KDE 3.5 Release Candidate 1 is finally released. Updating the Konstruct build script was easy, but creating the SUSE packages in time did cost me some hours of sleep which I in my current state should have better spent in bed.

Maybe you haven't heard this yet as international pr[ess] is slow: After last week's reports that Novell plans to not ship the KDE desktop anymore on Novell Linux Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server products, the company got lots of feedback from its customers.

Jeffrey Stedfast is strengthening FUD about KDE developers on some planets. Strange that in the first paragraph he only cites a point for proof, Novell dropping KDE on certain products, which actually was true last week.

James Ogley writes: "NLD is Novell's enterprise desktop product, I'm pretty sure it's always used GNOME". James, you obviously don't know Novell's products well. Neither is GNOME the only desktop on Novell Linux Desktop 9, nor is it the default. And judging from the bug reports and hearsay there are customers using KDE on NLD. It will be interesting what Novell will tell them.

Last Friday I had my first free day. And what did I do? Likely not what normal people would do. I participated on Friday and Saturday the Berlinux 2005 event. Berlinux took place the second time under that name and location and has only regional impact - but it's growing. I took some pictures with still the same old shitty camera. The KDE booth was (wo)manned by me, Ellen and Ossi.

KDE 3.5 Beta 2 has been announced and the full range of testing possibilities is available: My small "Klax" Live-CD has been updated to KDE 3.5 Beta 2 and KOffice 1.4.2.

SUSE Linux 10.0 is available for purchase and download in different flavors and some people are still spreading wrong information (initially started by some journalists). To make it short: "openSUSE" is only the name for the development project. "SUSE Linux" is the name of the distribution, also for the Open Source Software edition.

KDE 3.5 Beta 1 packages for SUSE distributions versions 9.1 to 10.0 are available. These packages are unsupported and completely untested. We are nevertheless interested in package related bug reports over at openSUSE because KDE 3.5 Beta will be also the desktop of SUSE Linux 10.1 Alpha 1 which will be published next week.

The first release candidate of SUSE Linux 10.0 Open Source edition has been published today. You can download it at openSUSE.org. The KDE task force team at SUSE, consisting of Coolo, Dirk, kAdrian, Seli, Will and me has squashed countless bugs for it.

Today I had my first work day - at Novell/SUSE, packaging KDE as successor of kAdrian Schröter (please note the part about "poor successor" on that page!) who became a lead for the openSUSE project. So call me biased what is "the world's most usable Linux distribution" from now on. :-)