The program for the first two days at the Camp KDE meeting in Jamaica provided the attendants with a series of talks. In time, these will be available in video from but for now we have these short summaries of the talks. Read on for details.

Saturday

Wade Olsen introduced us to the conference, outlining the reasons for this meeting. He spoke about the growth of the community, the large travel costs for contributors outside Europe to Akademy and the success of the Release Party at Google's place. Then Winston Wellington, the owner of Travellers Beach Resort and founder of the Negril Education Environmental Trust told us how results of our work are affecting this place. This organisation is dedicated to educating the Jamaican people by bringing cheap computers and books to them. This year alone they opened several libraries with thousands of books and over fourty computers. As Wade concludes, it is often easy to forget what happens with the software we develop. We worry about text drawing, widgets and memory usage, here the results are applied and used to help improve the life of people.

Adriaan de Groot, wearing a kurta, introduced us to a talk by Pradeepto about diversity in KDE. In the absence of Pradeepto, Ade and Till Adam replaced him. Moving through pictures of KDE PIM meetings Till showed changes in the KDE demographics from young, white male European students volunteering to work on KDE to a growing diversity of people from all over the world. This Jamaican meeting, the FOSS.in meeting and the upcoming Free Software event in Nigeria are clear signs of the ongoing changes. Ade and Till detail the issues in our communication with people in other cultures and provide examples of the importance of their contributions. The presentation ends with an acknowledgement of the huge amount of effort and work Pradeepto has put into building a KDE community in Asia. He has taught us how we were effectively chasing away people from any other demographic than our own and how we can do better.

A very interesting product which came from the FOSS.in meeting is The KDE Handbook. This little book covers many aspects of KDE. From who we are and what we do to details of our development infrastructure, the way we work, release schedules, the technology we developed and the various KDE application suites. The marketing people showed interest in this, and will most likely try to work with the Indian community on keeping this handbook up-to-date.

Till Adam then gave a presentation about what is happening in PIM country. The work going on on Akonadi and the KDE PIM applications is very interesting. Akonadi is on its way to becoming a FreeDesktop.org project, and its libraries are used by more and more applications. Work on the applications like Akregator and KOrganizer is progressing very well and there was some good news. The Kolab Konsortium is starting work on a prototype for the next generation of the KDE/Kontact Kolab client, which will be based on Akonadi. KDAB and Intevation have secured funding for this effort that will allow the team to progress Akonadi and KDEPIM overall in close collaboration with the wider KDE community throughout 2009.

Next we listened to Sebastian Kügler talking about Bringing the Free Desktop Software to the Mobile World. A world with leaner hardware, smaller screens and different input tools. The work KDE is doing in the area of resolution independence, flexible and scalable layouts and new widgets is pushing ahead. There are many boundaries to cross, and Sebas details several of them, but also mentions how we are tackling these issues one by one. In many cases we do so in novel ways, bringing the desktop closer to the mobile space. The tight integration of power and network management introduced in KDE 4.2 is a good example of solutions important for mobile devices. Sebas discusses several things developers should keep in mind when writing applications targeting a variety of devices.

KDE-on-Windows was introduced and demonstrated by Hölger Schröder. He showed Amarok, Kate, Konqueror and various other applications working pretty well. The installer is easy to use and the integration in Windows is reasonably good. Even plasma works, and the biggest issue right now is stability. The team is looking for people willing to test and send a few patches to get the KDE-on-Windows effort to the next level.

The last talk of Saturday was by Bill Hoffman from Kitware, about CMake and other building, packaging and testing tools. He introduced his company and the work they are doing. He explained how the roots of Kitware's quality software process lie in the 6-sigma efforts of General Electric. The goal of the process is to make errors more visible so they can be fixed and thus improve the quality of software. They have also developed and supported a powerful visualisation toolkit (VTK), a segmentation and registration toolkit (ITK), as well as the CMake family of build, test and package tools which are available to anyone under the BSD license. They are under contract by both governmental agencies and companies for consultancy of their products. Bill detailed the various products Kitware has and what they do. In KDE we currently use CMake and to a lesser extent CTest. Bill also pointed us to several other interesting and open technologies we could have a look at.

