Open Source > KDEEssentials

After much heated debate over whether the 4.0 and 4.1 releases were ready for general use, the KDE project has released the first beta of 4.2, codenamed “Caterpillar”.

Okay, before I begin writing about plasmoids, we have to get one thing straight – what on Earth is a plasmoid? A plasmoid is an applet developed with KDE’s new Plasma application development environment.

Canonical has updated its flagship Ubuntu Linux operating system to version 8.10 “Intrepid Ibex” with the KDE-centric distribution, Kubuntu, the first to ship with KDE4 as the default desktop.

With the recent release of version 4.0, the KDE open source project has garnered a lot of international attention. One of KDE's lead developers, and best known personality, Aaron J Seigo is in Australia to speak at this year's Linux.conf.au on his vision for better desktop computing. Computerworld spoke with Seigo, a native of Calgary, Canada, about his view of the world and how a little bit of innovation will permanently change how people interact with software.

After six months of development since the release of the much publicized 4.0, the KDE project has unveiled version 4.1 which includes many new bug fixes and feature enhancements.

After years of development and preparation, the KDE open source desktop community celebrated the much-anticipated version 4.0 release this month, but the word among the project's leaders is version 4.1 will only be a further six to nine months away.

The KDE project has announced the first release candidate of the pending 4.1 release due out at the end of July.

While the industry is distracted by the ongoing tussle between Microsoft and OpenOffice.org over document formats, the KDE project is quietly preparing the next generation of its own office suite, KOffice, for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.