KDE News: New Releases, Qt 5.3 Preview, Indian Event, End of Nepomuk, Steam Inclusion, and Success Down Under
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-05 13:05:44 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-05 13:08:27 UTC
Releases
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Today KDE released updates for its Applications and Development Platform, the third in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.12 series. This release also includes an updated Plasma Workspaces 4.11.7. Both releases contain only bugfixes and translation updates, providing a safe and pleasant update for everyone.
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For those KDE users wishing to learn more about the forthcoming "Plasma Next" desktop work alongside KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt5, there's new information available.
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Today KDE released the second alpha of Frameworks 5, part of a series of releases leading up to the final version planned for June 2014. This release includes progress since the previous alpha last month.
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Ubuntu derivatives have announced the first beta for 14.04 release. Since ‘daddy’ Ubuntu releases only one beta before final release the images for Unity are not available. Being a KDE user I am definitely looking forward to Kubuntu which will come with KDE Applications 4.12.2 along with newest Muon Software Center. I did notice a bug in Kubuntu beta and that’s freezing of installer if you have more than one hard drive attached to the system. I hope developers will fix this ‘deal breaking’ bug before the final release. Other betas are from Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Gnome and other members of Ubuntu family.
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The official release of Qt 5.3 is tentatively planned for April but with the feature freeze coming up we already have a good idea for the features of this next tool-kit release.
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Some developers have been interested in seeing Qt go back to doing feature-based releases rather than being time-based. Right now the Qt5 tool-kit is released about every six months regardless of the number of features, but generally with the Qt5 releases thus far they have also been quite heavy on features. Six month release cycles is not good enough for some developers (in either direction) but Lars Knoll decided to chime in on the discussion Monday about changing the Qt release cycle and how branching is done.
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Packages for the release of KDE SC 4.12.2 are available for Kubuntu 12.04LTS, 13.10 and our development release. You can get them from the Kubuntu Backports PPA. It includes an update of kde-workspace to 4.11.6.
KDE at India
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My own talk was about where KDE, both technically and socially/organizationally, is going, also resulted in quite a few questions. They ranged from "what does RTFM mean" to discussions about involvement of startups and decision making processes. Much of what I talked about won't be new for KDE people who follow what is going on in our community quite closely. I mostly extrapolate from trends which have been visible for quite a few years. But for those who are new or less close to our community, I plan on putting it in a blog post or two over the coming days/weeks.
Development
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There is news for others Cantor backends too. Now script editor load default syntax highlighting for each backend – in old versions it did not happen. And, if you push New button, the new script editor will have the default syntax highlighting working too.
Krunner
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If you’re a KDE user, you’re probably familiar with Krunner, a launcher application. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a small popup window that appears at the top of your screen when you press “Alt+F2ââ¬Â³, which is the default shortcut for it. Krunner allows Plasma Workspace users to perform a lot of simple as well as much complex tasks. So, if you are a KDE SC user, you must get familiar with this pretty awesome tool.
Commentary
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The story of KDE's user revolt is well-known. What is less well known is that, in the six years since then, KDE has been steadily regaining its user-share.
Summer of Code
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KDE is happy to announce that it has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. This will allow students from around the world to work with mentors on KDE software projects. Successful students will receive stipends from Google.
Nepomuk
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For years, KDE software has included a semantic (relationship-based) searching infrastructure. KDE's Semantic Search was built around concepts previously developed in a European Union-funded research project NEPOMUK which explored the use of relationships between data to improve search results. Based on these ideas, KDE's implementation of Semantic Search made it possible to search for all pictures - taken in - a particular place. On top of that, it added text search and tagging.
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It appears there isn't much of a future left to KDE's Nepomuk framework. It's going to be replaced going forward in the KDE land.
Steam
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Krita becomes one of the first open source illustration software to be greenlit for Steam. They started their campaign on 7th this month and the Steam community approved it in less than a fortnight. The Krita team is planning to integrate Big Picture, the Cloud and workshop in Gemini version. It will take some time for them to be commercially available on Steam.
Success Stories
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A fantastic interview with Bernard Gray (the IT guy for a wine company) surfaced recently, detailing the exploits of De Bortoli Wines of Austrailia. The Dot interviewed Bernard about his experience, and how he utilizes KDE in his Wine making company. Gray pegs himself as “a tertiary qualified programmer, and has been involved in either core development or supporting development with a few Open Source distros/projects over the years”. With experience under his belt, the long standing wine company, started in 1928, has been using GNU/Linux since the late 90ââ¬Â²s. Being no stranger to Linux, Bernard accelerated his Linux efforts in 2003, developing Graphical Terminals to replace existing thin clients at the company. The secret sauce for the project laid in “the fact that it runs out of a ramdisk and on generously spec’d desktop hardware, we finally managed to nail the trifecta of Cheap, Fast AND Good.”