In later conversations Bill, who has been active in FOSS for over 18 years, told us how well the Free Software business model has worked out for Kitware. Initially the goal of the company was to provide support for VTK and ITK and build proprietary vertical stacks upon them. But it turned out the development of these free libraries brought in more business than the proprietary solutions have, and now almost all of their products are available under the BSD. In the past year, after many years of indirect support as parts of other efforts, the CMake project has begun to generate direct consulting income. This ability to generate consulting income can be directly linked to the adoption of CMake as a build tool by KDE. In one example, a fortune 500 company has begun the process of porting a large amount of internal software to CMake with Kitware as a partner in the effort. The fortune 500 company cited the use of CMake by KDE as one of main reasons for their discovery of CMake and Kitware.

Thanks to Casey Link for the photos!

In preparation for hopefully the final beta version of KOffice 2.0, the bug squad will host a Bug Krush Day next Sunday Jan 25th from approximately 10 am CET. Everybody who has an interest in making KOffice 2.0 usable should try to be present. Especially note that you do not have to have any programming experience to take part of this Krush. The purpose of the exercise is to test the applications and to try to find as many bugs as possible. You can find all relevant information about the day on the Techbase page.

The bug day will be coordinated in the #kde-bugs channel on freenode IRC. There will be present both old timers from the Bug Squad to help out beginners and give tutorials in testing and also KOffice developers that will help with testing particular features and even fix bugs in real time.

This bug day is an important event, because the result will determine which parts of KOffice that will be part of the final release.

Some distributions have taken the trouble to provide binaries of a more up to date KOffice version than the last 2.0 beta 5. This means that some of the already reported bugs of 2.0 beta 5 are already fixed, among them a very irritating bug in KWord that makes it crash when the user just types a few letters. The detail of the binary packages can be read on the techbase page linked above.

So please take the time on Sunday and test one or more of your favourite KOffice applications!

KBasic is a new programming language similar to Visual Basic. It combines the best features of those tools and comes with built-in backward support for those tools as it is 100% syntax compatible to VB and QBasic. It is written with Qt making it entirely cross platform. The Full Version Professional Edition is available to download for KDE now. It follows the old Qt licencing of being GPL licenced for Free Software and commercially sold for proprietary software.

KBasic is an open source project backed by years of continual development. Versions are available for KDE, Windows and Mac. It allows developers with an installed base of VB applications to start developing for a mixed Windows, Mac OS X and Linux environment. It is made up of a compiler, an interpreter and an integrated development environment. It is about 15 MB source codes in C++ and about 1000 source code files.

People around the world join KBasic - inspired by the idea to make software available for everybody: a programming language that is easy to use, and a development platform that is stable, reliable and available at a low price.

We communicate by different means, most of them on the Internet. The KBasic community rests on dedicated volunteers to further improve our programming language and development platform in a number of different ways. Whatever your skills, there are lots of places to start contributing.

The project is under active development and has a vibrant community. Take a look at ways to contribute.

KBasic supports calling functions of C/C++ library files, enabling you to mix C/C++ and BASIC code. KBasic uses SQLite as an embedded database engine, which creates database files locally on your machine without the need of a database server. Libraries are availalble for data/time, i18n, RTF, web browser.

KBasic Software is a small software company with headquarters in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. KBasic Professional is its flagship product, the multi-platform BASIC programming language and environment.

Linux Format magazine has unveiled its annual Reader Awards (PDF) for 2008 and KDE won a 'landslide' victory in the category of Free Software Project of the year in recognition of the 'incredible' work done with KDE 4. Amarok, Qt, Konqueror and the KDE-based Asus Eee PC were also recognised in the awards. Read on for more details of the KDE related successes.

As noted in the Linux Format article, it takes a 'lot of hard work, some serious code fu and above all a commitment to the free software ideals' to succeed in the Reader Awards. The winners are chosen in an open process in which readers both determine the shortlist through nominations and the ultimate winners. KDE can be proud to be named the best Free Software Project - a wide category encompassing any project producing free software, including the likes of Compiz (runners up in this category) and giants of free software such as the Mozilla Foundation and Apache projects.

