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.

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):

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.

openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1 has been released including the new beautiful installer, an incredible fast installation and package management, KDE 4.0.3 and 3.5.9. With this Beta the media layout changed: no 1 CD install media anymore, just the KDE4 Live-CD and the DVD which allows to choose between KDE4 and KDE3. This beta marks the generic feature freeze so there was a rush to get everything in which led to the delayed release and some problems like most noticeable the Live-CD installer not working. So if you plan to do an install better download the DVD or use the network installation CD.

Only few outstanding branding and feature/version updates so it's mainly now bug hunting until the final release:

Last week HP announced it's Mini-Note PC with preloads of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. Our heros of the Mobile Devices Team have worked the last weeks on that. The Mini-Note is available in different configurations starting at $499 (that would be only 313 Euro if applied for Europe without surcharge). All editions share the form factor, the nearly full-size keyboard and the nice display (1280x768). So I had to lend one from Mobile Devices team and play with it.

The Mini Note comes with SLED 10, and SLED includes KDE as option. But that's only KDE 3.5 and that would be boring. So I started to install latest openSUSE Factory (almost 11.0 Beta 1) with our polished KDE 4.0 desktop on it:

KDE 4.0 is usable on this small edition (1 GHz and 512 MB). Only someone please fix the CPU and memory hog knotify4!

KDE 4.0.3 is out and openSUSE packages are available at the usual place as is a new "KDE Four Live" CD.

Just want to note that these packages are less pure KDE 4.0.3 with every day we near the openSUSE 11.0 feature freeze. Last week-end I started a "Plasma 4.0 openSUSE" work branch in KDE SVN to combine our local patches, upstream backports and own features. The goal is to ship a KDE4 desktop which has not less functionality than a GNOME desktop - means eg adding / removing of panels, a simple way of being able to move plasmoids on panels and the theme selector are in there. You can find this stuff already merged into our KDE 4.0.3 packages. Some outstanding tasks are using the Kickoff look of trunk and dealing with the desktop icon issue. Currently there are of course also some glitches to chase down during the bug fixing months until the final release.

If everything turns out fine in the remaining time until the feature freeze we will have a KDE4 desktop without any by default running KDE3 application. That includes update notification applet, kpowersave, front-end for NetworkManager 0.7 and if you like Kerry. And as you are maybe already aware: YaST (installation, system configuration, live installer), package selector and X configuration tool are already using a Qt4-frontend respectively are ported to Qt4.

Only three days left to apply as a student for the Summer of Code for either KDE or openSUSE ideas. So how about spending this week-end thinking what you could do this summer? Let me list some ideas I would like to see done:

• Qt/KDE Front-Ends for PackageKit
• YaST PolicyKit integration
• YaST PolicyKit configuration module
• PolicyKit Integration for KDE
• Using runners in Kickoff and a Xesam search runner
• International Clock plasmoid (multiple clocks, kworldclock map, kweather infos)

Or surprise with an application describing an own cool idea! But don't forget that already more than one application for some ideas exist so your application should really contain more than 5 sentences to get chosen: something about your skills, verbose plan what you want to do (not just copy'n'paste) and maybe some roadmap with planned milestones. And please keep in mind that the projects shall challenge you for 3 months, not just 1 week!

The participating mentoring organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2008 have been just announced and the openSUSE project is among. If you're a qualifying student and want to earn some money by contributing to an Open Source project, please start discussing with us your (eg Build Service, KDE or YaST related) idea. We will also propose some ideas during the week and put them online in the openSUSE wiki. Note the student application deadline on March 31th!

The KDE project has of course also some distro-agnostic ideas.

It has been over a month since the last version and it's still a month until KDE 4.1 Alpha 1 so it seems a good time to create a new Live CD with the openSUSE KDE 4.0.66 snapshot packages. It contains some Kickoff/Plasma features I have been worked on in the last weeks like the resizable Kickoff or adding/removing panels. Noticeable absent is my patch to move plasmoids on panels which is not in trunk (yet), you can by all means expect it to appear in our packages before openSUSE 11.0 gets released.