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Today we proudly feature an interview with Bernard Gray from De Bortoli Wines, an Australian winemaking company.We spoke with Bernard Gray who has worked for the company for over 10 years in an IT project management and development role. He is, in his own words: ""a tertiary qualified programmer, and has been involved in either core development or supporting development with a few Open Source distros/projects over the years"".
Recent Techrights' Posts
- Comparing U.E.F.I. to B.I.O.S. (Bloat and Insecurity to K.I.S.S.)
- By Sami Tikkanen
- New 'Slides' From Stallman Support (stallmansupport.org) Site
- "In celebration of RMS's birthday, we've been playing a bit. We extracted some quotes from the various articles, comments, letters, writings, etc. and put them in the form of a slideshow in the home page."
- Thailand: GNU/Linux Up to 6% of Desktops/Laptops, According to statCounter
- Desktop Operating System Market Share Thailand
- António Campinos is Still 'The Fucking President' (in His Own Words) After a Fake 'Election' in 2022 (He Bribed All the Voters to Keep His Seat)
- António Campinos and the Administrative Council, whose delegates he clearly bribed with EPO budget in exchange for votes
- Adrian von Bidder, homeworking & Debian unexplained deaths
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
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- Sainsbury's: It Takes Us Up to Two Days to Respond to Customers Upon Escalation (and Sometimes Even More Than Two Days)
- It not only does groceries but also many other things, even banking
- People Don't Just Kill Themselves (Same for Other Animals)
- And recent reports about Boeing whistleblower John Barnett
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 18, 2024
- IRC logs for Monday, March 18, 2024
- Suicide Cluster Cover-up tactics & Debian exposed
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 19/03/2024: A Society That Lost Focus and Abandoning Social Control Media
- Links for the day
- Matthias Kirschner, FSFE: Plagiarism & Child labour in YH4F
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Linux Foundation Boasting About Being Connected to Bill Gates
- Examples of boasting about the association
- Alexandre Oliva's Article on Monstering Cults
- "I'm told an earlier draft version of this post got published elsewhere. Please consider this IMHO improved version instead."
- [Meme] 'Russian' Elections in Munich (Bavaria, Germany)
- fake elections
- Sainsbury's to Techrights: Yes, Our Web Site Broke Down, But We Cannot Say Which Part or Why
- Windows TCO?
- Plagiarism: Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich) & Debian Developer list hacking
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Links 18/03/2024: Putin Cements Power
- Links for the day
- Flashback 2003: Debian has always had a toxic culture
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Sainsbury’s Epic Downtime Seems to be Microsoft's Fault and Might Even Constitute a Data Breach (Legal Liability)
- one of Britain's largest groceries (and beyond) chains
- [Meme] You Know You're Winning the Argument When...
- EPO management starts cursing at everybody (which is what's happening)
- Catspaw With Attitude
- The posts "they" complain about merely point out the facts about this harassment and doxing
- 'Clown Computing' Businesses Are Waning and the Same Will Happen to 'G.A.I.' Businesses (the 'Hey Hi' Fame)
- decrease in "HEY HI" (AI) hype
- Free Software Needs Watchdogs, Too
- Gentle lapdogs prevent self-regulation and transparency
- Matthias Kirschner, FSFE analogous to identity fraud
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 18/03/2024: LLM Inference and Can We Survive Technology?
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 17, 2024
- IRC logs for Sunday, March 17, 2024
- Links 17/03/2024: Microsoft Windows Shoves Ads Into Third-Party Software, More Countries Explore TikTok Ban
- Links for the day
- Molly Russell suicide & Debian Frans Pop, Lucy Wayland, social media deaths
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Our Plans for Spring
- Later this year we turn 18 and a few months from now our IRC community turns 16
- Open Invention Network (OIN) Fails to Explain If Linux is Safe From Microsoft's Software Patent Royalties (Charges)
- Keith Bergelt has not replied to queries on this very important matter
- RedHat.com, Brought to You by Microsoft Staff
- This is totally normal, right?
- USPTO Corruption: People Who Don't Use Microsoft Will Be Penalised ~$400 for Each Patent Filing
- Not joking!
- The Hobbyists of Mozilla, Where the CEO is a Bigger Liability Than All Liabilities Combined
- the hobbyist in chief earns much more than colleagues, to say the least; the number quadrupled in a matter of years
- Jim Zemlin Says Linux Foundation Should Combat Fraud Together With the Gates Foundation. Maybe They Should Start With Jim's Wife.
- There's a class action lawsuit for securities fraud
- Not About Linux at All!
- nobody bothers with the site anymore; it's marketing, and now even Linux
- Links 17/03/2024: Abuses Against Human Rights, Tesla Settlement (and Crash)
- Links for the day
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 16, 2024
- IRC logs for Saturday, March 16, 2024
- Under Taliban, GNU/Linux Share Nearly Doubled in Afghanistan, Windows Sank From About 90% to 68.5%
- Suffice to say, we're not meaning to imply Taliban is "good"
- Debian aggression: woman asked about her profession
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
- Gemini Links 17/03/2024: Winter Can't Hurt Us Anymore and Playstation Plus
- Links for the day