The hard work and successes of the Amarok and Konqueror teams were also recognised as they each came second in their respective software categories - notably Amarok was named the second placed desktop application overall, beaten only by Firefox. The Asus Eee PC which uses a custom Xandros desktop with KDE technologies won the accolade for best geek gadget of the year, beating the iPhone into second place. Trolltech (now Qt Software) was awarded second place in the embedded Linux category for Qt, rounding off a strong showing in this year's awards for KDE and related projects.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: More parts of the Oxygen-based "Air" visual identity enters KDE SVN in time for the KDE 4.2 release, including KDM background images. Better integration of the new "NetworkManager" Plasma applet with KWallet. Initial work on a new "Welcome" Plasmoid. Support for more units added to the "Conversion" runner in Plasma, including "pressure", "currency", and "energy". Support for identi.ca (and laconi.ca) added to the "Twitter" Plasma data engine. Much work on choqoK, a standalone KDE Twitter application. Support for using imageshack.us as the backend for the "Pastebin" Plasma applet. More work on a "VideoPlayer" Plasmoid (based on Phonon). The VLC backend for Phonon is imported into KDE SVN. New LilyPond indenter script and RPM Specification syntax highlighting files in Kate. Lots of long-awaited new features in KRuler. Start of a new user interface in Rocs. General improvements to visual rendering of .odt documents in Okular. Lots of fixes in KPilot and printing in KOrganizer. Needed improvements in the LaTeX export feature of KSpread. Various work on Akonadi and Amarok 2, including an early "Bookmark" applet and changes to the way the Plasma canvas is presented in the application. An new equivalent to the old "dcopstart" command. Support for localized backends in KPackageKit, with the ability to configure the application from the system tray icon. A registry patch for registering KDE system settings modules as Control Panel elements for KDE-on-Windows. Updated browser user agents representing modern browsers in Konqueror. A major refactoring to convert all backends (VNC, RDP, NX, test) to plugins in KRDC. Initial release of "Magazynier", a KSokoban remake for KDE 4. Import of a version of Konqueror with thumbnailing support. Initial import of a "Solid Actions" KControl module (to replace the "Media Devices" KCM from KDE 3), and telepathy-accountmanager-kwallet. KFormula is removed from kdelibs, in search of better maintainership and to avoid code duplication with KOffice. Amarok 2.0.1, KOffice Beta 5 (1.9.98.5), Eigen 2.0 Beta 5, KDE 4.1.4, and KDE 4.2 Release Candidate 1 are tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.

In a warm Jamaica around thirty KDE developers have gathered for the first Camp KDE. The following article is an impression of the first days of this event, a short summary of what is going on here. Read on for the full report!

In a warm Jamaica some thirty KDE developers have gathered for the first Camp KDE. The healthy growth of the KDE community created the need for a combined North/South American meeting. The release event showed it is possible. It has been a year since the KDE 4.0 release event by San Fransisco, and we see many of the faces we saw back then at Google headquarters.

Last year has been an exciting journey for the KDE community. The 4.0 release was made to some joy and some criticism. But the release increased activity and resulted in a fast growing number of contributors and code commits. Thus the 4.1 released around Akademy brought many improvements. Now it is the upcoming release which aims for the general public. And again the American community event is in the sweet spot, we will be releasing the KDE 4.2 software suite a couple of days after we leave the golden island of Jamaica. Of course this meeting is not only about the 4.2 release, far from it. It is about continuing what we started last year. We will continue to grow and create great software. And have fun while doing it.

The location for this event is amazing. Most of us have traveled a long way, and arriving in Jamaica after such a journey is very rewarding. It is a beautiful country and even late at night, it is warm and we can sit outside. Many arrived rather late, and met the others at the beach. Many went for a swim and there was a KDE Plasma meeting held in the Caribbean sea - the water is lovely.

As usual at KDE events there is a large variety of developers. There are PIM people, Edu developers, Plasma developers. We have them in every colour and taste. There are some Pardus developers looking for bonding with the KDE community. Of course, besides enjoying each others company, food and the weather, work is in progress already. There is wireless and power everywhere, even at the beach. As is often the case the heavy network usage proved too much for the network, but after persistent efforts of the organisers we got connected again. After being introduced to several kinds of fruit we never knew existed by a great Jamaican breakfast we started to move to the conference room.

