[428 total ]
Posted
1 day
ago
KOffice, like most KDE applications, has the unique selling point that the same codebase can be compiled and run on various platforms. The latest KOffice alpha release has attracted extra attention since it ships Windows and Macintosh binaries. This
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naturally means a much larger audience will be able to try it out and kick the tires. Techworld has an article up where they give a good overview and plenty of screenshots. Have you already tried out a KOffice alpha release? [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
Akademy 2008 has published the programme of talks. Track themes include research, applications and community. There are keynotes from Frank Karlitschek of the Open Desktop sites, Sebastian Nyström of Nokia, Cliff Schmidt of KDE users Literacy Bridge.
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Lightning talk sessions include a Plasma Frenzy and an Akonadi Rumble with KDAB's Till Adam. It is a packed programme to start off the week, the rest of which will be filled with BoFs, Tutorials and an Embedded and Mobile Day. Register now. [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
On Sunday 6th July, the Bugsquad will be holding a Kopete bug triage day. The aim: to dramatically reduce the number of Kopete bug reports from the current level of approximately 530. As usual, this bug day will be coordinated in the channel
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#kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net. There will also be a followup bug day two weeks later, on Sunday 20th July, to triage any remaining bugs.
The Bugsquad is a great way to contribute to KDE. You do not need a huge amount of time. Just 30 minutes is enough to learn the craft of bug triage - sorting and checking bug reports in the KDE bug tracker. You do not need any previous experience with programming or contributing to KDE - you just need a computer with KDE running on it and a desire to help out.
The Kopete bug triage marathon will take place on two Sundays, 6th and 20th of July, in your timezone. We will start in the morning in Asia, and continue until the evening in America. There will be expert triagers on hand in the IRC channel (#kde-bugs) to help you get started, and once you have done a few bugs you will be able to continue at any time of any day - whenever you feel like doing a bit more. [Less]
Posted
3 days
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Amarok 2 gets basic video playing support, and a connection to Librivox public domain audio books. Major porting to KDE 4 continues in K3b. More work on "Fuzzy Search" integration in Digikam. The start of support for
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sound effects in KGoldRunner, and the addition of a sound feature in KPresenter. Improvements in the msword-odf and kpr-odf import facilities in KOffice. Start of QTestLib integration into KDevelop. The Ruby development bindings support interaction with Akonadi. KMPlayer gets a bookmarks menu and support for displaying Phonon metadata. Kst replaces the concept of tags with "dynamic names". A new, improved version of KColorEdit is imported into KDE SVN. A new module, kdeplasmoids, is created in KDE SVN to consolidate the various different scattered locations of Plasma applets. A new Plasma theme for KDE 4.1 is unveiled in KDE SVN. All of Eigen no longer depends on Qt. KDevelop 4.0.0 Alpha2, Phonon 4.1.0, KOffice 1.9.95 Alpha 8, and KDE 4.0.5 are tagged for release. Phonon moves to kdesupport. guidance-power-manager moves to extragear/utils to be released with KDE 4.1. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
11 days
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Marble gets "temperature" and "precipitation" maps, and a "stars" plugin. More work on "fuzzy searches" in Digikam. Konqueror gets support for crash session recovery and session management. Runners can now be managed
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using a KPluginSelector-based dialog, and attention-blinking support in Plasma. Various Plasma applets move around KDE SVN before the KDE 4.1 feature freeze takes effect, with WebKit applet support moving into kdebase. SVG stuff from WebKit starts to be integrated into KHTML. More optimisations in KHTML, with KJS/Frostbyte, a version using bytecode and other enhancements, moving back into kdelibs. Start of an implemention of the JavaScript scripting API for PDF documents in Okular, based on KJS. Continued work on KJots integration into Kontact, and creating/editing links between entries in KJots. More work on theming in Amarok 2. Various improvements in kvpnc. More configuration user interfaces in KNetworkManager. Enhancements in the KTorrent bandwidth scheduler plugin. Support for CUPS printing options in KDE printing dialogs. Mailody moves to kdereview. The "OnlineSync" plugin is merged into Akregator. Initial commit of a new MSWord-to-ODF filter for KWord, and a caligraphy tool for Karbon. KDevMon is ported to KDE 4. Development of the Shaman2 package manager is moved into KDE SVN (playground/sysadmin). The PHP-Qt bindings move from playground/bindings to the kdebindings module. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
12 days
ago
Another milestone on the road towards KDE 4.1 has been packaged and put online for testing. The release notes highlight some features in Dolphin and Gwenview, as well as additional information on where to get the release, make sure you also check
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your distributor's websites as well. While there are some bugs left, the release already works quite solidly on most people's machines. Performance problems on NVidia chips remain, but we are confident that those will be solved by the teams over at NVidia in one of the next releases of their graphics driver. In KDE 4.1, there is also some preliminary Mac and Windows support coming up. Several apps can be tried by a wider audience on those proprietary platforms this summer already. On the side of Free operating systems, support for OpenSolaris is coming along nicely, but is not free of bugs yet.
