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 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.

Kubuntu 9.10 CDs are now available for pre-order on the Kubuntu Shipit site.

Can't wait a month for the CD to be delivered? Download the release candidate now for one last round of testing. Thanks to everyone who helped test the RC releases, see you again next week for the real thing!

All hands on deck for the release candidate CD (and DVD and USB and upgrades) testing day. See the ISO tracker for what needs tested (duplicates tests always welcome) and join us in #kubuntu-devel to coordinate.

Kubuntu 9.10 is on the final lap with freeze coming next week followed by the release candidate and then the final thing. I'm pleased to say it's shaping up to be a decent release. Of course compared to 9.04 that isn't hard, at least it connects to the network fairly reliably. The trouble with being a KDE distro is that when KDE is crappy we end up being crappy too, on the bright side, when KDE rocks, we rock with it.

We have KDE integration with OpenOffice which I think is great. We have social website integration in a bunch of places. We have a preview of Netbook which is perfectly usable, made from Plasma Netbook, packages compiled on ARM and USB Creator. We brought standardisation to visual notifications (which involved freedesktop.org being whipped into shape). Our installer is bling bling thanks to Nuno for his distro love project. There's a handy message indicator which I think is lovely and beats the pants out of what's available currently. We finally have a half decent user setup tool, userconfig. Translations are much improved (read: not broken compared to upstream).

Not everything went my preferred way, the world has yet to appreciate my genius in all matters. I wanted Arora as the default web browser on the not unreasonable grounds that it can read slashdot, but others wanted to stay with Konqueror for its better KDE integration and won the day. We also had an epic battle between Quassel and Konversation with Quassel winning narrowly, Konversation is still in main of course and has good mindshare outside KDE fans. The message indicator is cool but Plasma folks want to do one with different technologies, somehow our messages didn't indicate enough with the person in Plasma who knew this until too late for that. I didn't find time to work on system-config-printer-kde, one day, one day.

Outside KDE I'm glad to see Intel drivers working well enough to let me have compositing turned on for the first time, yay. Intel drivers are so keen to keep you at your computer they won't let you log off, we're still working on that one.

Qt 4.6 is in the Kubuntu Experimental PPA incase you hadn't spotted it. In the main archive we have a new Qt-SDK package which will bring in all the tools you need to do development with the world's finest GUI library.

One last change, the Konqueror about: page, which we've patched for a while now to give it a search box now points to a Google custom search, use it if you want to help Kubuntu pay for itself (use the search box in the browser top right if you don't).

Three more weeks of beastie squishing and testing, join us in #kubuntu-devel if you want to help out.

Nearly Beta time for Kubuntu. We need testers to grab the ISO images and test them. Also upgrade testing is needed. See the ISO tester for what needs tested and join us on #kubuntu-devel to help out.

Tests also include the shiny new Kubuntu Netbook edition, which contrary to some reports has been made in full consultation with the lovely people from Plasma Netbook. It'll be a tech preview rather than a give-to-your-family release but that's why it needs lots of testing now.

Ubuntu Developer Week is under way with a whole week of IRC sessions on a range of development topics. Me and Aurelien are running a Write-Your-First-Plasmoid session at 20:00UTC today. See you in #ubuntu-classroom

Recently Aurelien Gateau of the Canonical Desktop Experience team implemented the Message Indicator for KDE and Konversation. Now if you get messages when you're away from your computer or not looking at IRC it'll put them into the message indicator when you can happily not get distracted by them (unlike popup notifications) but can easily find them when you want to.

Nobody has pinged me, I can get on with something else

Someone has mentioned my name, but I'm busy, I can easily ignore it.

When I want to know who's been trying to get hold of me I have this handy list, clicking on a name will take you to the channel or query window.

It's all a vast improvement on the popup notifications in my opinion, but feedback is welcome. Hopefully the applet can go into kdeplasa-addons when it's ready. Other apps need patches, KMail, Kopete and Quassel seem like obvious candidates, talk to Aurelien if that seems interesting.

Incase you missed it, the whole of top project hosting site Launchpad.net is now available and accepting contributions. Complaints about it not having source code available always confused me, I never heard them about the once-open-now-closed Sourceforge.net and KDE seems perfectly happy to make use of proprietary websites like Google or kde-look.org. But now there is no such excuse, Launchpad is the easiest way to host a project or even a quick script you hacked up that might be useful to someone else because you can set it up with a 1 page form then just bzr push.

Ubuntu's new translations coordinator David Planella is holding a Kubuntu Translations Love Day in #kubuntu-devel tomorrow (Wed 29th). Do drop by at any time and let us know all your i18n problems.

Occationally people ask if they can use Oxygen icons on their website or in their (non-KDE) application. The answer is that of course you can, it's all lovely free software, you just need to include the LGPL and credit the Oxygen dudes. I wrote this handy guide for people who want to do so.

Aurelien Gateau and the rest of the Canonical Desktop Experience folks have been working super hard to get the visual notifications on KDE and Gnome united as part of their Project Ayatana. This involves uniting the Galago and KDE VisualNotification DBus interfaces. Along the way freedesktop.org had to get fixed to make such cooperation possible. But now the KDE half of the changes are in (KDE trunk and Kubuntu Karmic) and Gnome apps running in KDE show visual notifications just like KDE apps. There's minor issues to be fixed and the other way round (KDE apps running on Gnome) still has some patches to be finished & crashes to be fixed but it works in a lot of cases.

Gnome app on KDE. Why Pidgin, you fit into the KDE desktop now.

KDE app on Gnome. Amarok, your popups are so Gnomeish.