I'm nearly ready to move NetworkManager-kde4 to kdereview now, after a crazy week of rehashing the connection layer (the bit that writes your configured connections to KConfig (and optionally KWallet) into something that I actually want to support for a few years.

I was going to make it "Konsole Tabs Are Session Managed Again" but it's a restored KDE 3 feature and all the kids know that commandline hacking is not cool.

I'm a bit slow off the mark, but I was busy fixing a few last bugs in openSUSE 11.1 and entertaining krake. Today I noticed that Ars Technica have chosen openSUSE as one of the distributions of the year, with a special mention for the quality of our KDE environment. Thanks to my colleagues and the determined #opensuse-kde team, and here's hoping we can make KDE on openSUSE in 2009 even better!

Those of you've been around desktop computers for a while know the calming effect of a simple desktop. One of the things I've missed is the ability to have a basic tiled pattern with user defined colours. So since I wanted to learn a bit more about Plasma wallpapers for another project, I rolled up my sleeves, had a look at the old kdesktop sources, and reimplemented it using the latest technologies. The result is in playground. Everything old is new again:

Here we are on the steps at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. From left to right:
Igor Trindade Oliveira, Bertjan Broeksema, Stephen Kelly, Ingo Klöcker, Kevin Krammer, Thomas McGuire, Volker Krause, Will Stephenson and Tom Albers.

Mostly convenience foods are fun but loaded with sugar and salt. But building software needn't be inconvenient or make your waistline or disk requirements start to bulge. I've been pushing the openSUSE Build Service to anyone in the KDE community who'll listen, since making tiny tweaks to existing codebases with minimum effort is exactly what it's designed to do.

So here's a worked example to go from a new Build Service account to a built, tweaked RPM in 5 minutes*.

Back in May I blogged about the network management architecture in KDE 4. It's October now and I can't believe we still don't have a native NetworkManager frontend. But there's nothing like a imminent openSUSE release to focus my energies, and now we're a big step closer to having one.

I just updated the Build Guide for KDE on openSUSE for 11.0, some fixes for recent package splits, and some better formatting. Unless you are or want to become a developer, our Build Service 4.1 Beta packages should be new enough for you - they are updated weekly.

openSUSE 11.0 is out and with it are a set of KDE PIM (Personal Information Management) packages from KDE 4.1. This is part of the KDE 4 desktop choice and they have been extensively patched to work with the KDE 4.0.4 libraries on 11.0, and contain backports from KDE 4.1 trunk. They have been tested thanks to our devoted opensuse-kde community, but fixes are still happening in trunk so here's the skinny on what will happen via online update as we approach KDE 4.1:

• openSUSE 11.0 released with kdepim 4.1beta1 DONE

Today I took the plunge and merged the Solid network management infrastructure into KDE SVN trunk, where it will soon be released as part of KDE 4.1. Here's a summary of what it includes. Since what follows is Long, Save Planet[KDE|OpenSUSE] and read more for details.

Network Management in KDE 4.1 consists of the following components: