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Of all the nutty things Canonical has done in the last week wanting to drop 13.04 four months into development and two months before release is one of the more anti-social to the community who have been working on it. Fortunately at the "UDS" session today I poked enough and we seem to have consensus that it'll go ahead on the schedule we agreed at UDS last October. Feature freeze on Thursday my friends, two days to go.

If like Martin Owens you're feeling the lack of Ubuntu community and wanting an Ubuntu community that cares about everyone's contribution, doesn't make random announcements every couple of days that have obviously been made behind closed doors and cares about a community made upstream desktop (and err.. whole graphics stack), you'd be very welcome here at Kubuntu. Join us in #kubuntu-devel Read More

I tagged the first release candidate of QtWebKit 2.3 yesterday. You can find on gitorious, where you also find the tar-ball. Not much have changed since beta2, crashes fixes, build fixes on non-Linux and a bug that caused browsers to open links in a new window when set to open in new tab. Read More

Planet Gnome is headed by a curious blog today, Miguel moving to Mac. "To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl." Read More

I get nice comments on IRC occationally, here's an especially nice one recently: Can I thank all the Kubuntu Ninjas for their superlative efforts with Raring (amazingly stable for Alpha 2), KDE SC 4.10 and KDE Telepathy.. it is amazingly smooth and stable, and uses a lot less memory than previous releases.. very impressed.. Read More

Sony, the company who created Audio CDs which installed a rootkit on Windows computer to try to stop people copying music has pirated KDE artwork. The preferences-system.png icon from Oxygen is on their Choose your Vaio webpages (next to configure) but impressively is also on the UEFI firmware should you boot up into Assist mode. Nowhere on their website terms of use does it list the LGPL 3 licence it may be copied under (It does say "Any unauthorised use or copying of site content, or use of site content which breaches these Terms (or their spirit) may violate trade mark, copyright and other proprietary rights, and have civil and criminal consequences" although it also says "You must seek and obtain the written consent the operator of this site before creating any link to this site" so I don't give that page any legal credit.) Should KDE e.V. and Nuno's Oxygen friends start a new business model by sueing them for everything they're worth? Read More

Microsoft have decreed that every new Windows 8 computer has to come with UEFI, a new firmware to replace the old 80s BIOS. They've also decreed that every new Windows 8 computer has to come with SecureBoot which means it'll only boot an operating system signed by MS. This is only for security of course, nothing to do with making it harder to make competing operating systems, oh no. So I had to hunt out a new laptop to test this on which means going to a real physical shop since no website will list which firmware a computer has it being a most uninteresting feature. My local Sony Centre found me the very last 13" cheapo Vaio laptop in the country to use as a test machine. Read More

Oriental and other input methods have long been fiddly in Kubuntu. I'm very pleased to see that ace Kubuntu ninja Michal Zajac has fixed the language packs to set up the input methods correctly when installing a language that needs it. Read More

Aaron's grumpy discussion of how Unity doesn't currently use Qt on the desktop made it to Slashdot got this nice comment in the /. discussion: 'I have been using Kubuntu -- the semi-official KDE Ubuntu -- for years. I like it, it's stable, and the interface with least surprise. It does what I want, when I want, and it doesn't try to "integrate" things that do not need to be, or should not be, integrated.' Read More

Just a quick update to tell you beta 2 of QtWebKit 2.3 has been tagged. I am planning to tag the release before the end of the month. I would like to already now thank for all the encouragement and backup I have received on the project, Qupzilla and rekonq developers have been very helpfully and are already recommending to use QtWebKit 2.3 beta together with their applications, and a handfull of linux distros have been packaging it. The only thing missing is more feedback from Mac or Windows developers. On Linux this beta could be considered release quality, but on Mac and Win, there are still some issues I hope can get ironed out soon. Read More