Two years ago the development team of the popular Amarok audio player for KDE put themselves to work. A few days ago they released version 2 to rock the world.

Slackware is widely regarded as the oldest active Linux distributions. Right on time for Christmas, the distro, which once served as a basis for (open) SUSE, is available in a new version.

Dates for lectures at the first Akademy extension, “Camp KDE”, (Jan 17 to 23, 2009) in Jamaica have been set. Dates for the first KDE-Gnome conference in Gran Canaria have also been agreed, (July 3 to 11, 2009) along with a location.

KDE 4.2 Beta1 (a.k.a. "Caterpillar") provides a new user experience: messaging, wallpaper via plug-ins, and Vi input mode for KWrite and Kate.

In May 2008 at Linuxtag in Berlin, Nat Friedman had presented SUSE Studio, with which you can build your own Linux distro with just a few mouse clicks. SUSE Studio images are now available for the Eee 701 PC.

The OpenBSD project has released version 4.4 of the free Unix derivative. New in this version are drivers for Intel and AMD chips, and support for platforms such as UltraSparc IV/ T1/ T2 and Fujitsu SPASRC64-V/ VI/ VIII.

After much advance notice and successful pilot projects it is now official: From 2009, Russia will provide its high and primary schools with Linux software. Around 1500 schools will be converted this year.

In his keynote at the Qt Developer Days 2008, Matthias Ettrich covered the upcoming versions 4.5 and 4.6 of Qt due to release the beginning and end of 2009, respectively.

The KDE project wants more contact with its users: After the recent work on a User-Wiki, KDE has now opened a user forum, complete with forum software published under GPLv3 license.

After a few beta versions and months of news blackout, Nvidia has now released a robust version of its proprietary graphics card driver for Linux. Driver version 177.80 is to include 25 enhancements, among them the highly awaited support for GeForce GTX series cards.