Last week I went to Washington DC where I was meant to be giving a talk at CALUG. However the whole city was buried in a metre of snow so it got cancelled. In fact the whole government shut down. Good thing the US wasn't doing anything important last week or people would have noticed they had no government and anarchy would have broken loose, it would be like Belgium. The snow was mostly ploughed out the way by the end of the week in time for the KDE 4.4 release party organised by Celeste. The release party started off in true US style in a fast food burger restaurant where I ate Ostrich. Later it moved to a bar with a fine selection of beers of many interesting flavours, gosh it was like Belgium!

On Saturday we'll be hosting the first ever release party in Glasgow. Do come along if you're in the country.

Washington DC KDE SC 4.4 release party, eagerly awaiting beers.

Kubuntu developers visit the White House. Obama was snowed in and couldn't make our meeting so we had to take tourist photos instead.

The Ubuntu Platform team (the people Canonical employs for Ubuntu) is having a sprint in Portland. Portland is a nice city where you can be wandering down the road and come across 100 tweed wearing cyclists coming the other way.

My how they've grown

Kees' collection of every shipit CD ever nears completion

Voodoo doughnut, a local speciality. I got half way through eating this before gaining diabetes

libxml2 is compiled without thread support in Ubuntu 9.10 due to an oversight from upstream. This causes issues with Strigi which recently added a check for it. You can get packages from my PPA with thread support. It should go into -proposed and -updates soon too.

FOSDEM is happening next month. I can't go but you should, it's the best cross project free software gathering there is. If you're going put yourself on the wiki page and then think about doing a talk, if you are involved in KDE we want to hear from you. Add any talk ideas you have to that wiki page.

Winter is here, the snow is falling, the frost is crisp each morning and it get progressively harder to break the ice for the day's canoe.

Fortunately Kubuntu has just the thing to keep you snug in these cold months. From the davmor2 knitware shop comes the Kubuntu jumper range. Available in a selection of colours including beige with blue, beige with ligher blue and beige with cyan, it has been carefully crafted by designer extraordinaire Sue Morley over many months of hard work. Order one now, it's the perfect fashion item to impress that special someone in your life for Christmas (possible 6 months waiting time from ordering).

Hugs to Sue for being the best knitter I know.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit happened in Dallas last week with 200 developers from every part of Ubuntu as well as upstreams and hardware vendors around. Naturally the best looking of the lot was the Kubuntu contributors who turned up to discuss the next six months in the world's finest KDE distribution. The Lucid Lynx will be a Long Term Support edition and it's exciting that KDE 4 is now at a stage of maturity where this will be possible to do for the first time. LTS means fixing, completing and assuring over and above any new features. The Doctor is in the house.

Kubuntu Contributors: Julian Edwards (Soyuz), Roman Shtylman (Installer Bling), Roderick Greening (The Creator, USB style), Michael Casadevall (fixes your broken Arm), Jonathan Riddell (moi), Ralph Janke (5 a day, every day), Aurelien Gateau (Desktop Experience), Jussi Schultink (IRC Council), Mackenzie Morgan (s/Abort/Stop/), Scott Kitterman (negotiator)

So what's in store? Read the specifications for full details.

Under Packaging, of course we want KDE 4.4 and Qt 4.6. We will review all the patches and make sure any we carry have a clear rationale (this is mostly done already). We'll have a policy of discussing any patches with upstream and assume to follow their wishes where we want to add any. We won't go packaging beta applications unless upstream agree. KOffice 1 will die but KOffice 2 may not all yet be ready for main. We'll look at the Pulseaudio changes to Phonon (we don't use Pulseaudio in Kubuntu by default currently but many Gnome apps do so it's not something which is going away). We'll get Virtuoso working with Nepomuk and we'll get policykit-1 in which means KPackagekit can be updated to the latest version.

Kubuntu Netbook will no longer be a Preview thanks to lovely work from the Plasma Netbook dudes. We need to make sure kubuntu-netbook and kubuntu-desktop work sensibly when both are installed. Apps and UIs will be reviewed for Netbook suitability.

On the development front I hope to make good progress on printer config, there's a rewrite of update-notifier-kde in the works, more than one person has promised to get SMB file sharing working and we want to get touchpad configuration easy.

In Ayatana Integration the Canonical Desktop Team wants to adopt KDE's new systray tray spec (or notifier item as I believe its now called) for Gnome. They want to change it so the icon menu will be rendered natively with items sent over Dbus and we had a meeting with the Plasma folks to thrash out the details of that.

