KDE.news 

At aKademy we got really cool hardware from transtec to accelerate the development by shortening compiling times with icecream.

We did some quality tests for Debian and rebuild all Sarge packages with 2 blades (Intel Xeon based systems) from transtec and sponsored HP notebooks which were on daily use in the tutorials and worked 2 days compiling Sarge.

We have a winner! Our recent competition turned out to be more than possible for Waldo Bastian, who picked up his prize this morning from Phil Rodrigues. Based upon his recent tutorial and presentation, the entry covers KDE's KIOSK framework and administration tools, and will add an entirely new section on introducing administration to the User Guide.

Continuing our series of interviews for aKademy, we caught up with Eirik Chambe-Eng, President and Co-Founder of Trolltech, to pick his brain about Qt and Trolltech. Eirik apologized for "getting carried away" with our questions, describing himself as "passionate about these issues". So read on and enjoy...

As UserConf has kicked off today at aKademy we had the privilege to sit down with Will Stephenson, a prominent hacker who works on the KDE instant messenger Kopete. We talked about Kopete, its current status and future plans for Kopete and Will had some very good news for us...

If you are attending the UserConf over the coming weekend, then make sure you drop by the doKumentary room during your visit. Thorarinn Einarsson (Thor), a student of Documentary Studies at Duke University, is making a documentary about the KDE project. He is filming at aKademy, and is keen to hear from users and contributors.

In this week's KDE CVS-Digest: Kopete Groupwise support ready for testing. Digikam adds oil-painting and charcoal drawing effect plugins. Two new kioslaves; kio-trash and kfiledevice for disk size and usage. Kexi now supports subforms. Work started on a common multimedia interface to various backends.

The Scribus Team is pleased to announce the release of Scribus 1.2 - Open Source Desktop Publishing. The 1.2 release codenamed "aKademy" is the culmination of over 1 year of hard work since last year's 1.0 release. The Scribus team urges all users and distros to use this latest release.

Attention aKademy participants! The mission, if you choose to accept it, is to update at least a single unwritten entry in the new KDE User Guide. You can see the current content here. The best submission received by Saturday 12 noon will win a book from the great collection of O'Reilly books (including a signed Samba book, C++ Pocket References, and the entire Linux Webserver CD Bookshelf and much more to choose from). Read on for full details.

It seems that other news web sites are picking up on the news of the KDE Desktop event in Ludwigsburg. ZDNet is running an article about the new desktop search engine KDE hackers are working on here at aKademy. Aaron Seigo, prominent KDE hacker and usability expert, answered some questions during a telephone interview and gave the outside world some insight of what is happening here at aKademy. You can also find a transcript of the talk by Juk hacker Scott Wheeler on search and meta data ideas for KDE 4 here.

On Sunday and Monday the first Unix Accessibility Forum took place at aKademy and was said by participants to be extremely successful. The most notable thing was that amongst all participants there was a good spirit of cooperation and consensus that standards for assistive technologies would ensure success in the accessibility of graphical user interfaces like KDE.