KDE Blogs 

The 17th of this month was a historic day. The US President has now acquired un-controlled, despotic powers. Everybody can be declared "an unlawful enemy combatant". Everybody! US inhabitant or not. Innocent or not. Without ever seeing a judge or a court. Just because the President deems so. And if that happens, you'll be defenseless against torture. Because that's is now legal too. The bill has been rubber-stamped by the Congress, with only minimal opposition by some democrats. Read More

The Kubuntu Edgy Release Candidate is out. After Ubuntu added f-spot we couldn't be outdone and added Digikam to the default CD for camera goodness. We also upped KDE to 3.5.5. Read More

It's about time: my photos from aKademy are online. :) With aKademy being over for over two weeks already and the next aKademy in Glasgow already announced that's long overdue. There are not many KDE-related pictures in there because I didn't carry my camera with me during the first few conference days. I tried to compensate at the end by taking pictures of Aaron Seigo handing over the big Konqi to Marcus Furlong to thank him for organizing this excellent aKademy. Read More

Few OSS projects have a distinct usability community - and even in large projects like KDE and Gnome there is only a fistful of trained usability contributors. Why so? For an article which will be published in the German Open Source Yearbook 2007, I spent the last weeks comparing and analysing usability efforts in different OSS projects. Here are my top-four factors influencing usability in OSS: Read More

The secret is lifted and Akademy 2007 will be in Glasgow, organised by me and Kenny. We'll be holding it earlier than previous Akademies, hopefully that means we'll be able to get some students from the US who haven't been able to attend before. We had our first local team meeting last week and it's very exciting to have a bunch of enthusiastic helpers. With debconf in Edinburgh and Guadec in England this means we'll have the three largest free software projects having their conferences in Britain next year, an exciting trend (and even cooler, two of them are run by Quakers). Now the fun starts of opening bank accounts and organising a conference, anyone who wants to help with sponsors especially welcome. Read More

One picture tells the whole story: (link) Big thanks to the friendly KOffice team, in particular to Cyrille who deals with the time-consuming tasks related to the release! Kexi's going to jump from 1.1 to 2.0 version next time, so even the version numbers will be synced among KOffice apps. Read More

I often get the question what Flake is. And as the answer is getting clearer in the heads of the people designing it, I thought I'd write down an introduction. Read More

Another great feature release of KOffice and this time it fits fine into the release schedule of next upcoming openSUSE release: You can find fully functional rpms of it in Factory and for SUSE Linux 10.1. The koffice-illustration package for older SUSE Linux versions in KDE:Backports (a build service project which has the goal to not force you to update your system libraries or KDE to get the newest application versions) are missing Krita though as its developers explicitely disable the build of Krita because they think the version of libcms on these distros is too old/too buggy. They rather prefer to have less users than getting reports about some maybe seldom occuring bug caused by that libcms you would never notice.

I spent many hours the past couple months bug fixing two of my favorite KDE PIM applications (KOrganizer and KMail). And I'm not even making a small dent in the bug pile. Read More

This weekend sees the anniversary of 10 years of the Free desktop. Well done to Tackat for organising what looks like a great stream of talks and party. We've come a long way from that first announcement in 1996, but interestingly the task of "...createing a GUI for an ENDUSER, somebody who wants to browse the web with Linux, write some letters and play some nice games" was achieved many years ago, it's all been polishing since then. Read More