A shiny new Kubuntu release all for you. You can install it safe in the knowledge that the Kubuntu community will make security updates and major bug fixes for 5 years along with Canonical's lovely resources doing the same on much of the rest of the Ubuntu packages.

There's a few Known issues in this release I'm unhappy with, kmix crashes, akonadi upgrades are still not pleasant, Plasma activity manager likes to crash too, and users of 11.10 need to update to the latest packages before starting an upgrade. Sorry about those, we'll get onto them.

In terms of new features we've kept it light to be able to fit with the requirements of Long Term Support, but all the packages have been updated. I especially like what OwnCloud are doing, they've seen a big improvement and are getting some useful apps for providing from a server.

New stuff I like is Calligra and KDE Telepathy, I use these both a lot. It's really handy to be able to stay on Facebook chat without being distracted by the aimless news on Facebook webpages and Calligra has saved my day more than once when Libreoffice has crashed (on its own documents!).

Kubuntu Active is a shiny new Ubuntu flavour for tablets. It's a technology preview for now because it's not a very smooth experience yet and it's i386 only but.. ooh what shinyness!

Kubuntu is in interesting times, we're trying to branch out from one sponsor of Canonical to several. Those sponsors will include Canonical of course. Kubuntu as a project has had a long history of working with Canonical. Canonical have invested in sponsoring staff and producing CDs, as well as providing infrastructure and release management. Although Canonical has decided to adjust where it focuses it's resources, I am delighted that Canonical is continuing to support the Kubuntu project with infrastructure and other resources that help us as a project to build Kubuntu. I am also delighted that Blue Systems have stepped forward to fund my continued work on Kubuntu so that I can continue to give my full attention to the project and build the best possible KDE-based Operating System for our users

I've had some questions about Planet KDE recently.

Planet KDE is intended for personal blogs of KDE contributors blogging with a KDE focus. All KDE contributors are welcome to add their feeds to planet by editing the file in svn or filing a bug.

A while ago I added some categories because people were asking about adding blogs that weren't KDE contributors. Which categories are shown can be easily edited on your local browser by clicking "Configure" at the top of the page. KDE.News has the dot.kde.org feed and is on by default, Project News has KDE and KDE friendly projects like Calligra or Kubuntu in it and is also on by default. There are also categories for blogs not in English and for user blogs. Finally there's the microblogging category which is for twitter feeds and shows in a box on the side if you turn it on.

Hopefully that provides a way for KDE fans to easily read about what is happening in our community.

Ubuntu release date is set for Thursday so it's non-stop testing until then. All helpers needed - Kubuntu team will test everything in all permutations but it's never a good thing to be the only tester on software for which you are responsible for, third parties always needed. So join us in #kubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-testing and report results in the ISO tracker.

Calligra has been released, KDE's document suite of applications. It has applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and much more. Congratulations Calligra team. Install the packages from kubuntu-ppa/backports or direct from 12.04.

A while ago I had to announce that Canonical weren't going to sponsor Kubuntu any more. 'Fair enough' I thought, Canonical needs to make money and after dropping support for Gnome support for KDE couldn't be far behind. Then I got e-mails from companies, governments and individuals saying they depend on it, use it every day for themselves, their clients and their families. It turns out Kubuntu is very popular and important, people really use this KDE stuff I've been working on for the last decade.

Lots of KDE SC 4.8.2 packaging and testing today. But some folks can't test it easily because they have small bandwidth or they don't want to install experimental packages on their local computer. I've been using EC2 machines for a while, which you hire by the hour from Amazon Web Services. Whenever someone in Kubuntu needs a machine to compile or test and install on I run my script to get one going and give them access. They're also handy for showing people how to do e.g. packaging, you can log into the same machine and share a screen session to see what the other person is doing.

Today I finally got round to working out how VNC works and it works really well.
-set up a Security Group with port 5900 - 5950 open (and 22 for ssh)
-run an ec2 machine using that Security Group with an Ubuntu image - e.g. you can copy and paste the command from here if you have an account set up http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/precise/beta-2/
-sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop (or whatever you want to test)
-sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
-run vncserver and set a password
-on your local machine run krdc and connect to the EC2 machine and the port reported when running vncserver e.g. vnc://ec2-50-17-135-186.compute-1.amazonaws.com:5901
-from your ssh login on the EC2 machine export DISPLAY=:1 and startkde

You can share the VNC details around if you want to work on something collaboratively such as running a tutorial, awesomeness.

Testing Plasma Desktop 4.8.2 due for release any moment now

Since I had to announce that Canonical was dropping support for Kubuntu from 12.11 (and then had to announce two days later they were dropping support for 12.04) I've been getting lots of people asking "is this the end of KDE?"

Of course it isn't, KDE is a vibrant community of people making useful and fun software.

Recently Gnome have been noticing they're not winning either. There is a growing realisation that Canonical dropped Gnome some years ago. [This is melodramatic overstatement, there are still a bunch of Gnome programmes used in Ubuntu Desktop but the workspace and webbrowser and e-mail client aren't. Canonical is also using more Qt and less GTK.] Articles like GNOME 3: Why It Failed don't really help the impression.

