It is a while now since Akademy 2010, KDE's annual conference, came to a close. There were a huge number of blogs and articles about what happened and it is safe to say that the latest conference was a success. Many attendees noted how smoothly everything ran, thanks to the KDE organizers and the local team. The local team did an awesome job, not only during the conference itself but also during the many months of thought and hard work before Akademy. The Dot managed to catch up with some key players in the local team to get their take on the KDE invasion of Tampere and find out what it is like to organize such a large event.

Today, KDE updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1, new releases bringing a number of important bugfixes on top of 4.5.0. 4.5.0 was released only three weeks ago and receives monthly service updates. 4.5.1 is the first in this series of bugfix and translation updates. These releases improve stability and the user experience further, while not bringing major new features or bigger changes to the user interface.

In the second episode of the new Behind KDE series of interviews with KDE sysadmins, we meet KDE's "identity expert", Ben Cooksley - the guy behind the new identity.kde.org, which will be launched next week.

Ben is one of the leaders involved in setting up key parts of the new git infrastructure. Normally he's quiet and avoids publicity - another reason to put him in the spotlight. This interview even contains one of the rare pictures that are available of Ben.

Ben is also one of the people behind the KDE Forums - he is the one who isn't scared of terms like LDAP and Gosa and can write bug-free sysadmin shell scripts blindly. He's the only one who does everything with Grace.

Intrigued? Confused? Bored? Educate yourself and liven up your day with this latest interview from Behind KDE.

Over on his blog Sebastian Kügler talks about the status of Akonadi, how the migration of Kontact to Akonadi is going, and in general where the direction of development is leading.

As a status update, sebas notes "Initially, we had planned to release the new Kontact along with the rest of the KDE Applications 4.5. This did not quite work out, so we pushed the release back a bit, and are planning to release it along with one of the 4.5.x updates. The current plan is to release the Akonadi port of Kontact still this year. In contrast to our usual releases, this step is a bit different. We want to avoid hassle for the end-user as much as possible, so we are extending the beta phase until we think the quality is sufficient for the high demands of users, which is especially important in Kontact, where you likely spend a lot of your time."

KDE e.V., the organisation supporting KDE has published the quarterly report for the second quarter of 2010. The report covers many KDE events held all over the world, such as the Brazilian Akademy-BR, which was held this year for the first time. Akademy-ES, the Spanish KDE conference is another topic of the report. The report also holds information such as new additions to the KDE e.V. membership and its financial status.

You are now witnessing the kickoff interview of a new limited series of Behind KDE. This series will show you who the KDE Sysadmins are and also introduce you to the people directly around that dedicated team. In the coming weeks you will get to know the somewhat weird creatures that work night and day to provide all the KDE contributors with state of the art infrastructure and make sure the transition to Git will be made possible.

The KMyMoney team is pleased to announce the release of the first stable version built on KDE Platform 4. With over 15 months of development, this is the starting point for a series of KMyMoney versions leveraging the stellar features offered by the new Platform.

The new software from KDE's recent 4.5 Release Day has been well received by the technical media with widespread positive reviews and recognition of the focus on quality for this set of releases.

Read on for a summary.

KDE software has traditionally been strongest in Europe and South America. With the growth of events such as Camp KDE and many key contributors calling North America home, KDE is increasing its presence in this region.

Among upcoming highlights, KDE will be at Ohio Linux Fest on September 10-12 later this year. Read on for more details.

KDE today celebrates its semi-annual release event, making available new releases of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Development Platform and a large number of applications available in their 4.5.0 versions.

In this release, the KDE team focused on stability and completeness of the Desktop experience. More than 16,000 bugs have been fixed, and many feature requests have been filled. The result for the user is a system that feels faster, takes less time to "think", and works more reliably. The large number of bug fixes goes accompanied with many parts that have got an extra portion of tender loving care. Plasma 4.5.0's new notification system is one example here. It is designed to get less in your way, yet to support your workflow as smoothly as possible. Visually, the striking monochromatic icons make for a more consistent look in the notification area. A highlight of the KDE Applications 4.5.0 is surely Marble, which can now be used for map routing as well as viewing. The Konqueror web browser can now also use the WebKit engine to render its content. The KDE Development Platform 4.5.0 offers a new generic cache for applications that need high-speed access to certain data, such as icons or other pre-rendered artwork. The new KSharedDataCache speeds up loading of many components, while the new HTTP scheduler is optimized for concurrent access to web servers, and makes loading of pages in Konqueror and other parts using the KIO HTTP mechanism faster.

Today's releases are the first in the 4.5 series and will be followed with updated versions approximately monthly that will focus on fixing bugs. The next feature releases are planned for January 2011. If you would like to test-drive 4.5.0, you can do so by installing the packages that should be made available by your operating system vendor. You can also choose to build 4.5.0 from source, the nitty-gritty of that can be found on TechBase. For the impatient, there is also a Live CD available.