As every Beta, we release this software to gain feedback and to provide a preview of our upcoming technology. When encountering problems during testing, please help us by reporting bugs through KDE's Bugzilla so developers are aware of them and can make the necessary changes. When trying this release you will encounter a number of new things, most of the new features are listed on Techbase, make sure to check out that list and give the next KDE a whirl. [Less]
Posted
14 days
ago
openSUSE 11.0 has been released (screenshots), offering KDE 3.5.9 and an excellent experience of KDE 4.0. There has been a huge collection of changes and additions in this new release. For an overview of the improvements in KDE, see the KDE Sneak
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Peeks article over at openSUSE News, which features an interview with KDE developer Stephan Binner. He talks about the challenges faced, plans for the future, and what changes you can expect in the upcoming KDE 4.1.
KDE 4.0
The openSUSE 11.0 release includes an installable Live-CD with a SUSE-polished KDE 4.0.4 desktop, while the DVD contains KDE 3.5.9 as well. While many applications such as the openSUSE updater applet (with an optional PackageKit backend) have been ported to KDE 4, not all KDE applications are ported to KDE4 yet. In these cases, KDE3 versions of applications such as Amarok, K3b, KOffice or KNetworkManager (adapted to NetworkManager 0.7) are used, which integrate pretty seamlessly. A native KDE4 NetworkManager plasmoid is in development and will become available via openSUSE Build Service repositories. There has also been a whole horde of Plasma updates and fixes put into the release.
As KDE 4.0 doesn’t include KDEPIM (Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer etc.), therefore openSUSE 11.0 includes beta versions of KDEPIM 4.1. These applications work fairly well, and will be updated to final versions via official online update as soon as possible. The online repositories contain many more KDE 4 applications, such as Dragon Player, Okteta, KSystemLog, and Yakuake. Webkitpart is optionally included which makes use of the WebKit part of Qt 4.4.
YaST Ported to Qt4
openSUSE's administration and installation tool, YaST, and SaX2 have been ported to Qt4 for this release. This allowed the YaST developers to use CCS-like Qt stylesheets for the installer, giving it a themed look:
YaST is now using Oxygen icons to give it an integrated look in KDE 4.
KDE 4.1, KDE Four Live
While KDE 4.1 did not manage to make it into openSUSE 11.0, its packages will be available via 1-click-install in the openSUSE Build Service. You can track KDE4's development by using the regularly updated KDE 4 snapshot packages. The openSUSE-based KDE Four Live CD will be based on openSUSE 11.0 in future releases. [Less]
Posted
22 days
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Improved drag-and-drop of applets, and enhanced usability using the "Panel Controller" in Plasma. Grouping of notifications in the "Notify" Plasmoid, and continued progress in the "NetworkManager" applet. Animations
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in the "Pager" applet. SuperKaramba integration into Plasma is revived. More work on theming in Amarok 2.0, with the "Current Track" and "Wikipedia" applets re-enabled. A return to work on the Raptor menu. Initial steps toward a "satellite layer" plugin for Marble, with initial support for molecular editing in Kalzium. Copy-and-paste of vocabulary entries in Parley. "Singmaster" moves functionality in Kubrick. Support for searching the database by GPS position, and "fuzzy searches" (using a user-drawn sketch) based on the Haar algorithm (from imgSeek) added to Digikam. A "start page" is added to Gwenview. More functionality added to Beagle KIOSlave. A "quick reply" function is added to Mailody. Kontact gets a plugin for KJots. An import dialog added to assist in migrating from the KDE3 to the KDE4 version of KTorrent. Full support for the Windows platform in KTorrent trunk. Optimisations in the next-generation tile system of Krita. Work on loading ODF presentation notes in KPresenter. KNewStuff2 moves to Goya for handling and displaying items. Support for AIFF and RIFF audio file formats in TagLib. Initial import of Nonogram into playground/games. libkscan replaces libksane in kdegraphics. kdelirc moves from kdeutils to playground/utils. Phonon moves from kdelibs to kdesupport, "the never-freezing new home of Phonon". Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
24 days
ago
The KDE Project today announced the eighth alpha release of KOffice 2, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0. Work continues in the same vein as before, with a strong focus on finishing and polishing our new features that will set KOffice.
