Matthias Ettrich.

Today at 4pm CET at the Center for Economics, Technology and Women’s Issues at the Berlin Senate, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich was decorated with the German Federal Cross of Merit for his contributions to Free Software. Matthias was awarded the medal in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good. The award was presented by state secretary Almuth Nehring-Venus. She mentioned that not only is Matthias among the younger recipients of the award but also that this is the first award ceremony where young children of the family were present. Also attending was Eberhard Gienger, member of the Bundestag for the county Matthias grew up in. Read on for more!

Akonadi working in KMail

The second Akonadi sprint this year took place in Berlin, Germany on October 16-18. With a confrontation between the local punks and the law simmering on the streets below, the KDE PIM team and others worked to port applications, add polish to the libraries, and complete PIM software that will raise sparks on the desktop without burning out your CPU. Read on for an overview of what happened there!

The Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). This move allows donors to give tax-deductible donations in the US, and it increases transparency in the spending of Amarok's funds. At the same time, we will not loosen our ties with the KDE project. Amarok is, and will always stay, a fully committed project under the KDE umbrella. Read on for more!

Kshitij Sobti has written a nice article over at ThinkDigit.com about installing KDE 4 applications on Windows. He takes a look at the installation process and reviews some key applications such as Dolphin and Okular, praising Dolphin's "simple yet rich interface" and suggesting that "Okular can serve as a good replacement for Acrobat Reader". Kopete, Akregator and Kate are also featured. Read the full article.

KDevelop 4 in action

The KDevelop team is proud to announce the sixth beta of KDevelop4. There haven't been any major features started since beta 5 as this is mostly a bugfix release (demonstrated by the list of fixed bugs). This also marks the end of the KDE 4.2 support. With this release KDevelop4 requires KDE 4.3 and Qt 4.5 to fully supply the GUI we want to provide our users with. It is also the last release that we're doing on behalf of ourselves, all upcoming betas will be done together with KDE 4.4. We are aiming at releasing with KDE 4.4.0 as we think that KDevelop4 is ready feature-wise and really needs to get a first release out of the door.

Like the ticking of a Swiss watch, every month the KDE team brings you a new release. November's edition of KDE is a bugfix and translation update to KDE 4.3. With the KDE 4 series picking up in popularity, we're happy to encourage even more people to give KDE 4 another spin -- or just upgrade your existing KDE to KDE 4.3.3. As the release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone. Users around the world will appreciate that KDE 4.3.3 is more completely translated.

Over at openSUSE News, the new KDE features in openSUSE 11.2 come under the spotlight before its release in a few days. KWin stalwart and openSUSE hacker Luboš Luňák bares his soul. See how KDE is presented as the default desktop on openSUSE, and find out how the openSUSE team made Firefox fit in on a KDE desktop.

During the NLUUG end-of-year conference "The Open Web" in Ede, Netherlands, we did an interview with keynote speaker Steven Pemberton. Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the Center for Math and Information Technology in Amsterdam and has been involved with the web since it's first incarnation - he vividly remembers the day the connection from Europe to the US was doubled to 128 Kbit.

On October 29th the NLUUG held their second conference this year (the first, held in the spring, focused on file systems). With over 200 visitors and talks by 19 speakers, all prominent in their respective fields, this conference was of particularly high quality. This is surely emphasized by the location and surroundings and the excellent organization. Read on for a short impression on the conference, which was attended by several KDE community members.

KDE-based distribution Kubuntu has released version 9.10 which adds a new variant showcasing the up and coming Plasma Netbook setup. The release also adds OpenOffice KDE 4 integration and extra installer beauty thanks to artwork from KDE's Oxygen team.