KDE Blogs 

There are still five days left to submit a proposal for a presentation at Akademy 2009. The deadline is on Friday, April 10th. Akademy happens as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this year. See more details about what we are looking for in the call for presentations. Akademy is the prime occasion for meeting the community, and present and discuss your ideas. Lots of great initiatives were kick-started at Akademy. Don't miss out on this opportunity and submit your proposal now! Read More

There have been endless complaints about the KDE4 desktop shell missing certain functionalities like being able to have different wallpapers on each virtual desktop. The openSUSE KDE team has now listened and worked hard to bring back all desktop functionality as you know it from KDE2. A technical preview in form of a Live-CD (for i686 only) is now available. As additional bonus, Time Machine functionality was included too.

Roberto Alsina recently posted a series of tutorials about Python and PyQt on his blog. I don't think they appeared on Planet KDE, so I'm forwarding them on. ;-) It covers typical Qt GUI programming using Qt Designer. Read More

I just added some content to the new cute Qt community website.

A promising student was talking with me about working on Network Management in GSoC 2009, but decided to concentrate on his studies this summer. Out of the discussion I've created this idea proposal. In case anyone is interested in making mobile broadband connections really easy to do in Network Management, see the KDE Google Summer of Code 2009 ideas page.

We've recently extended our Marble Wiki to include more documentation about how you can participate in Marble development. Here are a few possible jobs for a start: If you are an artist or interested in historical world maps you can help us to improve our "Historic Maps" library: Magnus Valle ("wiscados" on #kde-edu) has done some great work in this area (resulting in the Historic Map that comes with Marble 0.7). Find out here how you are able to take part in this. For source code aficionados we have lots and lots of JuniorJobs for Marble. You can have a look at our How to become a Marble Developer page to find out how to tackle those. If you're a student and you are still looking for a Google Summer of Code 2009 topic, then you can either look at the KDE ideas page or you look at Wikipedia's fine article about Virtual Globes. They got a nice comparison matrix there which even includes Marble. There are still a few red "No" marks there which might help you to get an idea for your Marble topic for the Google Summer of Code application (like e.g. Movie Maker, Guides, Planetarium, etc.). Just make sure that you don't work on "Imagery of other planets" as Marble already has got this feature since Marble 0.7 (the author of the article just hasn't updated the page yet and I myself don't want to edit such wikipedia pages due to my obvious bias ;-) If you'd like to help us or have questions regarding Marble, just join us on IRC ( channel #kde-edu on irc.kde.org ) or write an e-mail to marble-devel@kde.org.

In a recent blog, David Nolden talks about transferring user-generated, file associated meta-data. His post was well written and the ensuing discussion interesting. I'd like to continue his line of thought here. Read More

I thought I share a few interesting links: Gnome switches to git: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-March/msg00086.html But not everybody does so, e.g. Python is switching right now to Mercurial: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2009-March/087931.html Eric Sinc has an interesting blog about DVCSs: http://www.ericsink.com/ Read More

The beta for our forthcoming 9.04 is available for download and testing. It features improved graphics and more slick applications. To see what's new and how to download go to the beta information page. You can upgrade from 8.10 or from 8.04. Let us know what you think on the feedback page and report bugs to Launchpad.

Drkonqi is nice and friendly, but some apps (e.g. kded or krunner) have a crash handler so that they restart instead of annoying the user with crash dialogs. As developers, we want to see backtraces of crashes in all cases; and to be in gdb in order to be able to print variables etc. Solution: asking for core dumps. That part is easy: Read More