KDE.news 

The KDE community has made available first beta packages of the 4.6 series of the Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications and Frameworks. All components add exciting new features making the stack more suitable for use on mobile devices, leveraging Nepomuk as the search infrastructure in the UI, and moving away from HAL as hardware abstraction layer. Source packages are available on ftp.kde.org, but most likely your distributor of choice will have created easy-to-install packages by now. Be aware that these releases do not meet production quality requirements. Being first betas, they might eat your baby or pet, or even cause serious damage to your beloved data. This is especially true since these releases contain the new Kontact based on Akonadi, bringing KMail and its sister apps to a whole new level of Groupware. As this release comes packed with new features, the KDE community encourages everybody to test 4.6 Beta1 thoroughly and report issues back to us via KDE's Bugzilla. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma starts experimenting with declarative QML, and gets Activity templates to enable quick setup and possible sharing of Activities. Refresh of many mimetype icons used across the KDE workspace. Work on over/under exposure interface functionality, face detection, and image history in Digikam. KStars merges the OpenGL branch, bringing this functionality to users with the next release. Various work on KLocale/KCalendarSystem in kdelibs. Various work across KDE-PIM, especially to the SMTP mail transport. Progress committed from the KOffice Essen meetup. Migrating the WYSIWYG Editor to WebKit in Blogilo. Twitter Lists support in Choqok. More work on KAccessible. KTorrent gains support for the Magnet protocol. Work in KRFB to allow more than one RFB server run at once. Better Valgrind 3.6.0 compatibility in KCacheGrind. Important progress on the Perl KDE bindings. Read More

Frank Karlitschek has just released ownCloud version 1.1, which contains many new features, bugfixes and improvements. It is suitable for everyday use. ownCloud is a web-based storage application similar to Google Docs, Dropbox or Ubuntu One with one major difference - all your data is under your own control. Read Frank's blogpost for more information about this active project and its growing development team. Read More

The EU research project, ALERT, is looking for KDE experts to assist research on free and open source software collaboration processes. The goal of the ALERT project is to develop methods and tools that improve FLOSS coordination by maintaining awareness of community activities through real-time, personalized, context-aware notification. KDE provides one use case for applying and evaluating these methods and tools. Read More

This year, KDE is delighted to have been chosen to take part in Google Code-in. Following the success of Google Summer of Code in previous years, Google Code-in is a new program to encourage pre-university students to contribute to free software communities. Like other participating organizations, KDE has provided a list of tasks that can be completed in short timeframes ranging from a few hours to a few days, whether they be simple bug fixes, documentation tasks or outreach projects and more. KDE has contributed a list of projects, each with a dedicated mentor from KDE to guide the student through the process and judge whether the task is completed satisfactorily. KDE's Google Code-in coordinator, Lydia Pintscher, explained why KDE wanted to take part: "We are always excited to be able to introduce new people to a great Free Software community working on changing the world one step at a time. We're offered an excellent program with Google Code-in to help students make their first contributions early in their life hopefully opening a lot of opportunities for their future."

Google Code-in begins at 08:00 UTC on 22 November 2010 and the first KDE projects will be available then, although more will be added later. Google Code-in ends on 10 January 2011. Anyone aged between 13 and 18 on 22 November can take part as long as they are in pre-university education and have their parents' consent (see contest rules for details on eligibility). In addition to gaining skills by completing the tasks and becoming part of the KDE community, all students who successfully complete a task will receive a t-shirt and certificate. Students will also revive US$100 for every three tasks they complete, up to a maximum payment of US$500 per student. There will also be grand prizes for students accumulating the most points. Full details can be found on the Google Code-in FAQ and the timeline.

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The Qt Blog covers topics relevant to Qt developers relating to innovative developments and applications using the latest Qt technology. They have noticed the ongoing development of Kontact Mobile from the KDE community by KDAB, and partners Intevation and g10code. The blog has a nice article about Kontact Mobile from a product perspective. Read More

The weekend before Qt Developer Days 2010 in Munich, Nokia invited thirteen members of the KDE community to get together in their offices in that same city for a developer sprint. The topic was Ovi and KDE, specifically how they can work together to widen adoption for both communities, both from a software development perspective and from a purely collaborative effort perspective. The developers were also invited to the main Qt Developer Days (DevDays) event too.

Ovi? What's that?

In addition to being the Finnish word for "door", Ovi is Nokia's service offering. Thus, rather than just being an app store or a mapping tool, it encompasses all of the services which Nokia offer. Depending on the country, you will find any number of services:

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The first Developer Conference for the Free Software Virtual Globe Marble ended successfully on November 7. Almost a dozen developers from the Marble community (the "Marbleheads") met for a weekend sprint at the basysKom office in Nuremberg. Read More

KDE recently attended SoLiSC (website in Portuguese), a local free software meeting based in Florianópolis, Brazil. SoLiSC had been inactive since 2005, but in 2009 the Free Software Association of Santa Catarina (Associação Software Livre Santa Catarina) was created to revive it and succeeded in doing so in October this year. The aim of the Association is to create a permanent forum for the discussion of free software in the state of Santa Catarina. The SoLiSC motto is Free Thought, Free Knowledge, Free Software (Pensamento Livre, Conhecimento Livre, Software Livre, in Portuguese). The main goals of this group are to educate people, to encourage the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), to promote economic and social development through FOSS, and to create opportunities for people who otherwise would not have access to technology. This includes supporting the SoLiSC event, the local edition of the FLISOL event, Software Freedom Day and other events in the area that promote FOSS education and use.This year, marking the 5th edition of SoLiSC, we set for ourselves the modest objective of organizing a relatively small event (thus the name SoLiSC.gz) in order to put SoLiSC in motion again without incurring too much cost for everyone involved. We were pleasantly surprised when the event turned out to be bigger than expected! It was a two-day event which took place on October 22nd and 23rd. We had about 300 people (including the speakers) showing up for the talks and hanging out with other FOSS enthusiasts and experts.

In addition to the talks, there was a user group space where attendees were able to meet each other and mingle. There was also, for the first time, a business-focused meeting that took place during the event. It was supported by the local enterprise support organization (SEBRAE-SC), and served as a bridge between local business and FOSS experts to work towards the implementation of free alternatives in small business.

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Ever wondered who is behind anonsvn.kde.org? Want to know what drives a person to provide that service to KDE for years and years? Martin Eisenhardt will tell you in a Behind KDE interview this week. Even now he is setting up one of the first anongit.kde.org mirrors, which will be live later this week! Read the interview at Behind KDE. Read More