[435 total ]
Posted
3 days
ago
The KOffice team announces
the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With
KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development
is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had
trouble keeping up
... [More]
are now getting active again, leading to a much
increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored
Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice
Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.
Using editable rich text (e.g. in Krita) is now possible.Apart from much invisible, but very important work on improving core
funcationality like ODF support, text handling and other infrastructure,
important visible areas of progress in Alpha 9 are:
KSpread has regained support for printing. It is possible to print
a range of sheets or a selection of cells.
The Kexi report generator can now generate reports in html and ODS,
the OpenDocument spreadsheet file format, which KSpread and OpenOffice
Calc can read.
Vector layers in Krita can contain text and vector shapes. Editable,
rich text in Krita is now a reality. Even nicer, it has become possible
to add filter layers and masks to Krita, delivering live filter effects
on vector shapes.
The text shape object, which is the basis for KWord and provides
editable rich text in all KOffice applications has gained a visual way
of changing the paragraph layout.
KOffice-wide, a new implementation of guides provides snapping to
guides and dragging of guides for all flake shape objects.
New for text: visually alter your paragraph spacing.
The Google Summer of Code students have been hard at work: Lukas Tvrdy
has implemented the core of a chinese painting brush engine. Benjamin
Cail has ported most of the .doc import filter to make it convert to odf
instead of the old native KWord file format, cleaning up and improving
our ODF code along the way. ODF support is really being focussed upon
with both Piere Ducroquet and Carlos Manuel Licea Vázquez putting in a
lot of work. Piere has been implementing document variables and Carlos
has made a lot of progress converting KPresenter to use ODF natively
instead of its own old file format. Lorenzo Villani is very productive
and has already shown off his Kexi
web forms work on his blog, until his computer started smoking! The
calligraphy tool Fela Winkelmolen is writing for Karbon is coming along
very nicely and is already completely usable. Fredy Yanardi, finally,
is shouldering a lot of development work on Kpresenter, focussing on
the presentation notes feature.
But all KOffice developers have been working really hard
on improving all components of KOffice. Please go to the changelog
for more details! Or install KOffice on the operating system of your
choice.
For more screenshots, please visit our visual
changelog. The KOffice team would really welcome volunteers to
maintain the visual changelog!
The KOffice team intends to continue delivering montly
alpha releases until we have implemented all features in our feature
plan: thereafter we will deliver beta releases until those features
are stable. Coincidental with the release of Alpha 9, KOffice has entered
the feature freeze stage. [Less]
Posted
4 days
ago
Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant
... [More]
amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page.
KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.
The development in trunk/ in Subversion has already been opened for feature development, which is going into KDE 4.2 (to be released in January), but developers are strongly encouraged to concentrate on bugfixing in the 4.1 branch for now. Do give RC1 a spin, file bugreports and fix things, there is only a week left until 4.1 is being tagged. Do have your changes in the 4.1 branch reviewed by your peers, though. Note that some users might still be suffering from performance problems with NVidia graphics chips. There is a page on Techbase that gives some more information about it. Make sure you report bugs via KDE's Bugzilla so they can be addressed and do not get lost. [Less]
Posted
5 days
ago
I'm very sorry to let everyone know that Uwe Thiem, a long term contributor to KDE, passed away yesterday at 14:45 of kidney failure. Uwe was one of the longest contributors to the KDE family and was one of the original members of the core
... [More]
development team. He moved on to become the main KDE representative in Africa. Uwe was one of the first people to write a book on KDE development, which helped many people who have become regular contributors today, and was still writing about KDE last week. Aaron Seigo spoke for us all when he said "Uwe had a deep love for and belief in Africa and the role that technology can, and should, play on that continent. He put his back into it and was a great advocate for Free software in his area of the world". Our thoughts go out to his family and friends at this irreplaceable loss, we are all a little less than we were yesterday. [Less]
Posted
5 days
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Global keyboard shortcuts for applets, and an Amarok and "python expression" runner in Plasma. A Java test applet and various interaction improvements in Plasma. Simple network and CPU monitors in the system-monitor
