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Calligra sees improvement in read-only mode handling and initial code for COffice (Calligra for mobile); Fill Tool is ported to strokes KDE-PIM adds an option to limit the item age in Google Calendar; introduces theme manager. Work on Nepomuk Service 2. Wacom tablet management sees large GUI rework and more utility classes. Artikulate adds course skeleton. KDevelop includes updated Branch Manager dialog.

Dot Categories: DeveloperIn this week's KDE Commit-Digest:

A web hosting company has publicly shared their thoughts on the Btrfs file-system for Linux. While often discussed as the next-generation Linux file-system, Btrfs isn't fully baked for use in a production world quite yet.

Last week, I attended my first OpenStack Summit as part of a team from Red Hat helping to launch a new community distribution of the popular open source infrastructure as a service (IaaS) project.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsThe Akademy 2013 Program Committee is proud to present the Akademy 2013 Presentation Schedule. Reflecting the scope of KDE, the schedule includes a wealth of interesting, timely and valuable topics. From the proposals submitted, 32 were selected to address currently relevant topics of most interest to the KDE Community.

Rust, the new programming language being developed by the Mozilla project, has a number of interesting features. One that stands out is the focus on safety. There are clear attempts to increase the range of errors that the compiler can detect and prevent, and thereby reduce the number of errors that end up in production code.

During my second year at Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT) Women's University, the first of its kind in India as well as in South-East Asia, I attended a workshop on Python and Orca by Krishnakant Mane. My classmates and I were novices to free and open source software (FOSS) and astonished when we saw a visually impaired person using a computer with the same ease as we did. I was aware of Linux and had learned the basics of Unix as a freshman, but I had never used Ubuntu, which I thought might be command driven. It had a great interface and there was a lot of new technology for us to learn. That day not only was our class introduced to a new world of open source, but so was the university as a whole. 

Dot Categories: Graphics and ArtKO GmbH announces extensive support services for Krita, the award-winning graphics application. Krita is an advanced paint application with a complete set of professional paint tools that can handle extremely large images effortlessly. It is particularly well-suited for special effects work in the movie industry.

Chemistry is not the most open field of scientific endeavor; in fact, as I began working more in the area (coming from a background in physics), I was surprised with the norms in the field. As a PhD student way back in 2003, I simply wanted to draw a 3D molecular structure on my operating system of choice (Linux), and be able to save an image for a paper/poster discussing my research. This proved to be nearly impossible, and in 2005 a group of like-minded researchers got together at a meeting of the American Chemical Society and formed an unorganization: The Blue Obelisk (named after their meeting place in San Diego).

The final release of X.Org Server 1.15 isn't likely until September or October of this year, but Keith Packard decided to do this 1.15 snapshot to take care of a previously reported security vulnerability. Aside from closing out the CVE, there's various other updates too. There isn't anything too extremely exciting about the 1.15 development state but there's some fixes, X Input and XKB updates, and a new ZoomModes monitor option for the X.Org Server configuration.

Unity Technologies has announced that it has dropped support for Adobe Flash from its cross-platform Unity game development toolset, citing the declining popularity of the technology among developers and inconsistent support from Adobe. "As of today, we will stop selling Flash deployment licenses," Unity founder and CEO David Helgason wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. "We will continue to support our existing Flash customers throughout the 4.x cycle."

AMD has added full-fledged system-on-chips (SOCs) to its Embedded G-Series integrated x86 processor family, by merging the APU (CPU + GPU) and I/O controller hub functions into a single chip. The Linux-ready AMD Embedded G-Series SOC incorporates up to four “Jaguar” CPU cores (clocked as high as 2GHz), a Radeon 8000 GPU, video accelerators, and an I/O controller, and is available in five versions featuring 9 to 25W TDPs.

Inforce Computing has unveiled a $149 Linux- and Android-friendly Pico-ITX single-board computer (SBC) based on a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor. The tiny SBC comes with 2GB RAM and 4GB flash memory, and provides HDMI out, MIPI-CSI camera input, WiFi and Bluetooth wireless, a GbE port, and numerous other functions.

Last week, members of the Plasma team met in Nürnberg, Germany to discuss open questions on the road to Plasma Workspaces 2. The meeting was kindly hosted by SUSE and supported by the KDE e.V.. For the Plasma team, the meeting came at a perfect point in time: porting of Plasma to a new graphics has commenced, is in fact well under way, and has raised some questions that are best discussed in a high-bandwidth setting in person.

Typically, a Linux-based system has the following structure of volatile memory. The first section is filled with a Linux kernel loader, which in turn can be executed in several stages. For example, a small-size bootloader is copied to the CPU internal memory, performs initialization of external memory and copies the second-level loader to the external RAM. The second-level loader (for example, U-Boot) copies the Linux kernel to RAM and hands over control to it. Finally, the system launches custom applications stored in the last section of the Flash memory. So obviously, it's necessary to update the memory sections with user applications and the OS kernel.

I’d heard some time ago of a couple of Stanford Professors running an online course in Machine Learning, with over 100,000 students registered for their course worldwide. Fortunately for me, 10gen—the company behind the wildly successful MongoDB database—started doing free training using the same delivery method.

Here's a job title you may not have considered: Open Source Officer. The CIA hires Open Source Officers (OSOs) to collect and analyze publicly available information in foreign affairs to provide unique insights into national security issues. OSOs may specialize in an area of the world (country or region) or a specific topic (like, emerging media technologies or cyber security).

This year, the Fest will be held on April 27th & 28th in 2013, from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. both days. People often arrive early to chat over coffee or to help with Fest set-up. There's even an after-Fest party on Saturday. Stay informed by subscribing to the Fest mailing list.

Inforce Computing has unveiled a $149 Linux- and Android-friendly Pico-ITX boardset based on a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro APQ8064 processor. The tiny IFC6410 module is equipped with 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and provides HDMI, LVDS, a MIPI-CSI camera interface, built-in WiFi/Bluetooth, and numerous other functions.

Virtualization is now a staple of the modern enterprise. As more and more shops switch to the virtual paradigm, managing those new virtual resources is a critical part of any deployment. For admins using Microsoft- or VMware-based hypervisors, powerful management tools are available to keep their virtual houses in order.