KDE Blogs 

Near where I live there's a pond. Actually it is right outside of my living room. In this pond there used to be many a goldfish. Until this week. Read More

I'd like to introduce Akarsh Simha, who was awarded a GSoC this year to work on KStars. His project is entitled "Optimising loading and painting of stars in KStars", and when it is successfully completed, KStars will finally have the ability to display millions of stars, without adversely affecting the programs interactive responsiveness. Read More

Kubuntu 8.04 is out, upgrade now for rock solid 3.5.9 goodness, or download the CD with a choice of 3.5.9 or cutting edge KDE 4. New stuff includes printer autoconfiguration (coming to the rest of the world in KDE 4.1), super easy compiz setup, auto-codec install for Kaffeine, Wubi the Windows installer making it easy to install for those first timers, bulletproof X, NTFS Support and User Mountable Hard Disks and the latest versions of everything you can think of. Read More

Virtual Folders in KDE You can tag files, you can annotate them, Strigi indexes your files, I showed how to create new information types and things, but you could not really use it. I suspect you want to find the things again by searching for it. Well, I don't think we should search. We should simply find! Read More

OpenStreetMap can get addictive once you discover how easy and powerful the flash editor is. But what, my girlfriend asked, is the point when you can get maps at no cost from Google et al. The justification is that unrestricted by copyright you can do interesting things that you would be otherwise unable to do. OpenStreetMap Cycle Map shows all the best routes for a bike. Open Piste Map makes maps for skiing. So this evening I made Open Whitewater Map to create maps for canoeing and other river users showing places to get in and out, rapids and their grades and hazards on the river too. The WikiProject Whitewater Maps page has the info. Only a few river routes done so far, any canoeists out there want to add some more? Read More

There are plenty sources for KDE relates feeds and news, but reading them through the usual neutral feed readers or even on separate sites takes the fun out of the less serious ones. Also the common separations between different parts of KDE (internal devs, external dev, artists, usability experts, bug hunters and pr people) is reflected in the different community cultures (mailing lists, bko, dot, wikis, kde look/apps/files, other forums) which usually never mix (dot comments are probably the closest to that happening). I always thought putting them all together onto one (naturally huge messy) page should give an interesting overview, similar to the yellow press' collection of often useless(ly funny) article collections. As I recently found out about simplepie I decided to test myself how far I would be able to go with an automated yellow press parody of KDE news, all while both making good use of my limited webspace (with "unlimited" bandwidth) as well as satisfying my rather constant need for KDE tinbits from everywhere. The result after a couple of hours today is here (warning: brutal use of bright colours).

Jakub Stachowski, who just committed a significant performance improvement to KConfig parsing, which, with previous improvements of his, made it about 4.5 times faster than the initial KDE4 version, and slightly faster than the KDE 3.5.9 one.

NLnet provided new KOffice logos (and it sponsors ODF development). Kudos for that! To help readers of the announcement, let's note that application logo is not always equal to its icon. Read More

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 has been released including the new beautiful installer, an incredible fast installation and package management, KDE 4.0.3 and 3.5.9. With this Beta the media layout changed: no 1 CD install media anymore, just the KDE4 Live-CD and the DVD which allows to choose between KDE4 and KDE3. This beta marks the generic feature freeze so there was a rush to get everything in which led to the delayed release and some problems like most noticeable the Live-CD installer not working. :-( So if you plan to do an install better download the DVD or use the network installation CD. Read More

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. If you're the type of person who always stays up to date with the latest alphas/betas, or are a Power Bug Reporter who wants to report bugs with full debug output and maybe try applying a patch from a developer or twiddle a few bits yourself, this is a way to get the freshest KDE 4 Plasma or Amarok around. Read More