... [More]
Plasmoid. Initial import of PeachyDock, a Plasma-based alternative panel. The Oxygen window decoration gets the "on-all-desktops" button. Continued development toward Amarok 2.0. KDevelop gets a new context browser, and various other improvements. Initial work on SVG theming in Parley and Step. Support for OpenGL rendering in Palapeli. Enhancements for KDiamond 4.2. Nonogram switches to its own package format, with the import of a collection of game files in this format. Planned developments start to materialise in KColorEdit. Map-based searches in Digikam. Digikam-relates libraries move to kdegraphics for KDE 4.1. Enhanced printing support (selections, zooming) in KSpread. KThumb, a simple command-line utility for managing freedesktop.org thumbnails. Optimisations in Kate, Dolphin, and kjs-frostbyte. Ruby bindings for various KDE facilities (QtWebKit, NEPOMUK, etc). Decibel strips some of its KDE dependencies, and moves to kdesupport. KDiskManager is removed to make way for a replacement. Mailody moves to kdeextragear. KPilot, KMobileTools, and the Kontact Planner summary plugin are disabled for the KDE-PIM 4.1 release. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
8 days
ago
As a response to recent negativity on the Internet, we've been working with Groklaw to get a story running detailing facts about questions such as "Releasing KDE 4.0 was a mistake", "I am forced to use the kickoff menu", "The whole KDE4 desktop
... [More]
interface is radically new". among others. Thanks go out to Pamela Jones for giving the KDE community a chance to rectify certain points that have recently been said in public. This way, we hope to make it easier for journalists to put KDE's direction, recent decisions and put simple myths into the right light. [Less]
Posted
8 days
ago
The KDE e.V. and GNOME Foundation today announced that they will hold their yearly conferences, Akademy and GUADEC in 2009 in Gran Canaria. The conferences will be separate events, but co-located and hosted by the same organizers, the Cabildo of Gran
... [More]
Canaria and its Secretary of Tourism, Technological Innovation and Foreign Trade.
"The GNOME community is very excited about the co-hosted GUADEC and Akademy" says Behdad Esfahbod, president at the GNOME foundation, "GUADEC has traditionally been a very important chance for our community to meet in person, build great working relationships and make new friends. We're looking forward to having the opportunity to extend those relationships to our KDE colleagues at Akademy/GUADEC." KDE e.V.'s vice-president Adriaan de Groot adds "KDE e.V. is looking forward to a co-located conference, where the GNOME and KDE communities can mingle and cooperate as never before in one location. Gran Canaria is uniquely located at the junction of Europe and Africa, close to the Americas and is a fitting place for a historic 'meet-your-neighbours' conference."
GUADEC and Akademy 2009 will be held on Gran Canaria, the main island of the Canary Islands archipelago. The tentative schedule plans the event from Friday, July, 3rd until Saturday, July 11th 2009 in the Alfredo Kraus auditorium and the adjacent Congress Palace in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
This co-located event will turn Gran Canaria into the capital of Freedesktop.org development for a whole week next summer.
While there were other excellent bids, the KDE e.V. and GNOME foundation have settled on Gran Canaria because of its position as Port to Africa and the excellent circumstances for holding such an event there. Unfortunately, having three proposals, two have to be rejected. The proposals from Tampere in Finland and Coruna in Spain were close contenders. Both foundations would like to thank those organisers for the work they have put into their proposals and encourage them to consider their cities for conferences in future years.
The conference organiser's Wiki has extensive information about the planned conferences on the Canaries. [Less]
Posted
9 days
ago
The Amarok team have released the very first alpha version of Amarok 2, their upcoming series based on KDE 4. It features a completely redesigned interface, the PopUp Dropper, and the revolutionary "Biased" playlists. The Complete announcement is
... [More]
available on the Amarok Website. The Amarok team kindly asks you to report any problems you might encounter and submit patches to help make Amarok 2.0 a huge success. [Less]
Posted
15 days
ago
KOffice, like most KDE applications, has the unique selling point that the same codebase can be compiled and run on various platforms. The latest KOffice alpha release has attracted extra attention since it ships Windows and Macintosh binaries. This
... [More]
naturally means a much larger audience will be able to try it out and kick the tires. Techworld has an article up where they give a good overview and plenty of screenshots. Have you already tried out a KOffice alpha release? [Less]
Posted
16 days
ago
Akademy 2008 has published the programme of talks. Track themes include research, applications and community. There are keynotes from Frank Karlitschek of the Open Desktop sites, Sebastian Nyström of Nokia, Cliff Schmidt of KDE users Literacy Bridge.