Wade introduced us to the conference, outlining the reasons for this meeting. Then Winston Wellington, the owner of Travellers Beach Resort and founder of the Negril Education Environmental Trust told us how results of our work are affecting this place. This organisation is dedicated to educating the Jamaican people by bringing cheap computers and books to them. This year alone they opened several libraries with thousands of books and over fourty computers. As Wade concludes, it is often easy to forget what happens with the software we develop. We worry about text drawing, widgets and memory usage - here the results are applied and used to help improve the life of people. After Wade's introduction several developers gave a talk. Those will be covered in a separate article available in the coming days.

When the last talk was over a big group of contributors went to town under supervision of our "security team" (Roger Pixley and Dmitri Dawkins). After a visit to the supermarket for drinks we had a portion of the famous Jamaican Jerk Chicken alongside the road. Eating chicken, sitting on benches between the Caribbean sea on one side and the road with a reggae party going on on the other side. That is how life is around here.

Returning at the hotel, one group went to the beach and sat on the benches just before the hotel (2 metres from the sea). Accompanied by various kinds of Jamaican rum, juice, good company and a warm sea, the evening was great.

A second group went out for pizza but was less lucky. A local pizza place had a hard time serving the whole group. So it took a while to get food, but in the end they joined the others on the beach with their belly full.

Sunday again offered talks about various topics. During and between talks developers went downstairs to the beach for a swim and we also had a great lunch.

While this article is being finished your author is looking out over the beach, watching the community enjoy the waves and have a good time. This must be one of the most enjoyable KDE meetings ever... You can count on more articles, blogs, inspiration and of course code resulting from this event!

Moving towards the 2.0 release with almost monthly beta releases, the KOffice team has once more honoured its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the time is right for a release candidate. So today we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across the board. Incremental as it is, this beta is an important step towards a final release. So here it is: full announcement and changelog.

Highlights of the 2.0 beta 5 Release

The developers have been working very hard fixing bugs and removing incompatibilities and other misfeatures. This can be seen in the rather large list of changes. Here are some of the highlights of this release:

Significant Progress with OpenDocument Saving and Loading

Much of the work on this beta has been concentrated in making loading and saving OpenDocument files more complete. A lot of effort has been put into making KOffice interoperable with OpenOffice.org, since that is the most important OpenDocument editor today.

All Reported Crash Bugs in KWord Fixed

KWord has received extra attention that removed all known crash bugs. We want to emphasize that at this point it is extremely important for users to test all components of KOffice and report all bugs, especially crash bugs.

Together with the Bugsquad team, a Krush day is going to be organised on Sunday 25th January 2009, to help find new bugs before the final release.

Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement,

The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework.

This exciting change, made with consultation of the KDE Free Qt Foundation, should encourage KDE and Qt use among commercial and proprietary developers and makes the philosophy of "Qt Everywhere" complete.

Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President of Devices at Nokia expands,

"By opening Qt’s licensing model and encouraging more contributions, Qt users will have more of a stake in the development of Qt, which will in turn encourage wider adoption."

The change in licensing for Qt is happening under the mantra "Qt Everywhere" and is a step to remove any and all possible blocking objections for not using Qt. Nokia explains further,

Qt will be available under the LGPL version 2.1 with the upcoming Qt 4.5 release. Qt will also continue to be licensed under commercial license terms, as well as the GPL, version 3.0.

Nokia will also be opening up the development of Qt. A clear path for the extension of external contributions is currently being built, including publicly available source code repositories and access to the same level of support, independent of the license.

The simple fact behind this is that Nokia is less reliant on the income from Qt licensing than Trolltech (now Qt Software) was, and this has given Qt Software more room to approach the market with more permissive licensing strategies in order to increase adoption of the Qt toolkit. This is part of the 10x growth target announced at last year's Akademy to achieve ten times as many developers and ten times as many free software community users. Or as KDE and Qt developer Thiago Maciera put it "we want KDE to be ten times as big".

While kdelibs has always been available under the LGPL, this marks the first time that both Qt and kdelibs will both be available under the LGPL. This will help make the licensing of KDE's libraries more permissive, flexible and coherent. KDE's licensing is summarised on TechBase, and can be described as "LGPL or equivalent for libraries, GPL otherwise".

