KDE Blogs 

The excitement of discovery is not confined within the realm of professional astronomy only, amateur astronomers have contributed to many significant discoveries including spotting Supernova 1987A, several comets, and even exo-planets! As the hardware used to observe the night sky gets more sophisticated, affordable, and sensitive, so does the sophistication and variety of the software. One of the primary issues for amateur astronomers utilizing Linux is not the lack of hardware support as it was often the case a few years ago. Nowadays most astronomical hardware is well supported under Linux, with the exception of a few cameras and auxiliary devices. However, what is severely lacking is a complete software suite that caters to the needs of amateur astronomers. As it stands now, you have a plethora of astronomy and control applications in Linux that cater to different stages of the amateur astronomer astrophotography train: You can use App X to control the telescope and camera, App B to perform guiding, App Z to focus, and none of these applications talk to each other! If you want to perform stacking, you have to find another program, and list just goes on. This can be incredibly frustrating for amateur astronomers new to Linux, and even those with experience. Last year, I purchased a 120mm aprochromatic refractor telescope, Quantum Scientific Imaging (QSI) CCD camera , Starlight Xpress Lodestar autoguider, and RoboFocus. There, I was set for astrophotography! Read More

Posted today to the kubuntu-devel mailing list, this handy image for your website

Calligra has made a second release. Packages are aviailabe for Kubuntu. With this release I'm confident Calligra is ready for bigger exporure and we're evaluating it for Kubuntu 12.10.

Danimo started a Planet Qt as a sign of the project's increased open development model. It uses the same Rawdog setup I made for Planet KDE. Favourite Microblog of the day "Kubuntu, nice addition to being more independent, now works better than ever" Read More

Rekonq, the web browser shipped with Kubuntu, has reached 1.0 congratulations Adjam and friends. It's pleasingly stable and thanks to WebKit it supports almost all the modern fancy stuff in websites. Just a pain websites like BBC iPlayer deliberately fail on it, bad BBC. Rekonq 1.0 is available in Quantal for latest Ubuntu users and precise-backports for those wanting to try it out. Akademy talk videos are up. Even if you're not into domain specific debugging tools for Qt it's well worth looking at the Keynotes of Mathias Klang, Freedom of Expression and Will Schroeder: It has a heart, a brain and it's dangerous. Be selfish and share!

Mega Akademy Group Photo, who can you name?

A week in Estonia, the lovely sunshine, the magical forest and all the BoFs you could want. Qt Quick Training The main event of the Monday was KDAB running a Qt Quick training session. Qt Quick continues to be full of swish bling although the widget sets are all a bit incomplete. The good news is there's not a lot of QML change in Qt 5. Kevin even showed us some new bling from Qt 5 which makes snowflakes, pretty. Read More

I went to the day long course on Monday given by KDAB, about QtQuick for Qt5, and it was excellent. I had used Qt4 and QML for a Symbian phone project earlier this year, and the combination worked very well. Read More

A whole week of KDE goodness here at the IT College in Tallinn. Favourite talks: Jeroen van Meeuwen gave a talk about bug management, something we're often not very good at in free software due to lack of manpower. I'd love to have a quick and convenient way of marking bugs for the next kubuntu release for example, and what's quick and convenient for me posting it via IRC, we recently got a bot who could do this but it can't mark it for the next release due to daft security issues, grr. Read More

A life reaffirming gathering of KDE contributors is happening this week in sunny Tallinn in Estonia. Here's some pictures for those stuck at home Pre-Akademy Hacker beer Read More