... [More]
Lightning talk sessions include a Plasma Frenzy and an Akonadi Rumble with KDAB's Till Adam. It is a packed programme to start off the week, the rest of which will be filled with BoFs, Tutorials and an Embedded and Mobile Day. Register now. [Less]
Posted
16 days
ago
On Sunday 6th July, the Bugsquad will be holding a Kopete bug triage day. The aim: to dramatically reduce the number of Kopete bug reports from the current level of approximately 530. As usual, this bug day will be coordinated in the channel
... [More]
#kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net. There will also be a followup bug day two weeks later, on Sunday 20th July, to triage any remaining bugs.
The Bugsquad is a great way to contribute to KDE. You do not need a huge amount of time. Just 30 minutes is enough to learn the craft of bug triage - sorting and checking bug reports in the KDE bug tracker. You do not need any previous experience with programming or contributing to KDE - you just need a computer with KDE running on it and a desire to help out.
The Kopete bug triage marathon will take place on two Sundays, 6th and 20th of July, in your timezone. We will start in the morning in Asia, and continue until the evening in America. There will be expert triagers on hand in the IRC channel (#kde-bugs) to help you get started, and once you have done a few bugs you will be able to continue at any time of any day - whenever you feel like doing a bit more. [Less]
Posted
16 days
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Amarok 2 gets basic video playing support, and a connection to Librivox public domain audio books. Major porting to KDE 4 continues in K3b. More work on "Fuzzy Search" integration in Digikam. The start of support for
... [More]
sound effects in KGoldRunner, and the addition of a sound feature in KPresenter. Improvements in the msword-odf and kpr-odf import facilities in KOffice. Start of QTestLib integration into KDevelop. The Ruby development bindings support interaction with Akonadi. KMPlayer gets a bookmarks menu and support for displaying Phonon metadata. Kst replaces the concept of tags with "dynamic names". A new, improved version of KColorEdit is imported into KDE SVN. A new module, kdeplasmoids, is created in KDE SVN to consolidate the various different scattered locations of Plasma applets. A new Plasma theme for KDE 4.1 is unveiled in KDE SVN. All of Eigen no longer depends on Qt. KDevelop 4.0.0 Alpha2, Phonon 4.1.0, KOffice 1.9.95 Alpha 8, and KDE 4.0.5 are tagged for release. Phonon moves to kdesupport. guidance-power-manager moves to extragear/utils to be released with KDE 4.1. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
24 days
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Marble gets "temperature" and "precipitation" maps, and a "stars" plugin. More work on "fuzzy searches" in Digikam. Konqueror gets support for crash session recovery and session management. Runners can now be managed
... [More]
using a KPluginSelector-based dialog, and attention-blinking support in Plasma. Various Plasma applets move around KDE SVN before the KDE 4.1 feature freeze takes effect, with WebKit applet support moving into kdebase. SVG stuff from WebKit starts to be integrated into KHTML. More optimisations in KHTML, with KJS/Frostbyte, a version using bytecode and other enhancements, moving back into kdelibs. Start of an implemention of the JavaScript scripting API for PDF documents in Okular, based on KJS. Continued work on KJots integration into Kontact, and creating/editing links between entries in KJots. More work on theming in Amarok 2. Various improvements in kvpnc. More configuration user interfaces in KNetworkManager. Enhancements in the KTorrent bandwidth scheduler plugin. Support for CUPS printing options in KDE printing dialogs. Mailody moves to kdereview. The "OnlineSync" plugin is merged into Akregator. Initial commit of a new MSWord-to-ODF filter for KWord, and a caligraphy tool for Karbon. KDevMon is ported to KDE 4. Development of the Shaman2 package manager is moved into KDE SVN (playground/sysadmin). The PHP-Qt bindings move from playground/bindings to the kdebindings module. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
25 days
ago
Another milestone on the road towards KDE 4.1 has been packaged and put online for testing. The release notes highlight some features in Dolphin and Gwenview, as well as additional information on where to get the release, make sure you also check
... [More]
your distributor's websites as well. While there are some bugs left, the release already works quite solidly on most people's machines. Performance problems on NVidia chips remain, but we are confident that those will be solved by the teams over at NVidia in one of the next releases of their graphics driver. In KDE 4.1, there is also some preliminary Mac and Windows support coming up. Several apps can be tried by a wider audience on those proprietary platforms this summer already. On the side of Free operating systems, support for OpenSolaris is coming along nicely, but is not free of bugs yet.
