KDE.news 

FOSDEM, the sixth Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting will be held on 25 and 26 February 2006 in Brussels. KDE will be present there to socialise, hack and take part in the wider Free Software community. KDE has reserved a devroom to serve as a central meeting point for the KDE crowd. We will be holding our own talks which so far include Raphael Langerhorst on KOffice 1.5 and Jonathan Riddell on Kubuntu. Read More

Witold Wysota wrote in to inform us of the newly launched Qt Centre which is being billed as the ultimate Qt community site. With the support of Trolltech, Witold and former Qt Forum administrators, moderators and fans Axel Jaeger, Daniel Kish, Kevin Krammer, Johan Thelin, Jacek Piotrowski and Michael Goettsche have banded together to form the new site after learning that the Qt Forum as well as KDE-Forum.org had been hijacked for the purposes of boosting the Google Page Rank of unrelated external sites and have otherwise become neglected. If you had any public links to either Qt Forum or KDE-Forum.org please consider removing them or using the nofollow attribute. Let us hope that the new Qt Centre flourishes! Read More

After a lot of hacking behind the scenes, a new initiative to improve KDE's interaction with network and hardware devices has been launched. Solid will provide a robust basis for the dynamic modern desktop in KDE, which needs to be aware of available hardware and networks, paving the way for innovative functionality. Users should see KDE applications taking advantage of Solid in KDE 4, from the most basic Plasma applets and complex applications to desktop-wide awareness. Developers will be able to take advantage of a robust, flexible and portable API and will be integrated into the Plasma engine. It will make use of existing technologies like HAL. Solid will also include a knowledge base providing a way for users to easily provide feedback on incorrect behaviour. Read More

Rex Dieter has been making the unofficial KDE Red Hat packages for some years now. Since this is a service depended upon by thousands of Red Hat users to get their required latest build of KDE, KDE Dot News interviewed Rex to find out how he got started, why the need for the project exists and how he makes the packages. Read on for the interview. Read More

Stephan Binner has released a VMware Player image of KDE 3.5 with KOffice running on SUSE Linux 10. The image is fully functional and can be upgraded and tweaked as needed. The version of VMware necessary to run it can be downloaded for free. Stephan blogs "It's a fully working installation so don't forget to install and try some additional KDE applications - and to run the security update when you're asked to. ;-)" Read More

Welcoming in the new year is People Behind KDE bringing us one of the little known stars of KDE development. Sebastian Trüg is the man behind one of KDE's most successful applications, K3b. Read the interview to find out how K3b started, what KDE needs to conquer the world and what keeps Sebastian motivated to work on the premier CD burning application. Read More

KDE convert Diego Calleja explains Why KDE Rules by showing off some of its power features. He starts by dismissing some myths about KDE then tells us about the application that brought him to KDE, amaroK. Power features explained include KParts, DCOP and KIOSlaves. "I wrote this document to tell everybody why KDE is great, why it's worth using (great functionality), supporting (great development platform) and hacking (great design) and why you can expect many other awesome features from KDE 4." Read More

Turkish distribution Pardus, one of the first GNU/Linux distributions to feature KDE 3.5 as its desktop, has announced its first stable release. All Pardus specific desktop applications, including the installer and package manager are developed using the powerful KDE and Qt libraries. KDE was chosen to be the default desktop environment for its extendability and close integration of applications. Pardus is funded and developed by the Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey and expects to make some major KDE rollouts in the Turkish public sector in 2006. Read More

It seems to be review time for amaroK. The amaroK team is thrilled to see amaroK way ahead of the pack in a recent Grumpy Editor review on LWN.net, in which the author describes the best and worst features of four popular Free Software audio players. The review points out some of the weaker features of amaroK and the developers have written about how they are addressing some of the issues mentioned. amaroK has also had an audio review on the GNU/Linux User Show No. 27. The author describes most of amaroK's features and shows once again that the slogan "rediscover your music" fits perfectly. You download the review at their website, or by adding the podcast to amaroK. Read More

KOffice development is currently going on at a tremendous pace. Version 1.5, with Open Document as the default file format, will be released in March 2006, and it is time to start collecting ideas for version 2. KOffice has received a donation of $1000 to be used as the prize in a GUI and Functionality Design competition. So whip out the RAD tools and your imagination and design the next big thing in office automation! Read More