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What a groovy week, no matter how busy it was! Yesterday I found out that among 3 other people, I am now an official member of the KDE e.V.. Thanks everyone for the support and the votes, as well as a congratulations to Gary Greene, Paul Adams, and Alexis Menard. I am honored to be a part of the wonderful KDE community and look forward to many, many, years of working together to make KDE the best!

On top of this news, I found out this morning that I have been approved as an Ubuntu Core Developer. This means that I now get to upload to the Main repositories, hopefully providing our current Kubuntu core developers a little relieve during the Intrepid cycle and in the future. I took the long and lazy route to core developer by taking my sweet arse time and just enjoying everyone in the community and enjoying the work that I have done. I look forward to the many, many, years of Kubuntu development.

With this news, I have to give a big thank you to Jonathan Riddell, Sarah Hobbs, Scott Kitterman, Lydia Pintscher, Celeste Lyn Paul, Anne-Marie Mahfouf, Wendy Van Craen, Tom Albers, Rafael Fernández López, Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas, and the entire KDE and Ubuntu communities, THANK YOU!

YES! It took me long enough with all of the work that was going on at the same time, but I would like to present you the ability to test out KDE 4.1 Beta 1 in Kubuntu Hardy right now! It seems we have worked out a majority of the quirks, but I can’t promise you that you may not get an overwrite issue with dpkg just yet. I do think we got them all covered, but you may have something nobody else does, so we didn’t catch it. We have been testing these packages since Saturday/Sunday and I have updated them as people reported issues.

To top it off, I have also included the KDE 4 PIM packages that contain applications such as Kontact, KMail, KOrganizer, Akregator, and more! The package name to get all of that is kdepim-kde4.

So, to install and test these new packages, please add the following to your Kubuntu Hardy /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main

Once you have done that and you already have a previous KDE 4 version installed, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Otherwise type the following:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop

Note you may need to install kdebase-runtime-data-common in order to get Application directory icons under the Kickoff menu.

To install the KDE 4 PIM packages, type the following in Konsole:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install kdepim-kde4

I would recommend that you backup your ~/.kde4 directory if there is anything that you might need, and then delete the ~/.kde4 directory to limit any quirks you may receive. After you have done this, update away, reboot for good measure, select KDE 4 from KDM, and enjoy!

I ask that you join us in #kubuntu-kde4 on IRC (Freenode) to discuss any issues that you may have. We can all work together to see if the issue we are seeing is a packaging/Kubuntu only/KDE 4.1 Beta 1 only issue and if not, file some reports on bugs.kde.org.

Thanks everyone for your patience! I will continue to work on the extragear packages and roll them out within the next day or so. Those should be fairly easy

Have fun!

It seems the popular question these past two days are, “Are there any KDE 4.1 Beta 1 packages yet?”

The answer is, soon! I am working on building the packages now and will hopefully have them all complete within the next couple of days. There are a lot of changes that need to be done to the packages for the 4.1 Betas, so I am taking my time making sure to catch all of them before releasing the packages to the world.

A little patience is all I ask and as soon as they are complete, I will blog about them here and also keep checking Kubuntu.org for a release announcement. Thanks!

Wow, what a day! Jorge Castro did a smashing job getting the OpenWeek setup this time around. I was totally impressed and intrigued with today’s talks and watched everyone of them. The participants were amazing! I saw some of the most thought out questions, comments, and ideas today that totally blew me away.

I gave the Kubuntu Development talk today that had the greatest participation I have ever had in my previous OpenWeek talks. Great questions and interaction by everyone present! Thanks for making today such a success and I hope you all continue checking the talks out this entire week. On Wednesday, April 30 at 20:00 UTC, I will give an introduction to KDE 4 and its future and on Friday, May 2 at 21:00 UTC, I will give a talk about the Ubuntu Documentation Project. If you are interested in either talk, I sure hope you show up! For those of you who have been wondering how to contribute, I urge you to really check out the Documentation talk, as it is one of the easier ways for you to get involved.

Once again, a huge thanks and a hug to Jorge as well as a big thanks and hugs to Jono Bacon, Lars Wirzenius, Brian Murray, Pedro Villavicencio, Leann Ogasawara, and James Westby…You all did a smashing job!

Tomorrow there are even more great talks lined up, so make sure you check out the schedule and get involved! Thanks again everyone for making OUR community rock!

Kubuntu 8.04, the Hardy Heron, has been released.

What is up with those old Foreigner lyrics? Well Kubuntu 8.04 was released with two versions. The first version is the stable KDE 3 release featuring the KDE 3.5.9 desktop. This is the same Kubuntu many of you have grown accustomed to over the past couple of years. It is a bit more stable, a tad bit polished, and ready for you to download. The second version is the KDE 4 Remix. This version is for those of you who like to live on the edge a bit and enjoy watching a development cycle. So if you are this type of person, put the children to bed, and download the remix now!

Thanks to the entire KDE, Kubuntu, and Ubuntu communities who made this possible. Every single one of you involved totally rock!