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PolishLinux Interviews KPackageKit Authors

PackageKit is a system designed to make installing and updating software on your computer easier. The primary design goal is to unify all the software graphical tools used in different distributions. KPackageKit is the KDE interface for PackageKit. Polishlinux.org spoke with Adrien Bustany and Daniel Nicoletti the Packagekit-Qt and KpackageKit developers, about the emerging possibilities in the process of managing software on your desktop.

Support Amarok This Roktober '08

Another year has passed and the Amarok team wants to celebrate with its fans: it's Roktober again! This is the time of the year when the Amarok team reviews what they have achieved during the past year and call for your help for the coming year.

Your donations of time and money make it possible to create the awesome music player you love so much.

Our aim for this Roktober is to raise €10,000. Our budget is aggressive, but as costs go up, and our plans get more complex, we have to raise the goal. As in past years, for every €10 donated, you will receive one entry in the drawing for an iAudio7. This year we have two grand prizes and we will also give t-shirts to 4 second chance winners.

At Akademy 2008 Amarok won the prestigious Best Application award at the Akademy Awards. Your donations make it possible to continue this work, producing what is the best music player for Linux, and will shortly become the best music player on any platform. Amarok 2 is about to let a second beta out of the bag and we look forward to a ground breaking final release.

KDE 4.1.2 "Codename" Finally Out

Two days later than initially planned, "Codename" (or more traditionally KDE 4.1.2) was released just a few minutes ago. The delay was caused by binary incompatibility issues in the branch. Those have been resolved so we are now looking at a stable release. 4.1.2 is another one of those monthly bug fix and translation updates. No new features are allowed into the 4.x/ branches, so no new features went into KDE 4.1.2, but some nice bug fixes instead. David Faure has fixed a long-standing and annoying performance issue when deleting files using KIO, so you can now accidentally delete your home directory 32 times faster For the more faint-hearted, it will also work well with other files. You can read about all the changes that went into Codename in the changelog which offers links to the comprehensive SVN log files. KDE 4.1.2 is a recommended upgrade for everybody running KDE 4. The next feature release of the KDE workspace and applications will be in January 2009 when 4.2.0 will be upon you.

KDE Commit-Digest for 21st September 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Various work across Plasma, including improved applet handles with monochrome icons, work on the Weather Plasmoid and the start of an extender-based notification applet. Continued development in PowerDevil, including support for suspend. Long-standing "slow deletion of many files" bug is finally fixed. A System Settings module for choosing the default file manager. Basic implementation of red eye reduction in Gwenview. A generator for G3/G4 fax documents in Okular. Support for filter plugins in Kst. More work on code completion in KDevelop 4. Start of a D-Bus interface in Lokalize. First working implementation of KMenuEdit global shortcuts. Work on supporting different resources in the Akonadi OpenSync plugin. The return of Ark context-menu actions. Liechtenstein, Oman, and San-Marino maps in KGeography. Previews of slide transition effects in KPresenter now happen directly on the affected slide. A KFormula widget is extracted from KOffice and moved into kdelibs for use in other KDE applications. Work on porting Keep, a backup utility, to KDE 4. NEPOMUK query libraries move from kdereview to kdebase/workspace, with the search KIO slave moving into kdereview. A KDE 4 port of KnowIt, a note taking application, is imported into KDE SVN. Eigen 2.0 Beta 1 is tagged for release. Read the rest of the Digest here.

OpenExpo Winterthur

The second OpenExpo for this year was held in Winterthur on 24th and 25th September. All was perfectly organized by /ch/open. Read more about KDE's presence at the show.

Claudia, our Administrator.

KDE had a well visited booth, where Luca Gugelmann, Alexandra Leisse, Claudia Rauch and Eckhart Wörner answered questions, collected feedback and took care of the smaller and bigger sorrows of our users while Mark Kretschmann added some Rock 'n Roll feeling.

On wednesday Alexandra Leisse gave a well received talk about the upcoming release of KOffice 2. The slides (in German) are available here. A video of the whole talk will be online later this week.

Thanks to everybody who made this presence a success.

KOffice 2.0 Beta1 Released

The KOffice team is proud to announce the first beta of KOffice 2.0. The goal of this release is to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow us to release a usable 2.0 release, demonstrating our vision for the future of the digital office to a larger audience and attract new contributions both in terms of code and ideas for improvements. Read on for more information or see the announcement and download it from the release notes.

This is the first beta release of KOffice 2.0, and the first version we encourage users to download and try out. After a very long development cycle KOffice is now in feature freeze. The development team will from now on shift focus from new features to bug fixes until 2.0 is released.

The release team has decided that the following applications are mature enough to be part of 2.0:

• KWord, Word processor
• KSpread, Spreadsheet calculator
• KPresenter, Presentation manager
• KPlato, Project management software
• Karbon, Vector graphics editor
• Krita, Raster graphics editor

The chart application KChart is available as a shape plugin, which means that charts are available in all the KOffice applications in an integrated manner.

