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Some highlights from this week's KDE Commit-Digest (all in one page):

KSpread improves range functions. KMobileTools adds addressbook import and export to VCard and KAddressBook. Umbrello adds Tcl code generator. KMail now has full text indexing. Kontact scripting (a Summer of Code project). And the first (somewhat) working KDEMM backend based on aRts.

Linspire has announced that their KDE based operating system is being trialed for use by schools in Indiana state. The Indiana Access Program will provide every classroom with computers for all their pupils. There are already several thousand Linspire machines running KDE in use in dozens of classrooms across the state to explore the benefits of one-to-one classroom computing. Introducing KDE to high school students in this manner will equip these young people with the skills necessary to be comfortable and familiar with the Open Source platform. Many of these students will likely go on to use KDE after school and perhaps even join the KDE project as contributors, helping to spread KDE and GNU/Linux on the desktop even further in North America.

Trolltech, makers of the Qt application development framework used by KDE and the Qtopia application development platform for embedded Linux devices, is proud to announce their full-time sponsorship of KDE developer Aaron Seigo. This arrangement will enable Aaron to devote his full time and attention to KDE software projects such as Plasma, which aims to reshape the desktop, as well as to engage in greater Open Source community participation and support.

QDevBlog has launched featuring the thoughts of all your favourite Trolltech engineers. Currently "the ramblings of engineers" has a lead entry from KDE founder and Qt lead developer Matthias Ettrich on some basic thoughts about KDE 4. QDevBlog is also on the increasingly large Planet KDE.

Wikimania 2005, the first international Wikimedia conference, will be held in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, starting next Thursday and finishing on Monday. Following the announcement of the Wikipedia-KDE Cooperation the KDE Project has been invited by Wikipedia to join Wikimania 2005.

This week DistroWatch interviews our own Jonathan Riddell about Kubuntu, the KDE-centric Ubuntu flavor. He reveals to us how he started with Kubuntu, what problems they've encountered and what his plans are for the upcoming new version.

The August edition of the free to subscribe TUX Magazine covers a number of KDE applications: Guarddog "lets you have total control over your personal firewall without having to invest years in the study of firewalls and security" while digiKam is "a perfect all-in-one solution for importing, editing and managing photo albums from all my digital cameras over the last few years". There is also an extensive introduction to KDE's webpage editor Quanta Plus and you can vote for your favourite KDE applications in their first readers' choice awards.

The K Desktop Environment project will again be present with a booth at the LinuxWorld Expo being held in San Francisco August 9 through 11. We'll be at booth #2038, upstairs, in the new Moscone building! We'll be demonstrating not only KDE 3.4, but also the upcoming KDE 3.5 and even maybe bits and pieces of what will become the revolutionary turning of the Gear KDE 4.0. We'd be pleased to welcome you.

Some highlights from this week's KDE Commit-Digest (all in one page):

DigiKam adds an image editor plugin to remove Hot Pixels' on photographs. Krita adds an OpenEXR import filter and adds support for working with high dynamic range images such as 32-bit floating point RGBA colourspace. KSpread gets a new function manager and repository (a Google SoC project). Allow setting the wallpaper via DnD, even when icons on desktop are disabled. Media kioslave implements the autostart of application after mount. KMail now has Online/Offline status. amaroK adds podcast support within the playlist browser.

Among users of the K3b CD and DVD burning application there has been quite some confusion with the new audio project so I wrote a little overview of the new features and changes in version 0.12. Check out the K3b 0.12 New Feature Guide to get an idea of how much more there is under the hood in the new version.