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This is a work in progress, showing the changes that have been made over the last month by the KOffice developers. Most features that will be part of the final release are present now, and bug reports are welcome for the more stable components.
OpenDocument Improvements
One of the highlights of this release is the work on saving and loading Open Document Format documents, especially for the text shape, thanks to the sponsoring of Girish Ramakrishnan by the Dutch NLNet organisation. Girish has added scores of tests to check for ODF compliancy.
It is also worthy of note that now KOffice is able to load and save images in
text and presentation documents. Shapes can now be animated and associated with
events such as sounds.
Multiplatform
Importantly, for the first time, KOffice is released simultaneously for the
three main platforms: Unix/X11, Windows and Mac OSX. KOffice is the only office
suite that is available for all three platforms using a single codebase.
Early testers
While KOffice applications, generally speaking, are not ready for bugs reports,
some applications are more ready than others. The developers of KSpread, Krita, Karbon and the report component of Kexi welcome user feedback. The season is open for bug reporting! [Less]
Posted
25 days
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A wordprocessor-like ruler for repositioning and resizing the Plasma panel. Scripting support re-enabled in KRunner. More developments in the NetworkManager Plasma applet. Initial work to allow closer interaction of
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Plasma with KNotify's popups. Work on theming, Magnatune membership support, and the ClassicView in Amarok 2.0. Work on adding support for plugins to Marble. General work across KDE games, with many new application icons. Work on project management handling and Ruby support in KDevelop. Functional improvements to the Sonnet spellchecking engine. Undo/Redo support in Krone. Exploded pie charts in KChart. The start of work on notes in KPresenter. Scripting support for images in the Kexi "Reports" plugin. A KOffice Flake shape which uses Marble to display a map. A return to work on the Raptor alternative menu. Initial commits for KaffeineGL, and the next-generation tile system of Krita. The start of a vi input mode support is merged into Kate. Winning themes from the first Plasma Theme Contest added to KDE SVN. KsirK and KBreakOut move from kdereview to kdegames, ksaneplugin from kdereview to kdegraphics. Goya moves into kdereview. guidance-power-manager, written using Python (PyKDE), is added to kdereview, for later inclusion in extragear/utils. KSim, KMilo, KLaptopDaemon move to the unmaintained module of KDE SVN. KWorldClock is officially replaced by the world clock applet of Marble. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
25 days
ago
To celebrate the release of KDE 4, the KDE French contributors and the Toulibre LUG organised a two-day event on January 25th and 26th 2008 in Toulouse, France. On the 25th, Kévin Ottens made a general presentation of KDE 4, and on the 26th there was
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a day of technical conferences featuring speakers such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Alexis Ménard, Kévin Ottens, Aurélien Gâteau and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. The videos of all these talks, in French, are now available for download.
Here is the list of available videos, with their original french titles:
Présentation de KDE 4 by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (207 Mb, 58 minutes) and slides. We also have Aaron Seigo's keynote using the french subtitles, a commercial for KDE 4 and a demonstration.Contribuer à KDE, Bienvenue à tous ! by Alexis Ménard, vidéo Ogg Theora (97 Mb, 26 minutes) and slidesPrésentation de Qt by David Faure, vidéo Ogg Theora (210 Mb, 43 minutes) and slidesTour d'horizon de CMake by Laurent Montel, vidéo Ogg Theora (140 Mo, 36 minutes) and slidesSolid: intégration avec le matériel sans utiliser d'aspirine by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (302 Mb, 1h and 3 minutes) and slidesPlasma: une nouvelle approche du gestionnaire de bureau by Alexis Ménard, vidéo Ogg Theora (112 Mb, 28 minutes) and slidesLes feuilles de style de Qt by Aurélien Gâteau, vidéo Ogg Theora (201 Mb, 49 minutes) and slidesPhonon: multimédia facile pour vos applications by Kévin Ottens, vidéo Ogg Theora (157 Mb, 39 minutes) and slidesGuide de contribution à la traduction de KDE by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, vidéo Ogg Theora (87 Mb, 31 minutes) and slidesPrésentation KIO by David Faure, vidéo Ogg Theora (271 Mb, 42 minutes) and slidesDes logiciels éducatifs dans KDE by Anne-Marie Mahfouf, vidéo Ogg Theora (91 Mb, 28 minutes) and slides
Meanwhile for English speakers Aaron Seigo's talk from LinuxTag KDE 4: Desktop interfaces in a mobile Web 2.0 world is available in video form. And coming up this Sunday is Kubuntu Tutorials Day with IRC talks on Usability, Plasma with Python and more. [Less]
Posted
25 days
ago
This coming Sunday, June 16, BugSquad is hosting a BugDay to go triaging through old Amarok bugs. Come join #kde-bugs anytime to get training and help out! No prior experience is necessary, and you don't need any programming knowledge.