As every Beta, we release this software to gain feedback and to provide a preview of our upcoming technology. When encountering problems during testing, please help us by reporting bugs through KDE's Bugzilla so developers are aware of them and can make the necessary changes. When trying this release you will encounter a number of new things, most of the new features are listed on Techbase, make sure to check out that list and give the next KDE a whirl. [Less]
Posted
27 days
ago
openSUSE 11.0 has been released (screenshots), offering KDE 3.5.9 and an excellent experience of KDE 4.0. There has been a huge collection of changes and additions in this new release. For an overview of the improvements in KDE, see the KDE Sneak
... [More]
Peeks article over at openSUSE News, which features an interview with KDE developer Stephan Binner. He talks about the challenges faced, plans for the future, and what changes you can expect in the upcoming KDE 4.1.
KDE 4.0
The openSUSE 11.0 release includes an installable Live-CD with a SUSE-polished KDE 4.0.4 desktop, while the DVD contains KDE 3.5.9 as well. While many applications such as the openSUSE updater applet (with an optional PackageKit backend) have been ported to KDE 4, not all KDE applications are ported to KDE4 yet. In these cases, KDE3 versions of applications such as Amarok, K3b, KOffice or KNetworkManager (adapted to NetworkManager 0.7) are used, which integrate pretty seamlessly. A native KDE4 NetworkManager plasmoid is in development and will become available via openSUSE Build Service repositories. There has also been a whole horde of Plasma updates and fixes put into the release.
As KDE 4.0 doesn’t include KDEPIM (Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer etc.), therefore openSUSE 11.0 includes beta versions of KDEPIM 4.1. These applications work fairly well, and will be updated to final versions via official online update as soon as possible. The online repositories contain many more KDE 4 applications, such as Dragon Player, Okteta, KSystemLog, and Yakuake. Webkitpart is optionally included which makes use of the WebKit part of Qt 4.4.
YaST Ported to Qt4
openSUSE's administration and installation tool, YaST, and SaX2 have been ported to Qt4 for this release. This allowed the YaST developers to use CCS-like Qt stylesheets for the installer, giving it a themed look:
YaST is now using Oxygen icons to give it an integrated look in KDE 4.
KDE 4.1, KDE Four Live
While KDE 4.1 did not manage to make it into openSUSE 11.0, its packages will be available via 1-click-install in the openSUSE Build Service. You can track KDE4's development by using the regularly updated KDE 4 snapshot packages. The openSUSE-based KDE Four Live CD will be based on openSUSE 11.0 in future releases. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Improved drag-and-drop of applets, and enhanced usability using the "Panel Controller" in Plasma. Grouping of notifications in the "Notify" Plasmoid, and continued progress in the "NetworkManager" applet. Animations
... [More]
in the "Pager" applet. SuperKaramba integration into Plasma is revived. More work on theming in Amarok 2.0, with the "Current Track" and "Wikipedia" applets re-enabled. A return to work on the Raptor menu. Initial steps toward a "satellite layer" plugin for Marble, with initial support for molecular editing in Kalzium. Copy-and-paste of vocabulary entries in Parley. "Singmaster" moves functionality in Kubrick. Support for searching the database by GPS position, and "fuzzy searches" (using a user-drawn sketch) based on the Haar algorithm (from imgSeek) added to Digikam. A "start page" is added to Gwenview. More functionality added to Beagle KIOSlave. A "quick reply" function is added to Mailody. Kontact gets a plugin for KJots. An import dialog added to assist in migrating from the KDE3 to the KDE4 version of KTorrent. Full support for the Windows platform in KTorrent trunk. Optimisations in the next-generation tile system of Krita. Work on loading ODF presentation notes in KPresenter. KNewStuff2 moves to Goya for handling and displaying items. Support for AIFF and RIFF audio file formats in TagLib. Initial import of Nonogram into playground/games. libkscan replaces libksane in kdegraphics. kdelirc moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Phonon moves from kdelibs to kdesupport, "the never-freezing new home of Phonon". Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
The KDE Project today announced the eighth alpha release of KOffice 2, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0. Work continues in the same vein as before, with a strong focus on finishing and polishing our new features that will set KOffice.
