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During LinuxTag 2004 the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the company credativ unveiled the Linux Government Desktop. The Linux Goverment Desktop has been developed within the scope of the project ERPOSS which evaluates Open Source Software in government environments.

Under Windows there is the Outlook/Exchange duo. Under Linux there is ...? Evolution is nice but, correct me, it's not an easy task to find a free groupware server on Linux where it connects to. On the other hand Kontact connects to free groupware servers like Kolab only. After reading the manuals I think Kolab is a PITA to setup. The recent Kontact version in CVS also connects to eGroupware, a PHPGroupware fork. PCLinuxOnline features a Howto about the setup of Kontact CVS and eGroupware.

Did you create a beautiful-looking SuperKaramba theme? Well get your gem listed in the SuperKaramba Theme Archive. SuperKaramba can be downloaded from the usual website. *** Unifying your desktop seems like a hot topic these days. At KDE-look.org you can find an article about how you can achieve that cool Plastik look on all of your applications. *** There is even a project called MetaTheme which is dedicated to unification of appearance between different graphics toolkits, such as GTK and Qt. *** Well they said they would do it and they delivered. Skype released their first beta version of Skype for Linux based on the Qt toolkit which makes this baby blend in to your KDE desktop. *** I noticed this project called Rule with the goal of making Free Software run on older hardware. The RULE Mini KDE page shows how to do this with KDE and they even explain how you could configure a minimal Qt library that still supports KDE 3.2.

A Task Force Team of KDE and Knoppix hackers and enthusiasts created "just in time" for LinuxTag 2004 two programs which harvested an overwhelming response from visitors: FreeNX Server and kNX Client. Although not yet officially released, several presentations showed a well working preview of the KDE version for the speed boosting NX Terminal Server technology.

In this week's KDE-CVS Digest: Python bindings for Qt and KDE are now in kdebindings. amaroK now has JavaScript scripting. kutils adds incremental find. kwin adds window specific settings GUI.

Chris Dunphy wrote a nice four page KDE 3.2.1 Review in March which we obviously missed and which imo hasn't received the attention it deserves yet. On the other side we were notified by "illogic-al" that he has written a short "What's New, KDE 3.3 Preview" based on KDE 3.3 Alpha. The first KDE 3.3 Beta with more completed features is expected to be released in about one week.

LinuxTag 2004 is the largest Linux and Open Source exhibition in Europe. Last year over 19,500 visitors and 159 exhibitors attended the event. This year's event will be hosted in Karlsruhe, Germany from June 23 through June 26. The KDE Team will have a large presence there, including several presentations and workshops, a large number of KDE developers, and of course the KDE mascot Konqi.

In this week's KDE-CVS Digest: Large image viewing improved. More integration between KAddressbook and Kopete. Continued OASIS file format loading and saving work in KOffice. XMLSerializer merged from Safari. kdetv adds deinterlacing. New Konqueror RSS feed plugin.

The Richmond Post, a news site covering adoption of the Mozilla XUL UI description language is current featuring an interview with KDE's own George Staikos. George is well known for his work on applications such as kdetv and KWallet, but he is also working on a facility that allows XUL applications to use native KDE widgets. The interview is in two parts: Part One and Part Two.

The V Fórum Internacional de Software Livre, the major Free Software event in Latin America, brought together a lot of KDE developers and users from June 2nd to 5th in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Read about the event, the KDE related materials and several plans and announcements.