If
... [More]
you are a Kubuntu user, there is a nightly build called Project Neon that you can use.
Joining Bug Days is a great way to help the KDE project. The only things you need to take part are a computer running a recent KDE 4 with Amarok 2 and a KDE 3 version of Amarok 1.4.9.1, and an internet connection. You can join at any point during the day, and stay for as long or short a time as you like. If you are a KDE user and have been wondering how to contribute, then this is a great way to get started - there will be plenty of experienced Bugsquad members on hand to answer any questions you might have. To get involved, join our IRC channel anytime, #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net, where we will help you get underway. The day will begin at 0:00 UTC (other timezones) on Sunday and continue until the day is over throughout the world, although people tend to stay later! [Less]
Posted
26 days
ago
Trolltech today announced the launch of Qt Jambi 4.4 – the latest version of its application framework for Java development.
Qt Jambi is based on the recently-launched Qt 4.4, and brings its benefits to Java developers: including the
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ability to develop web and multimedia enriched applications across desktop operating systems.
Among the new features in Qt Jambi 4.4 you can find:
Integration with WebKit, the open source browser engine based on KDE's KHTML.
Integration with Phonon, a cross platform multimedia API from KDE which allows you to play and manipulate video and sound in your application.
Support for any compliant JDBC driver as a backend to Qt Jambi's SQL classes.
Widget can be used inside a graphics view, allowing transformations and manipulations to be combined with the regular application logic.
For information about more features see the Gunnar's release blog. [Less]
Posted
26 days
ago
Another review of the upcoming KDE 4.1 was published at polishlinux.org. The review features the Panel's new configuration tool, the folder viewer, Gwenview, Marble, Akonadi and others. As usual it comes along with many screenshots.
Posted
29 days
ago
KDE was very busy at LinuxTag this year. We were present with two main booths - Amarok and KDE -
and a whole bunch of talks within our own track. Additionally, Aaron Seigo gave a well-received keynote on Wednesday, painting a vibrant
vision
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of the desktop in a mobile world, and the direction KDE is heading in.
Read on for a more detailed coverage of the event.
Till Adam
brought the features of Kontact to the audience on Thursday. On Friday morning Sebastian
Kügler opened the KDE track with an introduction to KDE 4. As Sebastian Trüg could not make it
to Berlin, Aaron jumped in again and talked about the Plasma basics. He was followed by Till
Adam who presented the possibilities of Akonadi's storage concept and the future of KDE's
Personal Information Management suite.
After lunch Ellen Reitmayr talked about usability concepts in KDE and the efforts the team
undertakes to incorporate them into the desktop and the applications. Franz Keferboeck gave
an overview of KOffice's apps and introduced the audience to the new features that will come
with KOffice 2. The final applause for the day went to Lydia Pintscher and Harald Sitter for
their talk on KDE multimedia.
On Saturday KDE was the topic in two more talks: Lydia Pintscher and Sven Krohlas focused on the
new features of Amarok 2, while Holger Schröder gave a presentation on the latest development of KDE
on Windows.
Booths
Both main
booths were well manned and even better visited. The interested crowd asked zillions of
questions and was very eager to see the latest features, goodies and eyecandy of KDE 4.1 which
we showed on all computers at the booth, on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Other visitors came by to
share ideas or suggestions, and altogether they gave wonderful feedback.
The booth
staff talked their heads off and tried to answer all questions, to satisfy everyone's curiosity
and sometimes even find a solution to the users' problems that popped up once in a while. The
booth staff were also supported most of the time by some of the developers who did a great job
dealing with bug reports right at the booth.
At the booths, members of the community met some of them for the first time. We welcomed new
faces to the family and formed new and inspiring working relationships with people from the
KDE community and beyond.
Besides these main booths, almost all distributions showed off KDE 3 and KDE 4 desktops, most
notably openSUSE, Kubuntu and also Fedora. In addition the German Federal Office for
Information Security displayed computers running Kontact on Windows as well as on Mac OS X.
