OStatic

It's one of the biggest gotchas for alternative operating systems -- at some point in the middle of one project's release cycle, some other component that's tied in some way to the original project's functionality gets a whizbang new update that's significant enough that full-fledged integration has to wait until the next release. Of course, there are ways around this for those who just can't wait, but these work arounds might not always be as straightforward as one would hope.

The KDE team continues to roll out updates, enhancements and new features for the KDE 4 desktop environment. The sticking point here is that different users on different machines might find the updates are neat little improvements -- or absolutely vital. And a distribution needs to balance stability and utility of its official packages with the needs of its userbase.

The openSUSE community recently took charge of this particular situation in the form of the openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Reloaded respin. The installable liveCD, masterminded by Stephan 'Beineri' Binner, incorporates the openSUSE 11.1 image (complete with updates issued since its release) and the KDE 4.2.2 desktop.

I've noticed, as I get older, time seems to go exponentially faster. Unfortunately, this meant high school lasted an eternity, and I'm burning through my thirties at warp speed. Some events make me more aware of this than others -- it seems like it was only last week that Fedora 10 made its first mark upon the world.

But no, another release cycle has nearly come full circle, and today the Fedora Project announced the Preview Release of Fedora 11 (codenamed Leonidas). This preview will be followed by a release candidate (scheduled for a May 12 appearance), with the final version hitting the streets on May 26.

So what new features can we expect to see in Fedora 11?

Recently, the KDE Project has put a concerted effort into improving the community experience. In October, Lisa covered the relaunch of the KDE Forums, while new real world events such as Camp KDE and the upcoming joint Akademy/GUADEC Desktop Summit in Gran Canaria gives KDE fans a chance to meet in person.

The KDE team recently announced the KDE Brainstorm initiative. KDE Brainstorm, in practice, works much like Dell's IdeaStorm -- community members of all walks of life are invited to chip in their ideas for new and improved features and functions, with the wider community voting on (and fleshing out) these ideas. Ideas that generate enough interest are then reviewed further by developers, who work to make them happen.

This week, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit began accepting proposals for its upcoming event. The event, aimed at encouraging interaction between KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC developer conference attendees, gives prospective speakers the opportunity to bring their passion to a more diverse audience.

I have a confession to make. Sometimes, even when you've been trained in the intricacies of searching every database known to man, you can still outright miss really obvious things in a simple Google search. When I was fresh out of library school, I resurrected one of the library's catalog terminals, an old Bondi Blue iMac, with Yellow Dog Linux and KDE. I spent days locking down the KDE desktop, so that if the browser displaying the catalog was somehow shut down (or crashed) it would automatically restart. I spent a few more days making sure that most patrons couldn't access anything but the browser (never underestimate the general public, or the havoc that stray keystrokes, however innocent, can bring).

It wasn't that the KDE Kiosk tool didn't exist at the time. I simply missed it. Yes, I was a bad systems librarian for missing it, and then spending days (happily, but still...) locking down the desktop and reinventing the wheel.

With the release of KDE 4, Kiosk sadly fell into a state of limbo. Now, however, KDE developer Ian Geiser wants to bring it back to life on KDE 4.

One of the goals put forth for Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope at the last Developer Summit, the development of a unified, hands-off notification display, has finally made an appearance in the testing release, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

The new notification display is designed to behave similarly regardless of desktop environment, and deliver notifications in an non-intrusive manner. An overview of what Shuttleworth calls attention-management guidelines is outlined on the Ubuntu wiki, describing how to design notifications that get the user's attention, inform, and then effortlessly get out of the way.

The development team working in this area is aware of at least 35 applications that need extra attention to work well with the new system, and its current focus is to address these issues and identify other applications with similar quirks.

Via OSNews comes word that the developers bringing Chrome to Linux have opted to use GTK over Qt as the browser's framework.

The development team's decision wasn't an easy one. The questions they addressed about Chrome's appearance and behavior, what end-users need and expect, and how to make it work smoothly on the Linux desktop are highly subjective, and in some cases, emotionally charged. The FAQ on the Chromium developer's site states that while both toolkits are capable of doing the job (WebKit handles most rendering with the exception of some form controls and dialogs), the team opted for GTK due to their level of familiarity with it.

Google's Summer of Code (SoC) Program has united students interested in open source with projects and mentors for several years now. The intiative's goal is to foster interest in open source software while exposing students to real-world software development processes. It's easy to see, based on how enthusiastically some projects embrace the annual event, that the students aren't the only ones who benefit from the program.

This week, both KDE and GNOME announced that development teams under their respective umbrellas wishing to submit project ideas and mentor students this summer were able to do so.

This also means interested students can get a sneak peek at potential projects and mentors. The list of projects (and mentors) won't be finalized until mid-March, but seeing as students only have two weeks to submit their applications, an advance project screening might prove helpful.

Last month's Technology Review featured a piece on semantic computing. Semantic technology -- whether it's applied on the web or the desktop -- seems almost impossibly complex, as it tries to bring some very human traits of relating and connecting information to a machine environment. The artificial intelligence field, relatively speaking, is in its infancy, and since the human brain is largely an indistinguishable mix of biology and culture, it would seem semantic technology would be confined to psychology departments and computer science labs.

That isn't the case, of course. And when you consider that semantic technology deals with computers and people, and that any technology or study ultimately benefits from larger participant pools, it's little wonder that the Nepomuk project is open source and now even comes integrated with the KDE desktop.

If you were unable to attend (or follow along with) the events at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, the highlights and more controversial proposals are now being discussed in the wider community.

One proposal for Ubuntu's Jaunty release was to unify notification display and interaction between GNOME and KDE. It's an idea that's been met with nearly every reaction imaginable, but Mark Shuttleworth has a very reassuring post on his blog that explains some of the reasoning behind this proposal.