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January 2009

KDE 4.2.0 released

Submitted by admin on Wed, 2009-01-28 04:38
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KDE 4.2 release announcement

Version 4.2 of KDE, the Unix desktop environment based on Qt 4, has been released. This release is believed to be the first release of KDE 4 genuinely suitable for the majority end-users, rather than the "casual users" who were the target of v4.1. Major changes:

  • New and improved Plasma applets, which can be used in conjunction with the screen-saver
  • Improvements to KWin to give "smooth and efficient window management"
  • New archiver, power manager and printer manager
  • Support for Arabic, Icelandic, Basque, Hebrew, Romanian, Tajik, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Maithii and Marathi languages
  • Improved SVG support in Konqueror
  • Reworked email list views in KMail, and improved IMAP support
  • Support for Python, Ruby and JavaScript Plasma applets, and improved Mac OS X widget support
  • Technology previews of Windows and Mac versions of KDE applications

See the visual guide for more information. The info page contains source and binary links (currently: Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE and Magic Linux). You may be able to find build instructions here at TechBase. Requires Qt 4.4.

KDE Dot News relaunches

Submitted by admin on Tue, 2009-01-27 18:57
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A New Day, A New Dot | KDE.news

KDE Dot News has relaunched, with a new, vaguely Oxygen-like theme and a new content management system (Drupal). The new system requires commenters to register first, as with the KDE Developers Drupal site.

DigiKam for KDE4: first release candidate

Submitted by admin on Sat, 2009-01-24 04:19
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From Drupal website:

A first release candidate of version 0.10.0 of digiKam, the KDE digital photo downloader and manager, has been released. Major changes include:

  • Use of multi-threading to generate thumbnails
  • Port to CMake and removal of direct X11 library dependencies, so it's portable to Windows and Mac
  • Preview of audio & video files using Phonon
  • Usability improvements to allow running on small screens (such as on netbooks)
  • Support for XMP metadata
  • Now depends on libkexiv2 v0.5.0 and libkdcraw v0.4.0
  • New design for camera interface
  • New capture tool
  • Bar graph in camera GUI to show free space on camera
  • Thumb-bar with Preview mode to make it easy to navigate between images
  • Improved searching, including ability to search metadata, image properties and geography, and to find similar and duplicate images
  • New plugin to correct lens aberrations
  • New Raw import tool to handle Raw pictures with customized decoding settings
  • All image plugin dialogs are removed. All tools are embedded in editor window
  • 363 bug fixes

For full changelog, see the link above. Screenshots here, source download here. For full dependency list see here, but it includes Qt 4.3 (4.4 recommended) and KDE 4 (4.1 recommended). (Corrected.)

Eric4 v4.2.5 released

Submitted by admin on Sun, 2009-01-18 03:52
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From Qt Apps:

Version 4.2.5 of Eric4, an IDE for Python based on PyQt, the bindings of Qt for Python, has been released. This is a bug-fix release. Screenshots here, downloads (bundled Python only, no packages) here. Requires Qt 4.3 (for full requirements, see download links).

KOffice 2.0 beta 5 released

Submitted by admin on Fri, 2009-01-16 17:07
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From KDE Dot News:

A fifth beta of version 2.0 of KOffice, the official office suite for KDE 4, has been released; official announcement here. Changes include:

  • Improvements to loading and saving of Open Document Format (ODF) document
  • All reported KWord crash bugs fixed
  • Numerous bug fixes to all applications and to plugins (see changelog).

Source downloads (with some details on binaries) here.

KDE 4.1.4 and 4.2 release candidate out

Submitted by admin on Wed, 2009-01-14 17:25
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From KDE Dot News:

Two big KDE releases are out today: version 4.1.4 and a first release candidate of version 4.2. Version 4.1.4 contains a large number of bug-fixes, particularly to KMail, Okular (PDF) and KGpg (full changelog here). Source downloads and links to binaries (Ubuntu only at present) at the info page.

The 4.2 release candidate contains significant enhancements over version 4.1, including many new features in Plasma and in the supporting applications, improved Python and Ruby scripting and improved support for non-Linux operating systems (BSD, Mac and Windows). See the info page for source downloads and various binaries (Ubuntu, Fedora 10 & Rawhide, OpenSUSE and Magic Linux at present).

Qt to be released under LGPL from version 4.5

Submitted by admin on Wed, 2009-01-14 17:25
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Qt Software has announced that Qt is to be released under the LGPL from version 4.5 onwards. The reason is that Nokia is not as reliant on the income from Qt commercial licences as Trolltech was. Nokia will still release Qt under GPL 3 and commercial licences, however. Also see Heise Online with reactions from Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu) and Joe Miller (Second Life), Qt Labs blog and the new licensing FAQ, and several recent blog posts by KDE developers. The licensing change affects Qt Creator and the bundled Qt developer tools, but not Qt Extended, i.e. the embedded platform. Qt 4.5 is expected to be released in March.

Call for KDE FOSDEM speakers

Submitted by admin on Mon, 2009-01-05 17:43
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From KDE Dot News:

KDE are looking for speakers to give presentations at FOSDEM, the European gathering of free and open source developers which is to be held in Belgium in February (7-8th Feb 2009). The KDE team will share a room with the GNOME and XFCE developers on Sunday and are interested talk which "transcend free desktops in general". Contact Bart Coppens if you are interested.

QTM v0.7.1.1 released

Submitted by admin on Sun, 2009-01-04 16:46
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From Qt Apps:

Version 0.7.1.1 of QTM, a desktop content management client based on Qt 4, has been released. Changes:

  • New feature: Ability to set background and text colours in the editor, preview and console (requires Qt 4.2 at present)
  • Improvement: Auto-sets local storage directory if there isn't one
  • Improvement: Runs the prefs then the accounts for a first-time user if they click "Yes" in the start-up dialog (and displays "Stage [1/2] of 2" on the dialog titles)
  • Improvement: When the category selectors are displayed, searches for categories if there are already none
  • Improvement: Sets the status to "dirty" when changing the blogs or categories only if there is text in the main entry widget
  • Improvement: Removed redundant EditingWindow constructor
  • Improvement: Prepends / to the location field, as webservers require full paths (e.g. /mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi or /xmlrpc.php, NOT just xmlrpc.php)
  • Bug fix: Fixed crash which occurred in the accounts dialog after a new account was deleted and it was the only account
  • Bug fix: Corrects start-up behaviour for new users, i.e. stops prompting them for prefs even after they have specified their preferences
  • Bug fix: Now auto-refreshes blog list after using accounts dialog when there is only one account
  • Bug fix: Failed to store auto-filled server and location details (esp. on wordpress.com sites)
  • Bug fix: Fixed bug which caused the wrong blog ID to be sent out in XML-RPC requests after changing accounts in certain circumstances

Screenshots here, downloads (source, packages for various Linux distros with Windows and Mac binaries to follow) from the home page.