Highlights of KOffice 2.0

KOffice 2 will be a much more flexible application suite than KOffice 1 ever was. The integration between the components is much stronger, with the revolutionary Flake Shapes as the central concept. A Flake Shape can be as simple as a square or a circle or as complex as a chart or a music score.

With Flake, any KOffice application can handle any shape. For instance, KWord can embed bitmap graphics, Krita can embed vector graphics and Karbon can embed charts. This flexibility does not only give KOffice unprecedented integration, but also allows new applications to be created very easily. Such applications could target special user groups such as children or certain professions.

Unified Look and Feel

All the applications of KOffice have a new GUI layout better suited to today's wider screens. The GUI consists of a workspace and a sidebar where tools can dock. Any tool can be ripped off to create its own window and later be redocked for full flexibility. The users setup preferences are of course saved and reused the next time that KOffice is started.

Platform Independence

All of KOffice is available on Linux with KDE or GNOME, Windows and Macintosh. Solaris will follow shortly and we expect builds for other Unix versions to become available soon after the final release. Since KOffice builds on Qt and the KDE libraries, all applications integrate well with the respective platforms and will take on the native look and feel.

Native Support for OpenDocument

KOffice uses the OpenDocument Format as its native format. This will guarantee interoperation with many other Office packages such as OpenOffice.org and MS Office. The KOffice team has representatives on the OASIS technical committee for ODF and has been a strong participant in the process of shaping ODF since its inception.

UserBase Goes Live!

The KDE community is pleased to announce UserBase. UserBase is the new end-user wiki for KDE and complements TechBase, the wiki aimed at developers. It will contain tips and tricks, links to where to get more help, as well as an application catalogue giving an overview of the different kinds of programs that KDE offers.

After weeks of preparation and vivid discussions at Akademy, UserBase is ready to help users with their day-to-day problems and is awaiting contributions from the wider community. A Talk page is available, for suggestions and requests for content.

The KDE community hopes to offer information that is better tailored to the needs of the KDE users by offering them a place to share their knowledge.

For questions regarding UserBase please contact the Community Working Group at community-wg@kde.org.

KDE Commit-Digest for 14th September 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: "Shortcut Scheme" support allows creation of shortcut themes (Emacs, etc.) for use in KDE applications. A "Media Player" runner (with support for Amarok 2), more work on panel hiding, and support for text zoom in the "Web Browser" Plasmoid in Plasma. The "Weather Station" applet moves to kdereview. More refinements in PowerDevil, in preparation for a move to kdebase. Lots more functionality in Attica, the Open Collaboration Services desktop client. Start of session support in KDevPlatform (the basis of KDevelop 4). A "McCabe cyclomatic complexity metric engine" in KDevelop 4. Support for image rating (using KRatingWidget) in the interface of KPhotoAlbum. Progress towards real levels in the KPicross game. More work towards Jabber-based network games in KSirK. A "black screen" presentation feature in Okular. Various work in Akonadi and KDE-PIM. Start of the NetworkManager KControl module (for use in System Settings, etc). Incremental scanner support returns to Amarok 2. New plugin to specify the download order of multi-file torrents in KTorrent. Passwords saved per LDAP login (not host) in KRDC, greatly improving the experience for LDAP administrators. An OpenGL demo to demonstrate various parts of Eigen 2. Some work to make KDE application dialogs fit into 1024x600 pixels. Merge of improvements to KFontInstaller. Import of QuickSand, an alternative front-end for KRunner. A proof-of-concept "decibel-kde" library for representing contacts "based on the representation used by Kopete". WLM protocol imported into Kopete. Asciiquarium screensaver moves from kdereview to kdeartwork. Kugar and koshell are removed from KOffice 2. Read the rest of the Digest here.

KDE Commit-Digest for 7th September 2008

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A KPhotoAlbum developer sprint leads to various developments, including a new viewer and support for image "stacks". Initial lyrics support and a new "Albums" applet in Amarok 2.0. Support for export to OpenDocument text and HTML formats for certain file types in Okular. More functionality in the Plasma "Engine Explorer", an application for data engine development. More work on the "grouping taskbar" and "Weather" applet for Plasma, and new features in the wallpaper configuration dialog. A new Plasma wallpaper plugin, "Mandelbrot fractal viewer" based on Eigen. Lots of new settings across KWin-Composite effects. Start of code for a "Plasma loader" in Raptor. Experiments with using Jabber to propose/find network games in KSirK. Support for subprojects with CMake, and a generic "Source Formatter" plugin (with multiple backends) in KDevelop 4. Start of an OpenSync plugin for Akonadi. An Akonadi "server configuration" KControl module, intended for use in KDE System Settings. Support for adding files through command-line arguments in Ark. "Instant search" is implemented in KCharSelect. More work on a new IRC implementation, and improved Kiosk support in Kopete. NEPOMUK query service, and kosdwidget move to kdereview. Import of "LokaRest", an experimental framework to access RESTful web services. A new application, kReMail, is added to playground/pim. Import of "deKorator" KWin window decoration engine to playground/artwork, and a KDE4 port of Kvkbd into playground/utils. KColorEdit 2.0 is released. Read the rest of the Digest here.