KDE.news 

The KOffice UI competition has received a large number of very innovative and detailed entries. Unfortunately KOffice 1.5 is a little delayed and still needs to be released. So all hands are on deck to make sure 1.5 has a perfect OpenDocument implementation and no Krita crashes. That means that the jury (Inge and me, Boudewijn) have decided to postpone our final decision until Sunday, instead of tomorrow, as we need more time to be able to treat all the great contributions fairly. Read More

Newsforge has a couple of interesting articles about KDE. In KDE 4 developers look towards new desktop possibilities, where KDE developers talk about some ideas for the next major KDE version. Among those ideas are universally available personal information, and a desktop that is tailored for and responds to the things users do most. Another article one is about a new marketing initiative, where KDE and GNOME collaborate on free desktop promotion. This initiative recognises how much each project has to gain from working together to take market share from the proprietary competition. Read More

Tonight's People Behind KDE interview is with the author of the most active program in KDE, Krita. Not only has he made the premier free software painting application he has also added the vital vertical-maximise feature to KWin. Find out what the most inspirational thing is for a hacker fixing his bugs in our interview with Boudewijn Rempt. Read More

The KDE Usability Project reports I posted last week received a lot of feedback. There were several motivations for posting the reports, and I think it was a success. They are a useful reference for developers and other usability specialists as well as provides a public appearance for what the project does. Some of the feedback included questions about the project and reports. So, as webmaster of usability.kde.org and a project representative, let me answer some of these questions for you. Read More

Last weekend, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting took place in Brussels. KDE was present there with a lot of developers, a devroom and several interesting talks. Among the speakers were Jonathan Riddell from the Kubuntu Distribution, Sebastian Kügler from the KDE's Marketing Working Group, Bart Coppens from the Krita development team and Raphael Langerhorst & Sander Koning from the KOffice teams. Read More

Some people still think KDE can not do groupware as well as proprietry systems. I found on the KDE site, the German publisher Bomots offers a German book about Kontact, KDE's Personal Information Manager. I decided it was time to see if this book, "Kontact Kompact" by Andre Schreiber, is useful for people looking for a replacement groupware client, and people willing to learn Kontact. Read the book review at LXer. Read More

It was announced on Tuesday that the KDE Catalan l10n team will work together with TERMCAT (Catalan link), the organisation that standarises new words, usually technology related, in the Catalan language. Details are still being worked out but the team will provide them access to the NX account on the OpenUsability server, so they can test the translations while we work on them. This will allow them to have a look at how their translation will look in future versions of a given program. Read More

Valgrind is a CPU simulator which is used by KDE and many other projects to profile and debug our programmes. In the interview below Valgrind author Julian Seward talks to KDE Dot News about why he developed Valgrind, how you can use it and, most importantly, where the name comes from. Julian will be giving a talk on Valgrind next Sunday at FOSDEM. Read More

LinuxQuestions.org launched their Members Choice Awards Polls. Plenty of KDE applications and KDE itself up for your votes. *** Krusader released 1.70.0 of their file manager. "Bringing a feature rich filemanager with new technologies and standards to the Linux desktop." *** Premiere IRC client Konversation released 0.19 with an impressively long changelog. *** Kubuntu released a live CD with the latest KDE, KOffice and Amarok. *** The schedule for the KDE Developers room at FOSDEM is up with talks on Kubuntu, Free Software marketing, KOffice and Krita. See you at the weekend. Read More

The Polish department of Mandriva has contributed over 100 files of documentation translations to the Polish localisation team. The commits (1, 2) are made up of over 8000 messages. This allows Polish people to get an even better experience when using KDE in their native language. The KDE Polish team would like to thank Mandriva for their contribution and encourage GNU/Linux companies in other countries to support local versions of KDE. Read More