Meanwhile, Nokia reiterates their commitment to a commercially viable and, technology-wise, best-of-breed toolkit. In fact, the performance and functionality improvements that can be seen in the upcoming Qt 4.5 release are impressive. Running KDE 4.2 with Qt 4.5 is already being tested by several engineers inside Qt software, which has resulted in a number of bug fixes in both KDE and Qt. Independent of the licensing changes, the KDE release team plans to update the version of Qt in KDE's development tree (qt-copy) shortly to snapshots of Qt 4.5 which is due to be released in March.

All-in-all today's news means tremendous things for Free and Open Source software. The possibility of extending the reach of all of our work is exciting in and of itself, and this announcement could lead to a veritable explosion of Qt and KDE adoption.

The KDE community has made available two new releases of the KDE desktop and applications today. KDE 4.1.4 is the latest update for the KDE 4.1 series. It contains many bugfixes, mainly in the e-mail and PIM suite Kontact and the document viewer Okular. KDE 4.2 RC is the release candidate of KDE 4.2, also bringing new features and thousands of bug fixes to the KDE desktop and applications. KDE 4.1.4 is the last planned update to the KDE 4.1 series and stabilises the 4.1 platform further. It is a recommended update for everyone running KDE 4.1.3 or earlier.

KDE 4.2.0 will be released on January 27th and is considered a significant improvement over the KDE 4.1 series. The beta announcements have all the details. Enjoy our releases, and don't have your head explode when choosing which version to upgrade to.

A little bit in late to release this article, but important to let know KDE community about our involvement to spread KDE to Italian people. Last October, three members of KDE Italia gave talks in three different Italian cities. Daniele Costarella in Salerno, Salvatore Brigaglia in Sassari and Diego Rondini in Castelfranco Veneto (TV).

University of Salerno, Italy

The Linux Day begins with a day in advance here in Salerno. Despite the inevitable unforeseen, the HCSSLug's boys managed to organise a beautiful Linux Day. A large student participation, some of whom are new to the "strange" world of Free Software, ensured the success of the event. After a morning passed together with the very pleasant organisers to work on the final preparations, in front of the Neapolis TV troupe, an informative show broadcast by the national TV, the conference about Free Software begins. The first on stage is Carmine De Rosa. I sit and assist with his introduction to Free Software. The concept of Freedom is emphasized also during the following presentations, the first one about FOSS projects and second about the distribution (what they are and how they born). The discussions devoted to Linux and its history make room for another topic that in recent years has made itself heard, "virtualisation" and in particular the security aspect that follow. At this point we have given to those present a 10 minutes break. But, 10 min are not been enough to answer all the questions they asked: "How do I install a Linux distribution?", "Where can I ask support?" and similar questions. We were happy to provide the answer. After the break it is my turn. With the slides that I prepared, I illustrated an example of a desktop environment, KDE as example :P, focusing on the pillars and all that makes KDE 4 a state-of-the-art system and ready to take a challenge with the well-known proprietary systems. I hope to have transmitted at least a bit of the potential of an environment such as KDE. After about 30 minutes of presentation (I believe 30 min were enough to divert the most of the new users and some users of other desktops), I returned to sit. A comparison between the free and proprietary formats (and consequences), a very good demonstration of Blender and some minutes on the vector graphics concluded the event, or at least the part reserved to the talks. I remained beyond the conclusion to answer the thousand questions from enthusiastic users and people who wanted to live in this new free world. Thanks to HCSSlug for giving me the opportunity to take part in the event. A big greeting to all participants, many of whom will surely read this short article. See you at the next Linux Day!

Daniele Costarella

Sassari, Italy

The was my first time for many experiences. First time on a Linux Day, first time surrounded by kind free software fellows, first time to have a speech in public about Free Software. Is it enough? I was a bit scared, but my mission was most important: talking about KDE 4 (I will not write here what I said. My slides are downloadable on the KDE Italia website and are in Italian)!

They gave me half an hour, which I thought was really a lot of time but, when the organisation-guy looked at me tipping with his finger on his wristwatch I realised that time flew!

It was in general a really pleasant day with Giuseppe Maxia, MySQL's community lead, talking about how he did business with Linux and Open Source in general, a lot of Ubuntu and openSUSE CDs, public administration and instruction chiefs present, a not-so-young couple asking about how to install Linux and, in general, talks here and there about what I care so much! Unforgettable!

