KDE.news 

I'm pleased to announce that the KDE Wiki has been moved to a new hosting solution sponsored by our very own Jason Bainbridge of the the KDE Web Team. As you might have noticed, we had outgrown the previous server which had been hosting both the Dot and the Wiki. After extended downtime and performance issues often related to having both services on the same machine as well as limited administration resources, Navindra Umanee and I decided to search for an alternate host for the Wiki.

March's Application of the Month covers KSpread, the spreadsheet program from KOffice. Markus Grob introduces us to using KSpread and we have an interview with its maintainer Laurent Montel. Read it now in Dutch, English, French, and German.

MozillaQuest Magazine has an overview of KMail. Their final evaluation of KMail awards it their "MozillaQuest Magazine Editor's Choice Award". The article includes the top five features from KMail author Ingo Klöcker, an explanation of some of KMail's standout features and some nice screen shots.

Issue 2 of the Free Software Magazine contains two articles by KDE promo member Tom Chance. In Guerrilla Marketing he discusses how KDE's promotion efforts compare to those of other Free Software projects while his interview with Bernhard Reiter, conducted at aKademy last year, discusses marketing in government and software freedom on the desktop.

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest (all-in-one version):

Beginnings of Subversion support in Cervisia. Cleanup of initial application sizing. KDevelop adds Qt Designer support for Python. IDN issues fixed in Konqueror. Digikam adds more plugins: Insert Text, Channel Mixer, Infrared, Blur, Distortion, and a new ratio crop tool. KMail adds an account setup wizard.

The KDE tradeshow team will be previewing KDE 3.4 at this year's Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, coming up this weekend. Based on the recent Release Candidate 1, the team will present the features of the new version at the KDE booth, which is prominently located in the front of the exhibition area. Talks include Kurt Pfeifle elaborating on KDE Tips and Tricks and Martin Loschwitz (of Debian fame) giving an insight on Kalyxo, the Debian KDE efforts. Kurt Pfeifle's FreeNX workshop is already sold out. See you in Chemnitz! Update: All talks will be available as live streams.

How do 250 scientists spend their coffee break at a scientific conference? They use KDE! There was a scientific conference, the Tübinger Perception Conference 2005 (TWK) at the end of February. Many scientists from all over the world joined to take part in the symposia and the poster sessions. Because many scientists are addicted to their e-mail, the organizers installed an Internet Corner with 3 KDE Terminals.

FOSDEM is Europe's biggest meeting of Free Software developers and KDE turned out in force at it last weekend. As well as talks in the main track on KDE and KDevelop, the KDE Developers' room hosted a series of other talks. We also ran a stall and still found time for some hacking.

Due to the unfortunate fact that Dirk Doerflinger, the old maintainer of the German KDE Forum has way too little time for the forum at the moment, we are pleased and grateful to announce that §igma from www.linux-web.de has graciously adopted it. We moved the forum to his server a few days ago and are expecting the domain to be fully transferred; there may still be some annoyances with referring mails until the transfer is complete. This will soon be (or already is) history.

Originally appearing in Linux Journal, a new KDE Kiosk tutorial is now available. It provides a great starting point for those interested in learning how the powerful KDE configuration framework is set up, with further insight into how to centrally customize a desktop setup. It also provides examples and pictures of various configuration options and demonstrates the many desktop restrictions available to an administrator.