Many thanks to all who helped and supported us and made this LinuxTag possible. [Less]
Posted
29 days
ago
This Sunday (8th June), the KDE Bugsquad will host a KDE PIM Krush day. The aim of the day will be to find and document as many of the bugs in the PIM applications (including KMail, Kontact, Akregator and many more) of the upcoming KDE 4.1 release as
... [More]
possible. The day will begin at 0:00 UTC on Sunday and continue until the day is over throughout the world. Krush Days are an excellent opportunity for KDE users keen to make their first contribution to the KDE project. You don't need to set aside a huge amount of time - as little as ten minutes will be enough to do some testing - nor do you need to have any programming experience. All you need is a recent version of KDE. KDE 4.1 Beta 1 will do, or a newer version from SVN. If you don't want to install KDE 4.1 on your system, then the Virtual Machine Image kde4daily is ideal. Just come along to #kde-bugs where the Bugsquad will help you get started. More information can be found on the Krush Day Techbase page. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
The KDE Community has today made available the fifth update to KDE 4.0. Although the changelog is not particularly long, the release should be worthwhile to upgrade to. KWin (according to some pronounced "quinn" instead of Kay-Win) has gotten some
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clipping fixes, also some dim and fade effects work on cards that can only do compositing via XRender. Juk, the lightweight music player has received some fixes regarding keyboard shortcuts, playback and cover art. Kopete, the instant messenger in 4.0.5 has some crashes fixed. The changelog has the details (although probably not all bugfixes have been recorded here). Overall, we expect to make the users' experience with this release a bit nicer. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
The IT Service Center Berlin has announced the development of a desktop system for the public services in Germany's capital (Google Translate to English). This is yet another public body making the switch to the Free Desktop system. The announcement
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talks about the good integration of KDE with their current infrastructure, which is partly based on Microsoft's software. According to the ITDZ's press release, the integration phase has successfully finished and the KDE-based client for Berlin's administration is now ready for prime time.
At LinuxTag, a big German Free Software conference and fair, the "Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik", Germany's national information security group, announced their successful porting of KDE's Email and Groupware client to the three major platforms, Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Finally, the "Auswärtiges Amt", responsible for German embassies in more than 200 countries also showed their KDE based desktop client at LinuxTag, which has been deployed to their employees already. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for Q3 and Q4 2007, covering July to September, and October to December 2007. This document includes reports of the board and the working groups about the KDE e.V. activities of the last two quarters of
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2007, as well as event summaries and future plans. All long term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Akademy 2008 is now open for registration. Akademy is KDE's World Summit, a week long event for all KDE contributors, industry partners and users. The week starts with a two day conference, and is set to include a tutorial day and a embedded and
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mobile day. As always, attendance to Akademy is free of charge, but you must register. Registration should be in by the 15th of June if you want the Akademy Team to book your accommodation for you. See you in Belgium! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Red Hat Magazine has a review of KDE 4 on the new Fedora 9. *** Linux Journal takes a look at Marble which recently gained OpenStreetMap support. *** The Fanatic Attack blog features an article on exceptional Linux programs for kids covering a good
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number of our own KDE Education apps. *** Another project's loss means we gained one extra summer of code project implementing the 3D part of the PDF specification for Okular. *** The Register takes a look at 4.1 Beta 1. *** SoftVision Blog reviews KDE 4 distros, the all new Kubuntu and Fedora releases plus an older openSUSE. *** Akonadi gained a beautiful new logo, thanks to Nuno and his excellent Oxygen team.
New Akonadi logo by Nuno and Thomas [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Earlier this month KDE Italia attended Open Mind 2008. A Free Software event organised by Roberto Dentice in San Giorgio near Naples. There were KDE talks and KDE demonstrations. Read on for the report.
Giovanni's KDE presentation in the
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library
At the three day event, a lot of school children with their teachers were involved to participate in the educational labs, for the talks and the workshops. We tried to show them why it is a good reason to replace Microsoft Windows on their computers to host GNU/Linux Free Software on their disks, they can learn more and be really free using KDE.
Daniele showing how Amarok rocks
We had about 1500 attendees. Me and Daniele Costarella, as KDE Italia, demonstrated KDE and its applications to the school children. Especially the ones that let you move to GNU/Linux very simply, without regret for Windows. I made a general presentation of KDE and then during the 3 days we had our KDE workshops on K3b, Amarok, Digikam, Konqueror, Dolphin, Kopete and KOffice. Daniele explained about KDE very well and very precisely which let me discover some nice Digikam and Amarok features I did not know. To get the students full attention I had to use some tricks with Konqueror. When I wrote "bluetooth:/" in the Konqueror address bar, we saw that all the audience were more involved when more than 30 icons appeared in the virtual Bluetooth folder. They were interested when I said, "now we can connect to this phone and spy in it...". Of course, I spied in my Bluetooth phone showing them a Konqui photo.