Salvatore Brigaglia

The Amarok team is pleased to announce the release of Magellan, Amarok 2.0.1.1. It includes some of the features users have been waiting for, bugfixes as well as a security fix. Filtering and searching in the playlist is possible again and track queuing as well as "stop after current track" are back. A lot of improvements have been made to MTP device handling and the scripted service API. Mac users can now enjoy Growl support. Read more in the release announcement and try it today.

Having met so many of you at Akademy last year, I am now glad to notify you guys that we have approval from Bayero University Kano Nigeria to host the Free and Open Source Nigeria 2009 conference on 6th to 9th March. We want to invite KDE contributors and users including organisations and companies who want to come and give talks or workshops during the event. We are expecting more than 2000 participants from within and outwith the university. We will be glad to receive guests from all over the world, especially people with vast experiences in open source.

70% of the attendees are going to be students from higher institutions from the northern part of Nigeria,while 2% are government representatives, 10% academicians and 17% are people that will come from outside the academic environment. Everyone will want to know what is free and open source software.

Due to our few resources ,the committee can only take care of our guest's food, accommodation and site visits of all those that will come from outside the country although we are going to look for a donations if we can get any.

We would like to release the programme of events by 19th january 2009.Therefore we will like to know those who would like to speak and give workshops so that we will speed up our arrangements in time.

From our research so far, 90% of the participants are ignorant of free and open source ideas,while the remaining have heard about the idea but do not know its values and importance. This is going to be the first free and open source conference in northern Nigeria, a country with more than 100 million people.

All interested companies who wants to advertise their open source products and services can send their banners, pamphlets, stickers, shirts or anything that can sell the idea to our community free of charge so that it can be distributed or place in all the programme halls.

If you are interested in coming to give a talk, workshop or just meet Nigerians interested in free software please contact me, Mustapha, at mustapha@hutsoftnigeria.com.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma panels now support "drag-and-drop unhide". More improvements for scripted Plasmoids. "Weather" Plasmoid moves into kdereview for eventual move to extragear for KDE 4.2. Lots of reworking the "HTML Validator" Konqueror plugin. Start of a "BomberMan"-like game using Kapman as a base. New game themes in Bomber and KTron. Further progress on the rewrite of Kolf. Start of an effort to refactor game modules in KGoldrunner. A KIPI plugin to export photos to Facebook from KDE photo applications. Support for autoselection in the "libksane" image scanning library. Work towards automatically detecting digital cameras in Digikam (using Solid). Support for importing old feeds from the RSS plugin (from version 2.2) in KTorrent. Work on "Kloss" (bindings for the Lua programming language). Start of an iPod plugin for DeviceSync. Final remaining feature implemented in Ark for KDE 4.2. Initial import of KSSH4 to KDE SVN. Read the rest of the Digest here.

On January 27, a year after the release of the first KDE 4 version, KDE 4.2 "The Answer" will be released. This release will feature stabilisation and feature completion and is likely to be taken up by a wide audience of users. To celebrate the important event in KDE's history with our fans all around the world we would like to invite our community members to organise a release party. It is all up to the organising teams to make it just the way you like it. There could be presentations, workshops, maybe some translation marathons, a hacking contest, just some socialising fun with a drink or two. It can be short and sweet or a whole-day event. Do not be afraid to invite some local press to the event to get the word about KDE out there into the wide world. If you decide to throw a party, or know about one, do add it to the list of party locations.

As always, KDE will have a presence at next year's FOSDEM in Belgium on 7-8 February 2008. This is earlier in the month than usual. We are looking for people to give talks in the KDE or cross-desktop devroom. FOSDEM is the European meeting of free software developers, with over 4000 visitors, 200 lectures and lots of stalls to visit over a 2 day period. You can come and listen to a plethora of interesting talks about anything related to free software, and meet the people behind the nicknames.

On Sunday, we will be sharing a room with the developers from Gnome and XFCE. This means that just like last year, we are also interested in talks that transcend free desktops in general. You can have a look at last year's KDE and Crossdesktop talks to have an idea about what kind of talk we might find interesting to do in the devrooms.

