KDE Blogs 

Feisty is available for download. Canonical's servers are going slow so use a mirror or bittorrent. Or, you can use the super new distribution upgrade tool, if you're up to date with edgy-updates you should find Adept pops up a prompt to upgrade to Feisty when you fetch updates. Must of the work in this release is behind the scenes with various apps ported to Qt 4. The new partitioner in the installer is a big improvement in reliability over QtParted. Network Manager by default is an equally big improvement over the old network app. Our OEM installer looks shiny and bling for all those machines due to be sold with Kubuntu on them, thanks to Abattoir. The Kubuntu help documentation has a big improvement in organisation, thanks to nixternal (who also did a smashing job on the release announcements). One of the smaller changes is setting Konqueror to use Firefox as the user agent for Google which makes GMail and Google Calendar suddenly fully functional. Stefan S turned up on IRC one day and wrote a funky new logout dialogue. There have been a number of small improvements to Adept, mostly to support the upgrader and to make us compliant with the universe-by-default spec, thanks to manchicken, Vladimir and others for that (there is a slight worry of branching too far from Adept trunk, so I want to merge back as soon as it's sane). Packages for KDE 4 are available as well as the latest CMake and Qt 4.3 beta (the -kdecopy packages). Guidance gets a funky Wine config module and improvements to the power manager, thanks to Sime, Sebas, Lure and Yuriy. Lots of work done by Tonio as usual including the new default kicker layout. Thanks also to Trueg who put up with me poking him about K3b 1.0, which we got included in time. We had some troubles with Qt and Chinese characters, which is why Qt 3.3.8 isn't in, (well spotted freeflying). Read More

As the result of a long discussion on kde-core-devel, I summarised the suggested application and system shortcuts for KDE4: Standard Keyboard Shortcuts About Shortcuts and Accelerators [The table isn't formatted yet - are there volunteers to make it look like these ones? I really hate tables in MediaWiki...] Read More

I found a nice name for my openSUSE-based KDE 4 Live CDs/DVDs: "KDE Four Live" - which has also spoken a nice second meaning. :-) It has been three weeks since the initial announcement, but still two weeks to go until KDE 4.0 Alpha 1, so I updated the DVD to another random SVN snapshot. The refinement and up-to-date keeping of the KDE4 packages in the openSUSE build service continues. A new KDE4 wiki page describes our goals, the packages and their usage. Read More

Some 18 months ago I decided that I wanted to upgrade from my desktop to a laptop. The machine was really slow, but the most important thing was that I intended to be able to travel with my main machine. So, I bought a really cool looking and pretty fast HP laptop. I didn't want to spent too much on a laptop and this one fitted the bill. Soon after I found that HP does not equal quality; the machine needed a bios upgrade, which actually came out some months before I bought it. But naturally I only found out after installing Linux on it and there is no way to upgrade then. The power supply has been replaced twice in those 1½ years and now the hinges broke so I use duct tape to keep the screen from separating from the machine. All in roughly 18 months. Hint; don't buy HP guys! Read More

As you may know, I bought myself a laptop, which I felt compelled to bring with me during my latest vacation to unload my digital camera and for the occasional late night hack. Read More

It's been a while (3 years!) since my last post regarding "changing the stars" of Open Source developers. I faded out from the KDE developer scene to concentrate on the corporate job I was offered then (though not because of that post :-P). Now that my duties at work have stabilized, I've "followed my feet" back to Open Source and KDE. Read More

Great news for all people who like the Marble Desktop Globe: Google Summer of Code '07 has started and our vivid KDE community managed to get 40 students accepted - three of them will work on Marble! I've got to admit that I was pretty overwhelmed by the interest people showed in Marble: lots of students have submitted applications that dealt with Marble. Most of the submissions were great so it was pretty hard for sure to choose among them. I hope that in the future we'll be able to get also those people involved whose ideas weren't accepted this time (especially the geocaching idea and the Marble Almanac). Right now I'm happy that now that Inge Wallin of KOffice fame has joined forces we'll have at least five people working on this tiny little project. For GSoC '07 topics will cover KML and GPS support as well as flat 2D projection. In other news there have been lots of Marble packages for Linux -- thanks to Steffen "Whitey" Joeris, Beineri, Chitlesh Goorah and lots of others. However I'd like to point out that Christian Ehrlicher managed to create a Marble install package for Windows which is ready for download (keep in mind that Marble is still in early beta stage, so bugs certainly do exist). Now even if you are forced to use Windows there is no excuse anymore not to try Marble ;-) I hope people don't mind if I post a screenshot:

Some of you may already know it, but I thought I should announce it here: next Thursday I'll be going to Albany/New York for around 6 months. There I'll have a job for this time at Kitware, you know, the guys who are (among others) writing the best buildsystem in the world ! ;-) Read More

Registration for Akademy 2007 is now open. This year it's being run by KDE GB. You need to register by the end of the month if you want accommodation with the KDE booking. Please pay promptly for the accommodation, it'll save us all a lot of hassle, payment is through paypal. Akademy 2007 is going to be great! Do come along. Read More

I'm sure I will be using KDE 3.5.6 for most of my personal Linux time over the next few months. And I'm evenly sure I want to follow the KDE4 developments (esp. regarding KDEPrint). But I'm also curious to have another look at Beryl and Compiz. (I'll certainly not be using it for any length of time -- last time I had a look, about a year ago, my head was dizzy from all the wobbly-ness of the windows moving, and the bottle-genie-ness of windows minimizing+maximizing; however, I'm looking for some cool 'demo-ware' to impress and make envy my collegues if I happen to give a scheduled presentation to them coming June...) Read More