Qt 4 in action on Giovanni's Laptop
The Open Mind organiser told us that at the end of the event people were very crazy about what we had shown and a lot of people wanted a GNU/Linux distribution with KDE. A boy asked me about the KDE distribution :) so I explained him that KDE is a Desktop Environment not a distribution itself. We burned some Kubuntu 8.04 CDs and told people that they can also download it from the Internet in legal way, copy it and redistribute it in the same legal way we did.
Our KDE Italia booth
Someone asked me and Daniele about "programming Linux" and "where is the source code?" so, at out booth, we showed KDE and explained them about KDE and Qt programming. They had a lot of questions, often very specific questions, so I understood that they were really interested and then I showed KDevelop in action. I created on the fly the classic Qt 4 simple text editor application and the very few line of code to have a browser with Qt 4.4 WebKit. I showed them the rich Qt documentation. I spoke all day but at the end everyone was satisfied, so I hope to see some new young Italian developer in the KDE team in the near future.
We also socialised with the other speakers, had beers and pizza. See you on the next Free Software event,
Giovanni Venturi [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
The KDE Project is happy to set the first beta of KDE 4.1, codenamed Caramel, free today. KDE 4.1 is intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users and we therefore respectfully request you to get testing Beta 1. Beta 1 is not ready for
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production use but is in wide use by KDE developers and is suitable for testing by Linux enthusiasts and KDE fans.
Highlights of 4.1 are a much more mature Plasma desktop shell that returns much of the configurability that was missing in KDE 4.0, many more applets and look and feel improvements, the return of Kontact and the rest of the KDE PIM applications, and many improvements and newly ported applications. The feature set is now frozen, so the developers look forward to using June and July to metamorphosing your bug reports into rock solid code, completing documentation and translating everything into your language. A series of Bug Days where users can contribute quality assurance to the release will continue towards 4.1's final release on the 29th of July, so watch the Dot for details.
For more details, see the release announcement and info page or if you are at LinuxTag, see KDE 4.1 being presented in Berlin this Friday. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
With the release of 4.1 on the horizon, and initiatives such as Krush days, recent call for help with documentation, and the perennial need for localisation it is very useful for end users to be able to easily get their hands on up-to-date builds of
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KDE4, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. As was the case with the run up to KDE4.0, KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.
For the uninitiated, KDE4Daily aims to accomplish this goal using Qemu virtualisation technology (although with KDE4Daily 4.0, people kindly stepped up to provide a VirtualBox/ VMWare equivalent). A self-contained Qemu image with a Kubuntu 8.04 base and a comprehensive set of a self-compiled KDE4 modules (all at r810996, initially) is provided, along with an updater system inside the VM itself. The updater downloads and installs binary updates provided by me to the full set of modules; these tend to be roughly 20-50MB each (although they will occasionally be larger), take a few minutes to apply, and will hopefully be pushed out daily - hence the name ;). "Bridge" updates will hopefully condense a week or so's worth of updates into one more compact version, so you can update at your own pace without being hit with a massive bandwidth bill :)
Because Qemu is distro-agnostic, you do not need to worry about distros or libraries or dependencies or suchlike; in fact, you can even test out KDE 4 while running Windows! The downside is that eye-candy such as KWin's new Composite-based effects will not be testable as Qemu does not support hardware graphics acceleration, and everything will generally feel a lot more sluggish than is the case with a native install.
KDE4Daily comes with its own backtrace-generation system so hopefully devs can be assured of having useful backtraces in any crash bugs you file, courtesy of DrKonqui. Do note that this system is currently rather slow and resource-intensive, although there are plans to improve it during the run of KDE4Daily 4.1. If you do somehow manage to crash a KDE app, please be patient while the valuable backtrace is created!
