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Announcing Project Neon at conf.kde.in Today

Kudos to Philip Muškovac (yofel), Michał Zając (quintasan), Rohan Garg (shadeslayer), and Gaurav Chaturvedi (tazz) for their accomplishment! And thanks to Sheytan (Tomasz Dudzik) for the great artwork. Branding is important, and the developers of this project appreciate it.

Lighting the Auspicious Lamp

The first session was by Lydia Pintscher who set the keynote for the conference with her talk "So Much to do, So Little Time". She introduced KDE and spoke about the elements that make it special, the high quality software, breadth of the project and most importantly the community.

This year's event will feature keynotes from Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of Linux Foundation, as well as Carol Smith, program administrator for Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in. We also have a full array of exciting talks organized into four tracks, plus a panel discussion and hacking sessions.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

• Calligra continues its activity including PPT and PPTX file support and an experimental Google Spreadsheets plugin
• Work throughout Phonon and its backends including an improved finding of virtual devices from ALSA
• KDevelop sees the implementation of a new shell command interface and improvements to the Valgrind parser and Ruby language support
• A new interactive legend in Kalzium
• Further work on Pick and Color Labels in Digikam
• Major work on the PublicTransport Plasma applet
• Keyboard navigation support added to the calendar applet
• Work throughout Plasma-Mobile
• Support for douban.com added to Tellico collection management software
• New "partial seeding" extension in KTorrent
• New configurable Samba browsing in system-config-printer-kde, the printing GUI
• Get Hot New Stuff support for the new template system in Cirkuit
• KDE Platform 4/Qt4 porting of KMLDonkey has begun
• FreeBSD fixes in Gwenview
• Bugfixing in KDE-Libs including Kioslaves
• Bugfixing in KGPG, Amarok and KDE-PIM
• Kolourpaint, KRuler, Skanlite, KSanePlugin, and KSnapshot move to Git

Read the rest of the Digest here.

In the latest KDE Commit-Digest:

          <ul><li>New "processor information" page and FreeBSD fixes in KInfoCenter</li>

            <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2011-02-20/">Read the rest of the Digest here</a>.

In many parts of the world, spring is around the corner. Time for some spring cleaning, and that's true for your desktop and netbook as well. With 4.6.0 being about a month in the wild, it's time for the first round of updates. The KDE team has made available "Helga" (bearing version number 4.6.1), a series of updates to Desktop and Netbook workspaces, applications and the KDE frameworks that make developers' lives so much easier. The changelog lists some of those fixes, but there are more that are not contained in the changelog. 4.6.1 is also the first release served mainly out of KDE's new Git-based development infrastructure. As usual, 4.6.1 only contains bugfixes and translation updates, so we expect smooth sailing for everyone who upgrades from 4.6.0 or earlier versions. Enjoy Helga!

Following Nokia's recent announcement about its future smart phone development strategy, KDE has received a lot of questions. Many of these questions have been related to the future of KDE and KDE's commitment to the Qt framework. In this statement we set out what we see as a bright future for Qt and KDE software.

In the latest KDE Commit-Digest:

          <ul><li>Fixes and Optimization in KWin, including NVIDIA related fixes</li>

            <a href="http://commit-digest.org/issues/2011-02-13/">Read the rest of the Digest here</a>.

The Desktop Summit 2011 is a joint conference organised by the GNOME and KDE communities, in Berlin, Germany from the 6th August 2011 to the 12th August 2011. Held annually in cities around Europe, GUADEC and Akademy are the world's largest gatherings of those involved with the free desktop or mobile user interfaces. Developers, artists, translators, community organisers, users, and representatives from government, education, and businesses and anyone else who shares an interest are welcome. GNOME and KDE are Free Software communities that drive the user interfaces of many Linux-powered devices, ranging from smartphones to laptops, or personal media centers. This year, for the second time, both communities have decided to organise a single, joint conference. We anticipate over a thousand participants, covering both projects as well as related technologies.

The Necessitas team, led by Bogdan Vatra, is pleased to announce the first alpha release of Necessitas, a Qt SDK for the Android mobile platform.

The release contains the following:

• Ministro, a system-wide Qt libraries installer
• Qt framework, precompiled for Android (only in a Linux 32-bit version)
• Qt Creator for Android - to create, manage, compile, deploy and debug your software

Although these make extensive use of free software from Nokia Qt Development Frameworks and Google, this is a community project and is not supported or endorsed by either Nokia or Google at present. The alpha release of Necessitas is exciting for KDE as support for Qt is a prerequisite to get KDE software running on a wide range of mobile platforms. The project also underlines Qt's value in community-led, cross platform applications, which KDE strongly supports.