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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

KDE and Ovi Sprint attendees

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:

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.

Marlei, Melissa and Tomaz from the SoLiSC and KDE teams

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.

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.