An extensive FAQ is provided at the KDE4Daily homepage, above; please feel free to ask any further questions in the Dot comments section. Also, note that KDE4Daily has not yet had any real testers apart from myself, so please be prepared for "teething trouble" such as botched upgrades and bandwidth issues! Enjoy, and remember that the more people test, the better KDE 4.1 will be. It's not all work, though; if you just want to try out recent deliciousness such as the KRunner and Marble, then that's fine, too! [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on form factor considerations and various applets in Plasma, with added functionality in the NetworkManager Plasmoid. Work and interface fixes, and support for the CMake cache in KDevelop. Spellchecking in
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Parley. Work on loading and saving games in Palapeli. Integration of GetHotNewStuff into KGoldRunner. An "Update Manager" for Kst. Xesam API makes NEPOMUK-related searching more available in KDE applications. Initial implementation of open/read/write/seek/close in the experimental KIO-GIO bridge. Tweaks to tab interactions in Konsole and Konversation. An implementation of a SQLite-based storage for KMail indices. Akonadi calendar resources can now be configured using a KControl module, and an initial version of an Akonadi RSS resource. Some new icons in Digikam and KTorrent. Work on the media player and BitFinder plugins for KTorrent. Work on font handling details in KOffice, with extended work on charting (including scripting support) in the Kexi report generator. KAppTemplate and various Plasma applets move to kdereview, krossjava moves to kdebindings. Initial import of KidDraw and kde4powersave into KDE SVN. KDE 4.0.4 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
Two weeks ago, the third edition of the Libre Graphics Meeting was held in at the Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland. Sponsored by KDE e.V., Boudewijn Rempt, Cyrille Berger and Emanuele Tamponi from the Krita project and Gilles
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Caullier from the Digikam project attended this yearly conference on free graphics software.
Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 Group Photo (photo by Alexandre Prokoudine)
The Libre Graphics Meeting brings together developers of free graphics software in the widest sense of the word as well as the users: artists, photographers, designers and publishers. Whether you are interested in fonts, photography, panoramas, digital art, mathematics, colour theory, vector libraries, applications, file formats, interoperability, user interaction, typesetting, text layouting, 3D modeling or animation, or all of those, the Libre Graphics Meeting is the meeting to attend. This year's program had a particularly good mix of introductory and in-depth presentations. No topic was left unexplored, and the great thing is: everyone was talking to everyone and came home with new ideas, new initiatives for cross-project cooperation and integration.
The LGM is one conference that proves that free software is capable of innovation: one of the highlights certainly was Emanuele Tamponi's presentation on colour mixing as demonstrated in Krita. While unfortunately not taped, his presentation of the new alpha-sigma colour space for realistic mixing of colours grabbed the interest of people from many other projects. Likewise, Pablo d'Angelo demonstrated the enfuse feature in his panorama stitching application Hugin: the ability to adjust the lighting of a panorama while blending, which is another innovation proprietary applications are only now copying. Raph Levien's Spiro curve mathematics was demonstrated in Fontforge and Inkscape: drawing beautiful curves the easy way. During the OpenICC BOF session, Cyrille Berger presented his work on OpenCTL, the free software implementation of the CTL pixel manipulation language. OpenCTL is important for making it possible to paint on images that use HDR color models.
Boudewijn Rempt presented an overview of natural media simulation: the academic field, the proprietary offerings and the free software efforts. Natural media simulation, going beyond programmable brushes and effects, could bring serendipity back into digital art.
With Gilles Caullier presenting Digikam for the first time at LGM, the scene was set for a meeting of many projects involved in the digital photography world: DCRaw's Dave Coffin was present, as was UFRaw's Udi Fuchs, and Raw Studio's Anders, Anders and Anders and relative newcomer Phatch.
Simultaneously with the Text Layout Summit for which Harfbuzz developer Behdad Esfahbod was present, the Scribus team presented the latest developments. Last year's LGM organizer Louis Desjardins from Montreal took us through the entire process of creating a document to output as a PDF. Here again, free software is gaining features beyond what proprietary applications offer, such as precise support for language rules.
Most talks were taped by Kaveh Bazargan, whose successful Kerala-based publishing business runs entirely on free software. Still, his use of a Mac and OS X for the recording served to show the need for good quality free video recording and editing applications.
Next year's edition might well be in Singapore, but no matter where LGM will be, it is the most important event for everyone involved in free graphics software. Everyone working on a graphics application or library, from Qt to Kolourpaint, from Krita to KPhotoAlbum, from Digikam to Karbon, from Quasar to Okular, should consider attending! [Less]
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about 1 month
ago
In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Rating support, with a NEPOMUK backend in Gwenview. KStars gets a conjunctions predictor module. Basic XSLT support and a HTML export GUI in Parley. Work on clouds view integration in Marble. Keyboard navigation
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support in KNetWalk. The start of a new dock window layout in Kooka. Work on tabbed interface user interaction in Dolphin. A paste text snippets applet in Plasma. charselectapplet is deleted, replaced by a Plasma-based equivalent. Welcome/info screen stylings extended from the KDE desktop into KDE-PIM applications and KInfoCenter. Various work, including improvements to the collection and On Screen Display in Amarok 2. Various small features in KTorrent. Initial work on a Krita module for "WaterStudio". KBlocks moves from kdereview to kdegames. Akonadi server and shared components move to kdesupport. "WaterFlow", a library and program to create computational flow chart-based diagrams is imported into KDE SVN. KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 and KOffice 1.9.95.4 (KOffice 2 Alpha 7) are tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here. [Less]
Posted
about 1 month
ago
KDE is attending this year's LinuxTag in Berlin with a wide selection of talks. Starting with Aaron Seigo's lecture about KDE in the mobile world and a KDE-related series of presentations on Friday. There are also some stalls where you can meet
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people from the KDE community.
