KDE.news 

Today, KDE has made available 4.5.3, the November updates to the Plasma workspaces, the applications built on top of KDE's platform, and the platform itself. This release, as all x.y.z updates, contains bugfixes, performance improvements and localization updates only. As such, it's a safe upgrade and recommended for everyone running 4.5.2 or earlier. The update contains a number of fixes in Okular, Dolphin and a series of KDE games. Also, the new shared data cache continues to mature. The rate of changes in the 4.5 series is slowing down while many developers already prepare for the 4.6 release planned for January 2011, which was soft-frozen only days ago. Read More

At the recent openSUSE Conference, Frank Karlitschek introduced a new KDE initiative intended to bring developers and users closer together, Bretzn. He admitted that they came up with the name Bretzn (a kind of German pretzel) only the day before the Saturday keynote, illustrating the speed and ease that are appropriate to the initiative.

The Issue

As a developer, you want to create cool Free Software and get the result out to millions of users. Unfortunately, to get the code to users you need to do more than just the fun stuff.

After you have written your application, you have to compile and package it for all operating systems you want to support. There is a wide variety of Linux distributions, and, of course, Windows and Mac too. Once you've built and packaged your software, you have to create a web site with information about the application, along with features such as commenting and bug reporting. Promotion comes next with social networking and conferences. Then you try to get it into distributions. Once the distributions ship your application, users turn up and start giving feedback, resulting in changes to the application. A new version is released, and you have to start all over again with the boring stuff.

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Roughly half a year and over a thousand commits after the first stable release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1, the first of hopefully many feature releases. As with the previous bugfix releases, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins. Read More

Have you ever started an update, download or file transfer only to find that you need to head off, so you leave your computer running to complete that task? Wouldn't it be great if there was a simple application that could monitor your computer and shut it down, suspend or hibernate it at the right time while you were not there? Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Start of KOffice UI Abstraction project, to enable implementing various UIs on top of KOffice without in-depth knowledge of KOffice MVC APIs. Support for picture bullets in the .docx format filter in KOffice. "Reply Without Quoting" in KMail (kdepim/mobile). Enable dropping of raw data (like one could do in KDE3) in Dolphin. Configurable routing profiles in Marble. First approach toward a version of KAlgebra for mobile devices. "Save Plot" function now saves to a SVG file in Kalzium. New contextual menu in HTML pages for export as PDF, ODT, image, and copy, in Skrooge. "Postpone Break" feature in RSIBreak. Initial support of Geolocation in Choqok. A configuration dialog for the Muon Updater. upower backend for PowerDevil 2. New StartupFeedback effect in KWin. Minimal implementation of a Windows CE backend in Solid. Support for defining "helper protocols" (e.g. "mailto URLs should launch the executable kmailservice") using .desktop files. Various optimisations across KDE-PIM and KOffice. Initial version of a Git plugin for Dolphin. More new mimetype icons in Oxygen. More intuitive keyboard shortcuts for rotation in Okular. A global way to allow KDialogs being embedded in graphics views. libplasma can now be built without KIO. Read More

Italian KDE blogger Giovanni Venturi will be presenting KDE software and Linux to attendees at the Rome Linux Day (website in Italian) on Saturday 23 October. If you are near the Italian capital tomorrow do drop by. Read More

While they are not busy doing (crazy) research, most scientists do a lot of technical writing: papers, presentations, posters, reports. Such writing is usually accompanied by large number of references; managing them by hand can be tedious and long. That is why scientists use bibliography managers. In the FOSS world, a popular choice is BibTeX, a complement to the LaTeX typesetting system. Along with BibTeX, front-ends are used to simplify addition, modification and removal of bibliography. Read More

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Return of the KDE Commit-Digest! Route Guidance mode (with automatic route recalculation based on position) in Marble. A basic UDev backend added in Solid. KFormula "Formula" shape becomes compatible with OpenOffice.org. Support for multiple leading zeros when using sequential renaming in Dolphin. New HolidayRegionSelector widget which allows users to configure which holiday regions to use in KHolidays (kdepimlibs). Various work in kdepim/mobile. Begin of SMIL "send" support in KMPlayer. Feature improvements in Skrooge. New "IMStatus" plugin for Choqok to send status messages to Instant Messenger applications (currently supports Psi and Kopete). KTTSD is renamed "Jovie". PowerDevil version 2 imported into KDE SVN. Read More

On a sunny September weekend in Cambridge, England, ten KDE and Telepathy developers met in the Collabora office to plan the future of Instant Messaging in KDE software. Once everyone had arrived, our host George Goldberg gave us an overview of the current state of the codebase, which parts are usable, which parts still need writing, and which parts were written years ago and need revision. This turned into a project management session to determine the order for getting things done, and a discussion about a release schedule that will make the project visible without tying it prematurely into compatibility guarantees that slow down development. Read More