We have a new website layout in the works, we need to poke sysadmins and security team to get that working. We'd like to crystalise some marketing (besides being like Ubuntu Desktop but blue) and work out our target users and get some slogans. We'd also like to make use of the Ubuntu loco teams by finding Kubuntu contacts for each one.

On bug triage we'll not DrKonqi for upstream KDE apps to stop our poor bug triagers being flooded with upstream bugs (it has the obvious downside that KDE bug triagers will get any bugs which are our fault but hopefully that'll be kept to a minimum).

For translations we got the Launchpad devs to promise proper QA reporting so we can be sure Launchpad is helping and not hurting our translations.

If you want to help out, take a look at the Todo list then come and find us on #kubuntu-devel.

The Ubuntu Family in Dallas

Dallas is a curious place. They don't say "hello" they say "how are you", I didn't work out if it was a question or just a greeting. You can't get anywhere without a car although mostly we took Limos because mere taxis wouldn't be luxurious enough. Talking of luxury, rooftop swimming pool and nobody uses it except me! After a week of hard discussions, early mornings and sharing a toothbrush I've escaped to the highlands and its failing internet, time for some cabogganing.

Today I updated the KDE Licensing Policy with a couple of changes following requests from folks. Most notably Creative Commons is now allowed. This is only for standalone media files (such as an image for a splash screen) and not for anything which might want to be mixed with GPL material such as icons. "Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported" is the version allowed. The other change is requiring BSD licencing for CMake modules, which brings the policy into line with existing practice.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening this week in Dallas. The theme of the discussions is LTS and what it will take to have a release in six months which can be supported for three years hence. We've been having sessions on packaging, development, bugs policy, translations and more. You can find the schedule and how to take part in sessions on the summit website, there are icecast streams for all the rooms. The Kubuntu specs are on this wiki page still works in progress of course. It's going to be great to have a KDE 4 release suitable for LTS, just six months to do it!

Some of the Kubuntu Team take to the ice rink

I often say that my hypothetical user for Kubuntu is my non-technical girlfriend. Unfortunately I'm between girlfriends at the moment but the intent is still there. Someone who uses the computer for everyday tasks of web browsing, chatting, watching videos, listening to music, writing some documents, storing photos. But also someone who doesn't care about computers any more than I care about my car, it should do the job but I don't want to have to fiddle with it to get it to work. Unfortunately I rarely get the chance to try out Kubuntu on such users, my family have all been using computers far longer than I have and are just as stuck in their ways as I am in mine.

But yesterday I did get a chance to install Kubuntu on a dying WIndows machine. The worst part of the process was booting up Windows to see how much disk space there was, it took 20 minutes to boot up loading all the half broken vendor apps and anti-virus software. Then it took 20 minutes just to shut down, every 30 seconds interrupted by a "missing .dll" or similar dialogue.

So up boots Kubuntu from the CD in half the time than Windows boots from hard disk. All hardware working perfectly. The disk partition resizing is a breeze, installation works without problems.

We came across two small problems. Knetworkmanager doesn't give much feedback if you use the wrong wifi encryption or password method, and the Firefox installer claims it has nothing to do if you don't have an apt cache first. Both known issues which I expect will be fixed before long.

So far one very happy customer, off to browsing the web in 1 minute beats Windows by a factor of 20. But that is just the install. I'll find out in the coming days how someone who doesn't care about computers manages with the everyday tasks that we all expect to work easily.

9.10 is out. KDE 4 is really taking shape now with more of the important gaps getting filled. We ported OpenOffice integration to KDE 4, the installer got some beautiful love from Nuno, social apps integation in various places, there's a handy message indicator and notifications work cross desktop. We have the latest KDE apps of course, K3b gets a KDE 4 port, user config got ported too. Rather importantly network connects work and intel graphics drivers aren't rubbish.

There's a shiny new Netbook edition thanks to the Plasma Netbook guys, it's not complete yet but it shows off a lot of nice ideas.

Looking at the future there's still some obvious gaps in the KDE 4 stack, some are being worked on like kbluetooth which has a new maintainer, some don't seem to go anywhere like file sharing, others its less clear what to do such as the web browser question. But I'm confident that in six months time we'll have something worthy of being LTS.

Hugs to everyone who helped develop and test this release. Go and download or Upgrade and let us know what you think

Once again we need testers, this time for the candidate images for Kubuntu 9.10. CDs, DVDs, netboot and upgrades all need going through their paces in triplicate. Join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate and log your results on the ISO testing site.