... [More]
This is a work in progress, showing the changes that have been made over the last month by the KOffice developers. Most features that will be part of the final release are present now, and bug reports are welcome for the more stable components.
OpenDocument Improvements
One of the highlights of this release is the work on saving and loading Open Document Format documents, especially for the text shape, thanks to the sponsoring of Girish Ramakrishnan by the Dutch NLNet organisation. Girish has added scores of tests to check for ODF compliancy.
It is also worthy of note that now KOffice is able to load and save images in
text and presentation documents. Shapes can now be animated and associated with
events such as sounds.
Multiplatform
Importantly, for the first time, KOffice is released simultaneously for the
three main platforms: Unix/X11, Windows and Mac OSX. KOffice is the only office
suite that is available for all three platforms using a single codebase.
Early testers
While KOffice applications, generally speaking, are not ready for bugs reports,
some applications are more ready than others. The developers of KSpread, Krita, Karbon and the report component of Kexi welcome user feedback. The season is open for bug reporting! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A wordprocessor-like ruler for repositioning and resizing the Plasma panel. Scripting support re-enabled in KRunner. More developments in the NetworkManager Plasma applet. Initial work to allow closer interaction of
... [More]
Plasma with KNotify's popups. Work on theming, Magnatune membership support, and the ClassicView in Amarok 2.0. Work on adding support for plugins to Marble. General work across KDE games, with many new application icons. Work on project management handling and Ruby support in KDevelop. Functional improvements to the Sonnet spellchecking engine. Undo/Redo support in Krone. Exploded pie charts in KChart. The start of work on notes in KPresenter. Scripting support for images in the Kexi "Reports" plugin. A KOffice Flake shape which uses Marble to display a map. A return to work on the Raptor alternative menu. Initial commits for KaffeineGL, and the next-generation tile system of Krita. The start of a vi input mode support is merged into Kate. Winning themes from the first Plasma Theme Contest added to KDE SVN. KsirK and KBreakOut move from kdereview to kdegames, ksaneplugin from kdereview to kdegraphics. Goya moves into kdereview. guidance-power-manager, written using Python (PyKDE), is added to kdereview, for later inclusion in extragear/utils. KSim, KMilo, KLaptopDaemon move to the unmaintained module of KDE SVN. KWorldClock is officially replaced by the world clock applet of Marble. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
To celebrate the release of KDE 4, the KDE French contributors and the Toulibre LUG organised a two-day event on January 25th and 26th 2008 in Toulouse, France. On the 25th, Kévin Ottens made a general presentation of KDE 4, and on the 26th there was
... [More]
a day of technical conferences featuring speakers such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Alexis Ménard, Kévin Ottens, Aurélien Gâteau and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. The videos of all these talks, in French, are now available for download.
