In two and half weeks the likely biggest Linux Event kicks off: LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin. Four days of exhibition and more talks (the organizers say 240, German/English mixed) than ever before. I plan to be around all the time.

On Wednesday everyone's darling, the multi-headed president of KDE e.V. and the galaxy, Aaron Seigo will give a keynote about KDE4. On Friday is a day-long track with KDE talks, on Saturday is openSUSE day and there are separate talks about Amarok and Kontact planned. Additionally there will be of course KDE and openSUSE booths all the time.

Special tip: one can travel for 59 Euro from everywhere in Germany with ICE to LinuxTag/IT Profits and back.

Just want to point out four improvements of the YaST Qt package selector in the upcoming openSUSE 11.0 that were missing too long, much requested (at least by me) and now added :

The first screenshot shows the new special package groups "Suggested packages" and "Recommended packages" to list packages which enhance your installed packages. Also the strange "zzz All" package group of previous releases is renamed to "All packages" and visible without endless scrolling.

On the second screenshot you can see the new "@System" meta repository to list all installed packages only. And note the new secondary filter "Unmaintained packages" to detect which packages are not contained in your activated repositories (also a nice way to detect which old packages were wrongly not obsoleted by a distro upgrade).

Update: Let me add a fifth one. As you can see on the screenshots we have a yast2-theme-openSUSE-Oxygen package with Oxygen style like icons everywhere thanks to Martin Schlander.

Just like last year the KDE-family did provide us again a gsoc-slot to work on Improve ISO OpenDocument support (in KOffice, particularly in KWord). Not only did the number of mentors drastically increased but personally I also had the feeling the number of very good proposals did. To be allowed to read all of them was such exciting that I found myself spending hours over hours on the huge list reading lots of proposals again and again just for fun.

...that's what my friends all call me.

Actually they don't but since I am a huge fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd and this blog entry is closely related to the previous one I am (ab-)using yet another of their song titles.

Earlier this week I got rid of the "org.kde" namespace in Akonadi's D-Bus names, e.g. org.kde.Akonadi.Resource is now called org.freedesktop.Akonadi.Resource, to emphasize that we are a cross-desktop project and that the real interaction point for interested parties are the interfaces (and the data transfer protocol), not some specific implementation like libakonad-kde.

Speaking of renaming: I am not yet quite satisfied with one of our D-Bus names, so if you have any suggestions I'd like to hear them.

To further facilitate contributions outside the KDE sphere we have requested project infrastructure on freedesktop.org
Since this will take a while, let all any interested contributors know that getting commit access to KDE's SVN is not an arcane procedure and anyone with a proven track record on another free software project will most likely get approved quickly (I am talking about the order of minutes here).

Ok, we all know, blogs are the new mailing lists, so here just some quick comments from my side on all the release-cycle stuff.

I've worked a bit on the scale dialog for Krita. Neither the old one from the 1.x series nor the new one in current KOffice2 alpha releases were good enough. I've mailed a bit with Ellen which only confirmed that it is indeed a difficult dialog to get right.

In the end I reordered some items, so I hope it's a bit easier to figure out how to use it. I think it has become quite good, but judge for yourself. So much cool stuff coming in KOffice 2.0

I have had so much struggle finding a decent html editor that I finally wrote one on my own:

• mozilla composer cannot handle the fish://-protocol
• openoffice dito
• quanta crashes when it sees me
• I finally started using kword, which cost me several months of fighting and finally even contributing code, but there are too many problems for using it where I work.

The usual monthly game: a new KDE bugfix release, openSUSE packages and a new Live-CD which as already said looks more and more less like KDE 4.0 but like our openSUSE 11.0 KDE4 desktop (while still being based on openSUSE 10.3):

Qt 4.4 brings lots of goodness. Packages are now entering hardy-backports.

If you want the latest unstable trunk Qt, kdelibs, kdebase and amarok on a regular basis without the hassle of compiling it yourself, project Neon has a Launchpad Personal Package Archive with regular builds.

Lastly, these were left on our doorstep today, free to a good home. Cuteness.

From the cross-blogging department, Qt 4.4 has been released and is entering Factory for openSUSE 11.0 with packages for older openSUSE releases being available in KDE:Qt44 (this will move sooner or later to KDE:Qt). Dirk Müller thinks that's boring news as "everyone has packages of it" and I should rather mention that he has created packages from Qt 4.5 development snapshot within the KDE:Qt45 Build Service repository.