All this just highlights that we've been making free software for users for over 15 years and still not got out of the geek market. This comment from mpt, canonical designer highlights some reasons why: third party software, marketing to users but importantly to OEMs and their supply chains, online services, an SDK etc.

= So how can KDE remain relevant? =

Better design? This was one of the comments from Ettrich when I first met him at a trade show ages ago. We can call it "usability" but design is a slightly broader term of stepping back and working out why certain tasks are hard to do.

New markets? Aaron and his Make Play Live company is making hardware devices with the Vivaldi tablet, that's exciting. That's a small company. Canonical is a large company and may well do the same, will be interested to see if either work.

Fill in the gaps! There is a common meme that "we've achieved what we wanted 15 years ago", well free software in general has but KDE is really nowhere near a usable desktop. We miss a decent web browser, our office suite is looking promising but still isn't much used, the plasma media centre has never got past an alpha stage, Kontact is losing popularity due to a bumpy transition to Akonadi. There's lots to be working on!

App shop? It's what users expect now. Ubuntu has one from Canonical. Muon in Kubuntu is decent and Plasma Active are working on one but they need to link up to third party suppliers.

Server! We should be welcoming in OwnCloud and Kolab to the KDE community. So far we've failed to do that.

Modularisation. KDE Frameworks 5 is a great project, it might mean developers like Canonical start picking up bits of KDE technology as well as Qt.

Take advantage of Qt project. It's there for the using, has some bumpy areas in the infrastructure (you can't download a patch without a whole clone) and social structures but we can help them.

= And how can Kubuntu remain relevant? =

Kubuntu has the world's largest Linux desktop rollout. I'll say that again. Kubuntu, often mistaken as a mere derivative of Ubuntu, has more spread than any other desktop Linux. Since I had to announce Canonical moving to focus on Unity I've been contacted by plenty of people saying they rely on Kubuntu. Fortunately Kubuntu isn't going anywhere, that's the advantage of Free Software, when you have a cool community (and we have about the most active community of any part of Ubuntu) then it carries on. We may even find new sponsors.

We like to show KDE at its best. We are the only regularly released distro to ship only KDE Software on the desktop(*), others fill it in with GTK tools or their own config tools, we want to be all KDE. [For the benefit of those journalists who don't understand 'regularly' we ship every six months, just like KDE SC]

(*)There is one bug in the above which is shipping LibreOffice, I think the time is right to move to Calligra, they are doing great stuff and need our support to get it to users. They also are reputed to have better MS Office format importers than LibreOffice thanks to the work of KO.

We must remain part of Ubuntu, they are a great community for distros and we couldn't survive without them. Kubuntu is often incorrectly called a "derivative" of Ubuntu but we are part of the Ubuntu family and we are one of their flavours which is just where we should be.

New markets? Kubuntu Active is taking shape. I'd love to have TV friendly media centre support too for example.

But do we need a new name? Kubuntu has never been a great name, it was actually a joke name made up by the original Ubuntu developers for the KDE side. I wonder if a new name would give us a new lease of life like Calligra has. Suggestions welcome :)

I've been playing with getting Kubuntu Active on ARM. Getting a working ARM setup is a lot like getting a working Linux desktop setup when I started in 1999. It's unclear what computer you need, it's unclear what install image you need, it's unclear how you install it and then it doesn't work and it's unclear how you debug it. For some unknown reason Ubuntu Desktop images from precise don't work on my Pandaboard but from oneiric they do. Ubuntu Server from precise seems to work so I've installed that and installed the Kubuntu Active packages on top of it. Maybe soon we'll have working Kubuntu Active images on ARM.

The application in this photo is Muon Installer QML which is a shiny new app installer being written by Aleix Pol and now available from the new Cyberspace PPA which is going to contain daily builds of various KDE projects.

Weel are ye wordy o'a grace, As lang's my ARM.

The first Ubuntu flavour for tablets is now making daily builds. We even got our first bug reports from our localy Plasma Active upstreams. Images are for i386 only for now, ARMv7 should be added when we know it's a bit more stable and have testers.

The logo above is only an idea, it's the extent of my SVG skills. I also updated the blogs.kde.org poll :)

"CeBIT is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to CeBIT."

I popped along to CeBIT for a day to browse the world's biggest technology show and say hi to the lovely KDE people who were running a stand there.

Ingwa was there in his smartest suit to look all professional. Friedrich and eckhart kept the punters enthused about KDE all day. Claudia and me met with a potential new Akademy sponsor. And Aaron turned up with his fabled Spark.

KDE's stall was in building 2 of 26.

KDE's finest demonstrating the world's finest consumer software to suits

The Ubuntu stand is organised by Ubuntu-DE (many of whom use KDE)

Ingwa acts as booth babe to the Spark Tablet

Amazing what you find at CeBIT, Xompu is a German company who make simplified UIs with Plasma, awesome. This article says it runs Kubuntu. Awesomer.

After the show the large stalls all out-compete each other to have the coolest after party. You could easily become an alcoholic by staying there all week, I got free lager and weiner from some a regional government of germany, free posh beer from some company or other and free cocktails from Citrix I think it was although nobody wanted to talk to me about Citrix. And I can't even drink much more than a sip of alcohol.