03.05.14

KDE News: New Releases, Qt 5.3 Preview, Indian Event, End of Nepomuk, Steam Inclusion, and Success Down Under

Posted in KDE at 8:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Releases

• KDE Ships March Updates to Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces

  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.

• Three Turning Points, KDE Releases, and Loving Ubuntu

• Learning More About KDE’s Plasma Next Desktop

  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.

• KDE Frameworks 5 Alpha Two Is Out

  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.

• First beta of Kubuntu 14.04 out for testing

  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.

• Exciting Features Coming For Qt 5.3

  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.

• Qt5 To Most Likely Stick With Time-Based Released

  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.

• KDE Applications and Development Platform February Updates Available

  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.

• The Mer-Powered “Improv” Board Is Running Behind Schedule

KDE at India

• Rocking India

  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

• KDE PIM November Sprint

• Rocking conf.kde.in 2014!

• KDE Commit-Digest for 26th January 2014

• Cantor’s script editor news

  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.

• KDE Commit-Digest for 19th January 2014

• Sprinter development, Luminosity Episode 17

Krunner

• Krunner: maximize your productivity in KDE’s Plasma Desktop

  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+F2″, 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

• Nine Lessons Other Desktops Can Learn from KDE

  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.

• New Distro Planned, Example KDE, and Linux Bucks

• Classic Desktops, KDE Changes, and Photoshop

Summer of Code

• KDE and Google Summer of Code 2014

  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

• KDE’s Next Generation Semantic Search

  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.

• KDE’s Nepomuk Doesn’t Seem To Have A Future

  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

• Krita will soon be available on Steam

  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

• KDE is helping an Australian wine maker, time to get drunk

  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 90′s. 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.”

• KDE Software Down Under

  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””.

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