Here is the list of available videos, with their original french titles:
Présentation de KDE 4 by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (207 Mb, 58 minutes) and slides. We also have Aaron Seigo's keynote using the french subtitles, a commercial for KDE 4 and a demonstration.Contribuer à KDE, Bienvenue à tous ! by Alexis Ménard, vidéo Ogg Theora (97 Mb, 26 minutes) and slidesPrésentation de Qt by David Faure, vidéo Ogg Theora (210 Mb, 43 minutes) and slidesTour d'horizon de CMake by Laurent Montel, vidéo Ogg Theora (140 Mo, 36 minutes) and slidesSolid: intégration avec le matériel sans utiliser d'aspirine by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (302 Mb, 1h and 3 minutes) and slidesPlasma: une nouvelle approche du gestionnaire de bureau by Alexis Ménard, vidéo Ogg Theora (112 Mb, 28 minutes) and slidesLes feuilles de style de Qt by Aurélien Gâteau, vidéo Ogg Theora (201 Mb, 49 minutes) and slidesPhonon: multimédia facile pour vos applications by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (157 Mb, 39 minutes) and slidesGuide de contribution à la traduction de KDE by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, vidéo Ogg Theora (87 Mb, 31 minutes) and slidesPrésentation KIO by David Faure, vidéo Ogg Theora (271 Mb, 42 minutes) and slidesDes logiciels éducatifs dans KDE by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, vidéo Ogg Theora (91 Mb, 28 minutes) and slides
Meanwhile for English speakers Aaron Seigo's talk from LinuxTag KDE 4: Desktop interfaces in a mobile Web 2.0 world is available in video form. And coming up this Sunday is Kubuntu Tutorials Day with IRC talks on Usability, Plasma with Python and more. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
This coming Sunday, June 16, BugSquad is hosting a BugDay to go triaging through old Amarok bugs. Come join #kde-bugs anytime to get training and help out! No prior experience is necessary, and you don't need any programming knowledge.
If
... [More]
you are a Kubuntu user, there is a nightly build called Project Neon that you can use.
Joining Bug Days is a great way to help the KDE project. The only things you need to take part are a computer running a recent KDE 4 with Amarok 2 and a KDE 3 version of Amarok 1.4.9.1, and an internet connection. You can join at any point during the day, and stay for as long or short a time as you like. If you are a KDE user and have been wondering how to contribute, then this is a great way to get started - there will be plenty of experienced Bugsquad members on hand to answer any questions you might have. To get involved, join our IRC channel anytime, #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net, where we will help you get underway. The day will begin at 0:00 UTC (other timezones) on Sunday and continue until the day is over throughout the world, although people tend to stay later! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Trolltech today announced the launch of Qt Jambi 4.4 – the latest version of its application framework for Java development.
Qt Jambi is based on the recently-launched Qt 4.4, and brings its benefits to Java developers: including the
... [More]
ability to develop web and multimedia enriched applications across desktop operating systems.
Among the new features in Qt Jambi 4.4 you can find:
Integration with WebKit, the open source browser engine based on KDE's KHTML.
Integration with Phonon, a cross platform multimedia API from KDE which allows you to play and manipulate video and sound in your application.
Support for any compliant JDBC driver as a backend to Qt Jambi's SQL classes.
Widget can be used inside a graphics view, allowing transformations and manipulations to be combined with the regular application logic.
For information about more features see the Gunnar's release blog. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Another review of the upcoming KDE 4.1 was published at polishlinux.org. The review features the Panel's new configuration tool, the folder viewer, Gwenview, Marble, Akonadi and others. As usual it comes along with many screenshots.
Posted
about 1 month
ago
KDE was very busy at LinuxTag this year. We were present with two main booths - Amarok and KDE -
and a whole bunch of talks within our own track. Additionally, Aaron Seigo gave a well-received keynote on Wednesday, painting a vibrant
vision
... [More]
of the desktop in a mobile world, and the direction KDE is heading in.
Read on for a more detailed coverage of the event.
Till Adam
brought the features of Kontact to the audience on Thursday. On Friday morning Sebastian
Kügler opened the KDE track with an introduction to KDE 4. As Sebastian Trüg could not make it
to Berlin, Aaron jumped in again and talked about the Plasma basics. He was followed by Till
Adam who presented the possibilities of Akonadi's storage concept and the future of KDE's
Personal Information Management suite.
After lunch Ellen Reitmayr talked about usability concepts in KDE and the efforts the team
undertakes to incorporate them into the desktop and the applications. Franz Keferboeck gave
an overview of KOffice's apps and introduced the audience to the new features that will come
with KOffice 2. The final applause for the day went to Lydia Pintscher and Harald Sitter for
their talk on KDE multimedia.
