KDE Blogs 

We are collectively elated, in the KDEPIM community, by the news that all four of "our" applications for Google's Summer of Code have been accepted this year. There'll be work on bringing the wonders of plasma to Kontact's summary widget, improving Akonadi's SyncML support (mentored by last year's student in that area, awesomely), porting KMail to use Stephen Kelly's very cool Grantlee templating library (which will allow much easier themeing and probably attract 1000 elephants) and on infrastructure for import and export of data and settings. All this is exceedingly useful and much needed stuff, and exactly the kind of work by new contributors that we were hoping to facilitate by building a strong, flexible, nice to work with foundation in the form of Akonadi. As the core Akonadi team continues to improve the machinery under the hood and as mobile versions of our applications emerge (watch this space for news on that hopefully later today), new contributors and those who have been waiting for a while for their moment can get to work improving the overall experience and bringing KDEPIM and Kontact to its full potential. The summer of code projects are part of that, but by no means the only such efforts. It promises to be a very exciting summer. I'm personally especially happy to see several applicants succeed (in KDE overall) who failed last time. Some even failed twice but continued to learn, improve their proposals, get involved in other ways the community and have now reached a personal goal in getting accepted. I applaud their perseverance and spirit, that's what makes our communities great, I think. Speaking of perseverance, it warms my heart to see no less than 11 successful applications from India, this year, much more than ever before. Maybe we in the Free Software world are finally starting to bridge the digital divide and truly engage contributors from more diverse backgrounds. Read More

Candidate images for the Kubuntu 10.04 LTS release have started to appear. We needs as much testing as possible to make sure these can be given the golden stamp of LTS approval. Download, install, give us your results on IRC in #kubuntu-devel and the ISO tracker. Read More

Aaron Seigo will be hosting a session on Plasma Desktop Scripting in #plasma on Freenode IRC network at 16:00UTC on Tuesday (today). It's intended for distro packagers but all welcome.

On the kubuntu.org front page we list a few interesting Kubuntu users of various shapes and sizes to give a feel for how diverse use is. One rather cool user which is missing is Weta Digital. Whenever I've been out the flat this week I've seen adverts for the Avatar DVDs, those blue 3D faces are all made on Kubuntu desktops and a whopping 35,000 cluster of rendering machines. That must be a large proportion of computers in New Zealand running Kubuntu. Read More

As you are hopefully already aware, the deadline for this years Akademy Call for Papers is approaching quickly. You have until Friday, 23 April 2010 to get all your proposals for talks, lightning talks, workshops and BoFs in. Read More

Kubuntu 10.04 Release is nearly upon us. This Thursday sees the Release Candidate with final release due a week on Thursday. So we need ISO testing (and upgrade testing) pretty solidly between now and then. Read More

Did you know every app built with KDE 4 can save files as easily to a FTP server or a remote computer using SSH as easily as it accesses your local hard disk? You should! This is a feature that I take for granted since it was introduced in the days of KDE 2.0, but it's easy to forget that the majority of KDE users only started using it since then. Read More

Hi, KDE 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4 all required at least CMake 2.6.2. I'd like to know how much "pain" it would be to increase this requirement for KDE 4.5 to CMake 2.6.3. Read More

Lukáš, who's taken over TagLib maintainership these days, has just released the latest bug fix release for TagLib, also posted in his blog: Changes from 1.6.1 are: Read Vorbis Comments from the first FLAC metadata block, if there are multipe ones. Fixed a memory leak in FileRef's OGA format detection. Fixed compilation with the Sun Studio compiler. Handle WM/TrackNumber attributes with DWORD content in WMA files. More strict check if something is a valid MP4 file. Correctly save MP4 int-pair atoms with flags set to 0. Fixed compilation of the test runner on Windows. Store ASF attributes larger than 64k in the metadata library object. Ignore trailing non-data atoms when parsing MP4 covr atoms. Don't upgrade ID3v2.2 frame TDA to TDRC. As a side-note, some of my buddies from RethinkDB have been looking hard for good C++ folks out in Silicon Valley doing a MySQL backend for solid state devices. If you're a systems-y C++ wonk in search of a job at a hacker-friendly company, they're good folks. If you're interested and we know each other drop me a line and I'll do a little intro show-and-dance. Read More

KDE Developers may have noticed that the developer documentation server at api.kde.org is down. This is due to a hardware failure which will be recovered next week. That need not put the brakes on your work though, since if you have the source code on your system you can build the API docu locally yourself, as HTML, as man pages, or as Qt Assistant help files to view in Qt Assistant or Qt Creator. Read More