KDE Blogs 

Oh, yes, just in case you haven't noticed, it's out. However, since I maintain this image of seriousness, purposefulness and so on (which I only occassionally spoil by something like doing strange things to my hair, eating way too much icecream or doing silly things at SUSE outdoor events), I would like here to reference the KDE release notes for openSUSE 11.2. We recalled at least the Pulse Audio thing a bit too late, so maybe right now the actual release notes do not mention it yet. Read More

I often say that my hypothetical user for Kubuntu is my non-technical girlfriend. Unfortunately I'm between girlfriends at the moment but the intent is still there. Someone who uses the computer for everyday tasks of web browsing, chatting, watching videos, listening to music, writing some documents, storing photos. But also someone who doesn't care about computers any more than I care about my car, it should do the job but I don't want to have to fiddle with it to get it to work. Unfortunately I rarely get the chance to try out Kubuntu on such users, my family have all been using computers far longer than I have and are just as stuck in their ways as I am in mine. Read More

Now that the mention of the Firefox KDE integration I've done has reached also the dot, I guess it's time for a couple of things that don't quite fit into an article but I should probably say them somewhere anyway. Read More

9.10 is out. KDE 4 is really taking shape now with more of the important gaps getting filled. We ported OpenOffice integration to KDE 4, the installer got some beautiful love from Nuno, social apps integation in various places, there's a handy message indicator and notifications work cross desktop. We have the latest KDE apps of course, K3b gets a KDE 4 port, user config got ported too. Rather importantly network connects work and intel graphics drivers aren't rubbish. Read More

On a related (to my other blog post today) note, while I'm giving credit where credit is due: my personal KDE hero at the moment is Anne Wilson, who has been helping KDEPIM users for years on our lists and at meetings and has been a voice of reason, courtesy, constructive feedback and positiveness that makes a huge difference in the atmosphere of our community. I much admire her work with the documentation team (userbase, anyone?) and the community working group and ever since I first met her in person (in Glasgow, I think) I have been impressed by the fearless and all embracing manner in which she has found her way amongst us weirdos and become a gentle, well respected leader and wrangler of geeks. I don't know when exactly it is, but happy 70th birthday, Anne, all the best from us PIMsters, we thank you and look forward to many more Akademy meetings with you. Read More

With all the excitement and energy surrounding Akonadi and the ongoing porting of our main applications to it at the moment (over 100 commits to KDEPIM yesterday alone!), it's easy to get the impression that we've collectively abandoned our stable versions and the many users relying on them today. Not so. While Volker Krause and his team at KDAB (currently Kevin Ottens, Frank Osterfeld, Sebastian Sauer, Leo Franchi, Stephen Kelly and Laurent Montel, with various others pitching in occasionally, like Marc, Guillermo and Romain) are ripping through KDEPIM trunk, Allen Winter and Thomas McGuire (again aided by Marc and others) are faithfully watching over the stable branches. They are making sure that all relevant bugfixes found by the Akonadi port make it back into the 3.x and 4.x stable branches and are doing many bugfixes and features in those branches themselves, every week, which are then merged into trunk. This results in a steady stream of improvements into both the 3.x and 4.x series, all of which make it to our users (i.e. you out there, probably) via the Linux distributions and via the KDE Windows and Mac packages regularly. This is mostly unglamorous and sometimes boring work which they carry out with great professionalism and personal commitment, both during their KDAB work time and well beyond, in their personal time. They hardly ever get any recognition for what they do, so this is an attempt to remedy that a bit. Rock on, boys! Read More

Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing Adam:                                

Once again we need testers, this time for the candidate images for Kubuntu 9.10. CDs, DVDs, netboot and upgrades all need going through their paces in triplicate. Join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate and log your results on the ISO testing site. Read More

This weekend I visited my parents in law, because my wifes paternal grandmother celebrated her 90th birthday. I noticed that the laptop they use was still running Kubuntu Feisty with OpenOffice 2.2. On this machine, reading emails, managing photos, surfing the internet and working on office documents are most important. Digikam is used for photos. Kmail and konqueror from KDE 3.5 are installed and a mix of OpenOffice and Microsoft Office 97 on wine is in use for editing office documents. in short, a horribly outdated setup of more than two years old. IT is still moving fast. Feisty was not a long term release and no updates for it anymore. Read More

One important feature for photo management is missing in the FOSS world:an application for creating photo albums that can be sent away for printing at a printing service. There is however a pretty slick closed source application that works on linux. It can be fiound at for example Pixum (also in.nl and .de). It is based on Qt 4.4 and installs using a perl script which downloads the artwork and the required libraries. The application is customized for different printing companies that have these customized downloads available from their website. Not all of them offer the linux or even the macintosh version. This is a shame and probably done to limit the number of different questions users might have. A standard for these photo album ordering services would be great, but I'm not holding my breath and will recommend Pixum for now. Read More