On Saturday KDE was the topic in two more talks: Lydia Pintscher and Sven Krohlas focused on the
new features of Amarok 2, while Holger Schröder gave a presentation on the latest development of KDE
on Windows.
Booths
Both main
booths were well manned and even better visited. The interested crowd asked zillions of
questions and was very eager to see the latest features, goodies and eyecandy of KDE 4.1 which
we showed on all computers at the booth, on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Other visitors came by to
share ideas or suggestions, and altogether they gave wonderful feedback.
The booth
staff talked their heads off and tried to answer all questions, to satisfy everyone's curiosity
and sometimes even find a solution to the users' problems that popped up once in a while. The
booth staff were also supported most of the time by some of the developers who did a great job
dealing with bug reports right at the booth.
At the booths, members of the community met some of them for the first time. We welcomed new
faces to the family and formed new and inspiring working relationships with people from the
KDE community and beyond.
Besides these main booths, almost all distributions showed off KDE 3 and KDE 4 desktops, most
notably openSUSE, Kubuntu and also Fedora. In addition the German Federal Office for
Information Security displayed computers running Kontact on Windows as well as on Mac OS X.
Many thanks to all who helped and supported us and made this LinuxTag possible. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
This Sunday (8th June), the KDE Bugsquad will host a KDE PIM Krush day. The aim of the day will be to find and document as many of the bugs in the PIM applications (including KMail, Kontact, Akregator and many more) of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release as
... [More]
possible. The day will begin at 0:00 UTC on Sunday and continue until the day is over throughout the world. Krush Days are an excellent opportunity for KDE users keen to make their first contribution to the KDE project. You don't need to set aside a huge amount of time - as little as ten minutes will be enough to do some testing - nor do you need to have any programming experience. All you need is a recent version of KDE. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 will do, or a newer version from SVN. If you don't want to install KDE 4.1 on your system, then the Virtual Machine Image kde4daily is ideal. Just come along to #kde-bugs where the Bugsquad will help you get started. More information can be found on the Krush Day Techbase page. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
The KDE Community has today made available the fifth update to KDE 4.0. Although the changelog is not particularly long, the release should be worthwhile to upgrade to. KWin (according to some pronounced "quinn" instead of Kay-Win) has gotten some
... [More]
clipping fixes, also some dim and fade effects work on cards that can only do compositing via XRender. Juk, the lightweight music player has received some fixes regarding keyboard shortcuts, playback and cover art. Kopete, the instant messenger in 4.0.5 has some crashes fixed. The changelog has the details (although probably not all bugfixes have been recorded here). Overall, we expect to make the users' experience with this release a bit nicer. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
The IT Service Center Berlin has announced the development of a desktop system for the public services in Germany's capital (Google Translate to English). This is yet another public body making the switch to the Free Desktop system. The announcement
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talks about the good integration of KDE with their current infrastructure, which is partly based on Microsoft's software. According to the ITDZ's press release, the integration phase has successfully finished and the KDE-based client for Berlin's administration is now ready for prime time.
At LinuxTag, a big German Free Software conference and fair, the "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik", Germany's national information security group, announced their successful porting of KDE's Email and Groupware client to the three major platforms, Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Finally, the "Auswärtiges Amt", responsible for German embassies in more than 200 countries also showed their KDE based desktop client at LinuxTag, which has been deployed to their employees already. [Less]
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about 1 month
ago
The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for Q3 and Q4 2007, covering July to September, and October to December 2007. This document includes reports of the board and the working groups about the KDE e.V. activities of the last two quarters of
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2007, as well as event summaries and future plans. All long term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V. [Less]
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about 1 month
ago
Akademy 2008 is now open for registration. Akademy is KDE's World Summit, a week long event for all KDE contributors, industry partners and users. The week starts with a two day conference, and is set to include a tutorial day and a embedded and
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mobile day. As always, attendance to Akademy is free of charge, but you must register. Registration should be in by the 15th of June if you want the Akademy Team to book your accommodation for you. See you in Belgium! [Less]
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about 1 month
ago
Red Hat Magazine has a review of KDE 4 on the new Fedora 9. *** Linux Journal takes a look at Marble which recently gained OpenStreetMap support. *** The Fanatic Attack blog features an article on exceptional Linux programs for kids covering a good
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number of our own KDE Education apps. *** Another project's loss means we gained one extra summer of code project implementing the 3D part of the PDF specification for Okular. *** The Register takes a look at 4.1 Beta 1. *** SoftVision Blog reviews KDE 4 distros, the all new Kubuntu and Fedora releases plus an older openSUSE. *** Akonadi gained a beautiful new logo, thanks to Nuno and his excellent Oxygen team.
