and financial matters, and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) are proud to announce their associate status, working together for the promotion and protection of Free Software on users' desktops in Europe and worldwide. "Together with the KDE e.V. we seek to break the stranglehold on the desktop, give people freedom, and explain to them why this is important, and why they should not give it up again," said Georg Greve from FSFE. See the full press release for details. Read More

KDE-Artists.org is back up sporting a brand new look and feel. We have created a much more community centric site where those interested can submit news, tutorials, links and more. There is also a new feature we call Studios. This is a new twist on blogging that is completely focused on the creation of art and showcasing the process of creation. Artists who are interested will be able to share their artwork with others and talk about how they created it, and what influences them in their creative process. Read More

At LinuxTag on Saturday, a meeting of Kubuntu and KDE contributors was held in order to improve the collaboration of both projects. The aim was to to talk about the common future of both projects. Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth from Canonical attended the meeting. Later in his keynote speech to the conference, Mark publicly committed to Kubuntu as an essential product for Canonical and showed his commitment by wearing a KDE t-shirt. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Coverity fixes continue to roll in. amaroK gets enhanced support for VFAT (ie. Generic Audio) devices. New themes for KTuberling. Preliminary support for both next-generation disc formats (Blu-ray and HD-DVD) in K3B. KDE 4 changes: More apps ported to D-BUS. JuK gets the ball rolling on porting to Phonon. Read More

KDE 3.5 is a vivid platform. We looked at some reasons why three weeks ago and also last week. Today, we look at the photo-manager digiKam, the plotting application QtiPlot, the LaTeX-dreamteam Kile and KBibTeX and the upcoming KDE 3.5.3 release. Read More

Germany's largest Free Software exhibition LinuxTag has opened today and runs until Saturday at Wiesbaden near Frankfurt. KDE is exhibiting on booth number 937a and will be showing off our plans for KDE 4 plus what's new in KDE 3.5 and KOffice 1.5. KDE related talks include Ariya Hidayat on KOffice, Sven Krohlas on amaroK and a workshop by Torsten Rahn and Daniel Molkentin on Qt 4. Elsewhere at the exhibition OpenUsability will talk about how the work with KDE, openSUSE will show off SUSE Linux 10.1 and their new open build service, The Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI) will demonstrate its KDE based desktop ERPOSS 4 and Mark Shuttleworth will meet with KDE developers to talk about the future of Kubuntu. Read More

Google's Summer of Code has opened for student applications, and KDE is again seeking students to mentor over the holidays. Our ideas page lists some of the projects you could work on, or you are encouraged to come up with your own. Last year we had 24 students working on KDE projects, one of the highest numbers of any project and gained important projects like Okular. For more information see the student FAQ and participant signup page. Update: be quick, the deadline is midnight UTC ending next Monday 8th May. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: optimisations in KDE startup services. amaroK gains CD ripping functionality through the audiocd:/ kioslave. In KDE 4 Phonon, the KDE 4 multimedia service sprouts the beginnings of a Xine backend. Reorganisation of the KDE-PIM module (KPilot and KMobile leave the module, respective destinations extragear/pim and playground/pim; Kandy, KitchenSync and MultiSynk also removed). KOdometer removed. Read More

After many months of work on the new Multimedia API for KDE 4 it is time to finally announce Phonon. Phonon will provide a task oriented API for multimedia, making it easy for KDE applications to use media playback and capture functionality (and more) resulting in application developers being free to concentrate on the user interface aspects. The number of possibilities to integrate multimedia into the desktop experience make Phonon especially interesting. Read More

Yesterday the LSB Workgroup released the first version of the LSB-Desktop specification. Qt and Gtk+ are part of this new specification which is another step towards standardizing the Linux Desktop. The KDE project and Trolltech are working closely with the LSB Workgroup to have KDE itself accepted in future LSB-Desktop releases when the standard further evolves. Read on for the full press release. Read More