For more information including accommodation, see the KDE at FOSDEM 2009 wiki page. If you want to give a talk, please contact Bart Coppens before January 10th.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Continued post-release polishing of Amarok 2.0. Support for conversion between temperature scales in the "Weather" Plasmoid. Initial import of "System Status" Plasma applet, which is renamed "System Load Viewer" (shows CPU, memory, and swap usage). Support for on-the-fly compilation of Plasma data engines with the C# language bindings. Further development of the "BookmarkSync" Konqueror plugin, including additions of autofetch, autosave, and a settings dialog. More refined integration of Wikipedia "place" information in Marble. A QtScript engine to allow creation of games using QtScript in KGLEngine. An experimental "curve brush" added to Krita. Support for the ext4 filesystem added to PartitionManager. More reorganisation of wallpapers in KDE SVN, with a general kdeartwork module cleanup removing IceWM themes, KWorldClock maps, and unmaintained iconsets. PolicyKit-KDE moves to extragear/base. Eigen 2.0 Beta 3 is tagged for release.Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Restoration of basic queue management functionality, support for basic searching and filtering the playlist, work on device handling, and better integration of the Mac OSX "Growl" notification system in Amarok 2.0. The Plasma "Pager" now accepts taskbar entry drops, support for dragging applets between panels, and improvements in setting keyboard shortcuts for Plasmoids. Import of a "BookmarkSync" plugin for Konqueror, allowing storage and retrieval of bookmarks on multiple computers from a central location. Support for full content zoom (instead of text-only zoom) when using WebKit with Qt 4.5, with plugins (eg. Flash) starting to work. Support for nested "for loops" in KTurtle. More work on the rewrite of Kolf. A basic prototype of a MuPDF-based backend (for PDF documents) in Okular. More work on the Windows Live Messenger protocol in Kopete. Support for running programs as other users (using kdesudo) in KDevPlatform (used in KDevelop 4, etc). A new game in development, "FruitWars", is added to KDE SVN. Reorganisation of wallpapers (including the addition of "Air", the default for KDE 4.2) in KDE SVN.Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Continued work to make applications usable on smaller screen resolutions, this time with changes to Konqueror, KTorrent, and KMail. Start of a "KuickQuiz" Plasma applet, with initial support for placement in the panel. More new Plasma themes. More development of the "NetworkManager" Plasma applet, including a conversion to the "extenders" paradigm. A "pseudo-working" version of QEdje Plasma wallpaper. Printing fixes in Okular. A SmugMug photo service exporter in kipi-plugins (used by Digikam, etc). Initial version of KMJ, a Mahjongg game for 4 players. Continued work on the KBugBuster and Akonadi/Maemo student projects. Significant refactored changes in the "WebGUI" plugin of KTorrent. Further improvements in the integration of KDE with PolicyKit, including policykit-kde moving to kdereview. Eigen 2.0 Beta 2 and KDE 4.2 Beta 2 are tagged for release.Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Old-school desktop patterns return as a Plasma wallpaper, along with an interactive Marble-based wallpaper display. A simple video player Plasmoid based on Phonon. Continued optimisations in Plasma and KDevelop. Various new colour schemes for KDE 4 added to KDE SVN. KSysGuard processes can now be "dragged into a text editor, word processor or spreadsheet program". More progress in the functional refactoring of the Kigo game. Support for compiling sources at runtime with the C# language bindings for KDE. Backup functionality added to KJots. Last.fm service converted to use the KDE system-wide proxy settings, and basic filtering capability added to the service browser in Amarok 2.0. Further work on the new DeviceSync application. KConfigEditor begins to be ported to KDE 4. KitchenSync and the Akonadi OpenSync plugin are disabled for the KDE-PIM 4.2 release. kdekiosk becomes officially unmaintained due to a lack of developer interest. Final preparations for release and the tagging of Amarok 2.0 Final.Read the rest of the Digest here.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Various usability improvements and polish in Plasma, with further work on JOLIE integration. Italic font support in the Plasma "Fuzzy Clock" applet. Full support for use-building on signal/slot connections in KDevelop, and the start of a framework for code quality checkers using the KDevelop C++ parser. Addition of VIM-like navigation (HJKL) in Okular. Refactoring in the Kigo game (formerly KGo) with a view to future expansion, including work on undo/redo support. Updated artwork in KTuberling. Support for hiding toolbars in KTimeTracker. More progress in the Skype text chat protocol in Kopete. Continuation of the improvements to Ark seen in recent weeks.Read the rest of the Digest here.