While the European Linux scene has been busy with KDE and Qt, a relatively unnoticed but important gathering occurred in the U.S. to determine the future of the GNOME desktop: the GNOME Boston Summit 2009.

At the Maemo Summit in Amsterdam Nokia gave away 300 N900 Internet tablets to KDE and Qt developers. The result is the first porting of KDE programs to Maemo 5.

Cheese is a simple yet practical graphic tool that has been available to Gnome users for quite a while. Kamoso now provides KDE fans with their own solution.

The official KDE Project currently consists of 4.2 million lines of code. Cornelius Schumacher has applied the lines to individual projects and published the stats.

About-information from developer profiles, desktop searches in online forums, an interface library and update notification of web page content bring the concept of a social desktop a step closer to reality.

The now released test version of openSUSE 11.2 is to be the last beta. The first release candidate will appear mid-October.

Like openSUSE, the Ubuntu project has released its first beta version of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The final version should appear October 29.

The Gentoo project is celebrating its tenth anniversary, which inspired the Gentoo-Ten team to produce a special DVD that is now available in a test version.