Exhibition:
KDE: hall 7.2a, stand 125
Amarok and Kubuntu: hall 7.2b, stand 124
openSUSE: hall 7.2b, stand 210
Trolltech hall 7.2b, stand 207
Talks:
Wednesday
KDE 4: Desktop interfaces in a mobile Web 2.0 world
13:30 - 15:00
Aaron Seigo (English)
Thursday
Kontact: Best for both worlds
15:00 - 16:00
Till Adam (German)
Friday
Beautiful Technology - What's new in KDE4?
10:00 - 11:00
Sebastian Kugler (English)
Nepomuk - Der Semantische Desktop mit KDE 4
11:00 - 12:00
Sebastian Trueg (German)
Personal Information Management with Akonadi
12:00 - 13:00
Till Adam (English)
It's not just testing - Usability in KDE
12:00 - 13:00
Ellen Reitmayr (German)
KOffice 2 - der Weg aus dem Schattendasein
16:00 - 17:00
Franz Keferböck (German)
KDE Multimedia
17:00 - 18:00
Lydia Pintscher, Harald Sitter (German)
Saturday
Amarok: Next Generation Audio Player
15:00 - 16:00
Sven Krohlas, Lydia Pintscher
(German)
and
KDE 4.0 on openSUSE
15:00 - 16:00
Stephan Binner, Will Stephenson (German) [Less]
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about 1 month
ago
It has been a year since launching our KDE.org.pl site, which has an aspiration to be a real "gate to the world of KDE" in Poland. During the last months, our site received 220 pages and articles, most of them are translations of news, articles and
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interviews from dot.kde.org and kde.org. We have got 480 photos, artworks and screenshots. In order to reach more people intrested in KDE, our goal is to simplify the language and keep the quality.
We have accompanied Polish KDE users by providing translations of The Road to KDE 4, and now we're keeping on with news on KDE 4. The central items on the agenda are topics like Amarok, KOffice, Education, Akademy or interviews with KDE developers.
History and Contributors
The work, based on the flexible Mediawiki technology, were started a long time before the launch - in early 2007. In February, we have started translations and categorising of the knowledge, sometimes exceeding the contents of English pages.
Over the past months, more people have been joining the Polish KDE Team. Words of appreciation for hard and thorough job especially goes to those who have belonged to the team from the beginning: Paweł Szubert (pbm, unquestioned record in number of translations), Bartosz Kozłowski (joker) and Łukasz Strzępek. Content and language-related corrections are maintained by Jarosław Staniek, who has also customised the KDE Oxygen Mediawiki style for the web site.
As a part of the evolution of the web site, forum.kde.org.pl launched in July 2007 in cooperation with JakiLinux.org (polishlinux.org) portal, and blog.kde.org.pl in November 2007. The latter has been designed in similar style to kdedevelopers.org blog, thanks to Bartosz Kozłowski (joker). Hosting for the kde.org.pl web site and our blog is provided by OpenOffice Software, LLC. [Less]
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about 1 month
ago
Bug Day 4 will take place on Sunday 18th May from 0:00 UTC - 23:59 UTC. (That's a start time of 02:00 CEST, or 17:00 PDT Saturday). For this Bug Day, we will be sorting and testing bugs reported against Konqueror.
Bug Days are hosted by the
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KDE Bugsquad approximately once every two weeks. Their purpose is to check back through the large numbers of bugs stored in the KDE Bug Tracking System and investigate how to reproduce them. This means that when developers come to the bug reports to fix them, all the information they need is available on the report and they don't have to spend huge amounts of their time investigating the bugs - they can just focus on fixing them. During each Bug Day, we will focus on one area of KDE in particular. For this Bug Day, we will be focusing on general bugs in Konqueror. More information can be found on the Bug Day 4 Techbase Page.
Joining Bug Days is a great way to help the KDE project. The only things you need to take part are a computer running KDE 4 and an internet connection. No programming skills or previous contributions to KDE are necessary. You can join at any point during the day, and stay for as long or short a time as you like. If you are a KDE user hoping to contribute, then this is a great way to get started - there will be plenty of experienced Bugsquad members on hand to answer any questions you might have. To get involved, join our IRC channel, #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net, where we will help you get underway. [Less]