New Akonadi logo by Nuno and Thomas [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Earlier this month KDE Italia attended Open Mind 2008. A Free Software event organised by Roberto Dentice in San Giorgio near Naples. There were KDE talks and KDE demonstrations. Read on for the report.
Giovanni's KDE presentation in the
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library
At the three day event, a lot of school children with their teachers were involved to participate in the educational labs, for the talks and the workshops. We tried to show them why it is a good reason to replace Microsoft Windows on their computers to host GNU/Linux Free Software on their disks, they can learn more and be really free using KDE.
Daniele showing how Amarok rocks
We had about 1500 attendees. Me and Daniele Costarella, as KDE Italia, demonstrated KDE and its applications to the school children. Especially the ones that let you move to GNU/Linux very simply, without regret for Windows. I made a general presentation of KDE and then during the 3 days we had our KDE workshops on K3b, Amarok, Digikam, Konqueror, Dolphin, Kopete and KOffice. Daniele explained about KDE very well and very precisely which let me discover some nice Digikam and Amarok features I did not know. To get the students full attention I had to use some tricks with Konqueror. When I wrote "bluetooth:/" in the Konqueror address bar, we saw that all the audience were more involved when more than 30 icons appeared in the virtual Bluetooth folder. They were interested when I said, "now we can connect to this phone and spy in it...". Of course, I spied in my Bluetooth phone showing them a Konqui photo.
Qt 4 in action on Giovanni's Laptop
The Open Mind organiser told us that at the end of the event people were very crazy about what we had shown and a lot of people wanted a GNU/Linux distribution with KDE. A boy asked me about the KDE distribution :) so I explained him that KDE is a Desktop Environment not a distribution itself. We burned some Kubuntu 8.04 CDs and told people that they can also download it from the Internet in legal way, copy it and redistribute it in the same legal way we did.
Our KDE Italia booth
Someone asked me and Daniele about "programming Linux" and "where is the source code?" so, at out booth, we showed KDE and explained them about KDE and Qt programming. They had a lot of questions, often very specific questions, so I understood that they were really interested and then I showed KDevelop in action. I created on the fly the classic Qt 4 simple text editor application and the very few line of code to have a browser with Qt 4.4 WebKit. I showed them the rich Qt documentation. I spoke all day but at the end everyone was satisfied, so I hope to see some new young Italian developer in the KDE team in the near future.
We also socialised with the other speakers, had beers and pizza. See you on the next Free Software event,
Giovanni Venturi [Less]
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about 1 month
ago
The KDE Project is happy to set the first beta of KDE 4.1, codenamed Caramel, free today. KDE 4.1 is intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users and we therefore respectfully request you to get testing Beta 1. Beta 1 is not ready for
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production use but is in wide use by KDE developers and is suitable for testing by Linux enthusiasts and KDE fans.
Highlights of 4.1 are a much more mature Plasma desktop shell that returns much of the configurability that was missing in KDE 4.0, many more applets and look and feel improvements, the return of Kontact and the rest of the KDE PIM applications, and many improvements and newly ported applications. The feature set is now frozen, so the developers look forward to using June and July to metamorphosing your bug reports into rock solid code, completing documentation and translating everything into your language. A series of Bug Days where users can contribute quality assurance to the release will continue towards 4.1's final release on the 29th of July, so watch the Dot for details.
For more details, see the release announcement and info page or if you are at LinuxTag, see KDE 4.1 being presented in Berlin this Friday. [Less]
