KDE.news 

The KDE Commit-Digest Team has been busy again and is pleased to present the KDE Commit-Digest for 7th November 2010.

Highlights in this issue include:

• Notifications window can be moved around
• Support for phone calls using the Contacts runner in Plasma
• Caching of generated Lanczos textures results in performance improvements in KWin
• New KLocalizedDate class to make localization of dates "fun"
• Lots of work on Kolf
• Support for relative "context present" actions in KNotify
• Improvements to the katebuild-plugin of kdesdk
• Budget and forecast functionality for accounts in Skrooge
• Search dialogs added to various Kontact Mobile interfaces
• More work on "List Save Refactoring", and Shape Caching in KOffice
• Upload of local images, with HTML updating in Blogilo
• Printers can now be manually added in playground/print-manager
• Conclusion of big remake effort for mimetype icons in the 256x256 size
• Videocatcher moves to playground/network/videocatcher
• Klickety moves from kdereview to kdegames, KSame moves from kdegames to tags/unmaintained/4
• Krazy2 moves to Git

Read the complete Digest here.

KDE is a growing community with growing needs. The KDE Sysadmin team works hard to keep up, but lately the servers have been coming under some strain.

To help ease the situation, Canonical has donated a new server for the KDE Sysadmins to use. The server, named kundong, features an impressive 8 CPU cores, 6 GB of memory, and a 130 GB disk with space for several more disks as needed. It is hosted in Canonical's data center in central London.

KDE today announced the immediate availability of a second set of beta releases for the upcoming 4.6 series. These releases, codenamed Caramel, bring previews of new versions of the Plasma Desktop and Plasma Netbook workspaces as well as introducing major changes to applications and the KDE Platform.

The KDE community today announces the start of the Calligra Suite project, a continuation of the KOffice project. The new name reflects the wider value of the KOffice technology platform beyond just desktop office applications. With a new name for the Suite and new names for the productivity applications, the Calligra community welcomes a new stage in the development of free productivity and creativity applications for desktop and mobile devices.

A selection of the available items

• Europe - http://kde-gear.spreadshirt.net
• North America - http://gearwear.spreadshirt.com

We would be interested to hear from volunteers willing to help set up localized sites for other regions. Please email the KDE-Promo team if you are interested in helping with this.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Improved map management and support for exporting routes in the KML format in Marble. Support for showing/hiding the bottom page bar in Okular. An option to create QML Plasmoids added to Plasmate. Support for GetHotNewStuff in the Pastebin Plasmoid. Work to increase the number of supported rows in KSpread. Pidgin support added to the "IMStatus" function of Choqok. Animated tiles in Kajongg. Various work in KDE-PIM. Start of filtering (no GUI yet) integrated into KMail Mobile. Long-awaited ability to set custom button labels for yes, no, continue and cancel buttons in KDialog. "Find links only" option added to the "find bar" in KHTML. More work in kdebindings/perl. New activity manager daemon (with the KDED and Nepomuk service merged into a separate application). Facet API into imported into libnepomuk. Timestamp functionality added to KSharedDataCache to support KGameRenderer and similar libraries. Support for shutdown/restart when there is no active display manager (using ConsoleKit) in KDisplayManager. PolicyKit-kde removed from kdebase. KOffice 2.3 Beta 3 is tagged for release.

Plasma Tablet

Making Packages

Creating packages using OBS made it easy to deploy KDE software to tablets that were distributed during the MeeGo Conference. Soon we started to see our KDE applications running on MeeGo. The results were recorded, and videos posted: Kontact Touch, Plasma Mobile, Plasma Tablet and KDE Games.

As of today, the latest release in KDE's 4.5 series is 4.5.4, which adds a bunch of stabilization and translation updates on top of 4.5. Users in general are encouraged to upgrade to 4.5.4. The changelog has more details about some of the changes that went into this release.

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels. We are now inviting proposals for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics to take place in the Cross Desktop devroom. This is a unique opportunity to show the novel ideas of KDE to a wide audience of developers.

In January the KDE community is set to ship major new versions of the Plasma workspaces, the KDE applications and the KDE development frameworks. As usual, a series of beta versions and release candidates is released in the months leading up to the release day, with the purpose of letting users test the changes in the upcoming versions and help us find and fix bugs and regressions.