KDE Blogs 

Scarlett has been working hard on packaging KDE Frameworks 5 Alpha 2 and the build status page shows a sea of green (the only yellow is when a framework is asking for a package which doesn't exist yet). Just in time for Plasma Next to get its Alpha release this week coming :) Grab the KF5 packages from the experimental PPA for Kubuntu Trusty.

The Blue Systems office in Edinburgh has moved across The Meadows to the Grassmarket to a larger office which is also surrounded on two sides by curious artist collectives and the occasional hipster café. Hosted in Edinburgh's new technology incubator Codebase we are in another building which is nicer on the inside looking out, this time with a view of our local volcano Arthur's Seat. Read More

Things have been rather quiet in Yakuake land for a while. 2014 is going to shake things up, though, so it's time for a brief look at what's been going on and where things are headed next. Read More

Early last year the Linux Mint developer told me he had been contacted by Canonical's community manager to tell him he needed to licence his use of the packages he used from Ubuntu. Now Ubuntu is free software and as an archive admin, I spend a lot of time reviewing everything that goes into Ubuntu to ensure it has freedom in its copyright. So I advised him to ignore the issue as being FUD. Read More

Hacker Public Radio FOSDEM edition is up now for those wanting a podcast packaged full of geek interviews. My interview is 27 minutes in and talks of KDE, Kubuntu and how Baloo will make the KDE world slicker. MP3 file. Read More

For several years, I used to maintain a collection of clippings showing the KDE workspaces in use in interesting settings - popping up on TV shows, on public terminals in odd locations, in articles on leading scientific endeavours. All sorts of cool cases. More recently I haven't been collecting as diligently anymore, though, for perhaps the best possible reason: It's happening so frequently now that individual examples have lost much of their novelty. Read More

Monday saw the release of version 1.2.0 of Homerun, now a collection of launcher interfaces for Plasma Workspaces, powered by a common foundation. If you're already familiar with, or even a happy user of Homerun this description of it might make you raise an eyebrow, so let's take a look at what's new in this version. Read More

KDE Frameworks 5 tech preview shipped last week and we've been packaging furiously. This is all new packaging from scratch, none of our automated scripts we have for KDE SC. Tier 1 is in our experimental PPA for Trusty. Special thanks to Scarlett our newest Kubuntu Ninja who is doing a stormer.

I'm going to FOSDEM for 2014, are you? FOSDEM is a massive free software meeting with more projects than you knew existed. We need help on the KDE stall. We also need visitors in the devroom. Finally we need KDE people to come and eat pizza on Saturday evening. Add yourself to the wiki page if you want to help KDE at FOSDEM.

Frameworks 5 Tech Preview has arrived. KDE Frameworks it a port of kdelibs to Qt 5 and turned into modules so you can install only the bits you need. People are often reluctant to add kdelibs to their applications because it brings in too many dependencies. With KDE Frameworks it has been modularised so much is simply extra Qt libraries. This will bring KDE software to a much wider audience. Many parts of kdelibs have just been moved into Qt itself thanks to the open qt-project. Read More