I'm at II Guademy 2008, the Spanish conference combining aspects of GUADEC and Akademy this weekend. I arrived yesterday, had lunch with my Novell colleagues Rodrigo Moya and Vincent Untz, then got straight into our presentations, which are a combined call for more cooperation and communication between the two Free desktop environments communities, leading to more effective sharing of data and infrastructure.

I've just published the Building KDE on openSUSE guide over at the openSUSE wiki. It makes it insanely easy to build latest KDE 4.1 in a minimal number of steps, but the goal is not just to make it easy, but to give people the tools and the skills to go from just building KDE to developing it.

Google have extended the Summer of Code 2008 student application deadline until April 7 so if you were busy last week or concerned your application wasn't good enough, now's your chance to get it in.

Student? Love KDE and/or openSUSE? Want to get 0x1194 bucks for improving them? Then check out the openSUSE Google Summer of Code ideas page or suggest your own project. There are a number of projects listed already which would improve KDE on openSUSE and upstream. As well as getting paid, it's an opportunity to work on a real world project, and learn from the experience of some leading KDE and openSUSE developers.

Some people already think we do a damn fine job packaging KDE at openSUSE. But we're just a few guys and we'd do it even better with your help. Tonight at 1900UTC we're having our latest openSUSE-KDE IRC meeting in #opensuse-kde on FreeNode and we'd love to see you there.

Over in Salt Lake City, Utah, Novell's BrainShare 2008 event is taking place. This is where the faithful come to see what's new and good in the big red N world every year, and what would be better to liven up a wintry landscape than a colourful talk about KDE 4? The KDE Team here at Novell have worked our KPats off all over KDE 4 to make it great and the Novell customer base deserve to know about it.

I'll keep this short because my mental batteries are running a bit low. Yesterday Dirk, Cornelius and myself from SUSE travelled to Mountain View in California for the KDE 4 launch event at Google. So far we had BoFs on marketing, distributions (always fun), and now it's Plasma's turn. Apart from that we had a nice lunch - even if the food didn't quite satisfy all the hungry hacker appetites present.

The nice thing about a community event is the way it brings everyone together. I just gave a presentation to all my colleagues at the SUSE office here in Nuernberg on KDE 4.0, what it brings to the table and where it's going in the future. It was great to have our two largest meeting rooms joined together, with a capacity audience. For the last few weeks Dirk, Stephan, Lubos and I on the KDE Team have been working all the hours we can to add the final polish to 4.0 and to make sure the openSUSE packages of KDE 4.0 are the freshest and highest quality KDE binaries available.

I decided a couple of weeks ago to sort System Settings out and here is the first result: I reworked the views using Qt4's InterView framework, reusing the KCategorizedView from Dolphin. This gives us a better quality view than the hard coded view used until now - item layout should work at large font sizes or high res displays. It will also make it much easier to improve the UI with custom delegates and category drawers in future - just by reusing code. I was able to chuck out a couple of classes entirely which will make System Settings easier to maintain.

Not mine, but one Korneliusz Jarzebski (in Polish) has done the numbers (pro-linux coverage in German) and produced a chart showing exactly how the RAM consumption of comparable KDE4 and KDE3 sessions measure up. The result is a mindblowing 39% smaller memory footprint in KDE 4. This just goes to show, that it's worth making large-scale changes to your desktop environment to get the fruit hanging on the higher branches.