The boards of KDE e.V. and the GNOME Foundation have issued a call to co-host Akademy and GUADEC, the flagship conferences of the KDE and GNOME projects respectively, during the Summer of 2009.

This would be the first time that the conferences are to be co-hosted. The combined conference is expected to have around 800 attendees, being one of the biggest meetings of free software developers in the world.

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Next week the members of the GNOME Mobile initiative will descend on Austin for the 3rd GNOME Mobile summit, which will be held as part of the Linux Foundation collaboration summit. On the agenda are the creation of a roadmap for the initiative, and encouraging industry participants to collaborate in the community on projects of joint interest.

For more information, see the foundation press release.

The Libre Graphics Meeting gathers developers and users of free software graphics applications together every year. The conference, now in its 3rd edition, has become hugely important to the volunteer developers of the projects involved. It has led to increased co-operation between projects, and has resulted in improvement on features like inter-application drag & drop, colour management and resource sharing.

This year, the organisers need your help. They have just launched a campaign to raise $20,000 in two weeks to help cover the travel costs of people who could not otherwise attend the conference. You can also help by embedding a badge to increase awareness of the campaign in your website.

GNOME 2.22 has been released, bringing a whole ream of new apps, features and improvements to GNOME users.

Among the most significant additions in this release are the addition of a photo and video taking application that integrates with your webcam called Cheese, a new VNC viewer called Vinagre and the addition of an advanced and integrated IDE, Anjuta.

Notable improvements are the improved support for DVD playback, subtitles and VLC support in the Totem video player, an improved international clock applet, Google calendar integration in Evolution, improved accessibility for web apps and a whole new library to support networked file-systems.

The second annual report of the GNOME Foundation is available for download (1860 KB, PDF) now. The report aims to bring a summary of GNOME community activities in 2007. It includes a review of the year, accounts of various community activities and events around the world, and foundation development actions during the year.

The GNOME Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation will increase their collaboration to improve developer support and user experience. As part of this partnership, the Mozilla Foundation joins the GNOME Foundation advisory board and announces a grant of $10,000 to be spent on the improvement of accessibility.
Read the announcement for more information.

BOSTON, Mass—February 28, 2008—GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference will be held in Istanbul, Turkey from the 7th to the 12th of July 2008. The conference will bring together the GNOME development and user community and key personalities from businesses and governments, to discuss the future direction of the GNOME project.

The call for participation in the conference is now open, and will close on March 30th. A variety of presentations and session can be proposed. “Emerging GNOME trends set the dialog at GUADEC. It was Online Desktop last year, and GNOME Mobile the year before that.” said the program chair, Behdad Esfahbod, “We are excited to see what the community brings to GUADEC this year.”

The GNOME Foundation is running an accessibility outreach program, offering USD$50,000 to be split among individuals. This program will promote software accessibility awareness among the GNOME community as well as harden and improve the overall quality of the GNOME accessibility offering. Read the full announcement.

PyChess Philidor 0.8 has been released. This happens after nearly a year
coding, and a rewrite of large parts of the codebase for stability and
features. If you haven't already beaten fruit, gnuchess, pychess-engine
and your friend with PyChess, now is time to!

The most prominent new features include:
- - - Online chess play on the FICS servers.
- - - Ability to undo and pause chess games.
- - - Support for UCI engines like Fruit, Glaurung and Shredder.
- - - Full list of changes: http://code.google.com/p/pychess/wiki/PhilidorRelease

Downloads: http://www.gnomefiles.com/app.php/PyChess

Wine-doors 0.1.2 has been released, this release sees vastly improved exception handling thanks to Andrew Stormont who joined the project after 0.1.1, along with some new features tweaks and various other fixes. We’re also syncing the repos from SVN nightly, this means that we can release apps faster between now and the finalisation of the new application database which is currently being worked on by Sam Taylor.

Originally based on the Freerock GNOME project, GNOME.SlackBuild (GSB) provides the latest GNOME Desktop (2.20.3) for Slackware Linux. It includes both a binary distribution, as well as a complete GNOME source build system. The GSB project has been re-vitalised by a new development team who have, over the past several months of hard work, re-engineered the GSB source build system and brought the project back to the forefront of the GNOME packaging projects for Slackware. This project also supports and provides binary packages for x86_64 ports of Slackware, such as Slamd64.

For information about the project, screenshots, and downloads, please see http://gnomeslackbuild.org

GCstar is an application for managing personal collections.

Main new features included in version 1.3.0 are:

• Multiple selection for items in list to modify or delete them together.
• Multiple selection in results of a web search to insert all the items to current collection.
• Board games collections with fetch plugins.
• Better look for picture mode and some special effects such as reflection.
• Tagging for items with keywords.
• Specification of date format by user.
• Spelling checker.

The candidates were announced. This year, to make life easier for the candidates, the Membership Committee formulated the questions which will be answered on the GNOME Foundation mail list.

In LugRadio Season 5 Episode 5 - "A Quality Production", Jono Bacon, Stuart Largefridge, Chris Proctor and Adam "Err..." Sweet interview Havoc Pennington and Colin Walters from Red Hat about the Gnome Online Desktop project, discuss whether we need rockstar programmers when there is hard, unglamorous work to do, consider whether the weirder side of Second Life is inhabited by freaks, electrocute themselves again in another quick distro round-up, behave smugly because LugRadio was chosen as the best Linux podcast in the Linux Format magazine Christmas issue and read out a dazzling array of emails to the show, with the best winning a limited edition LugRadio T-shirt, at last.

You, my friend, can avail yourself of too much excitement to handle by downloading it from http://www.lugradio.org/episodes/88".

After almost two years of development, we announce the first release candidate of Gambas 2.

We're making this announcement now in hopes of attracting more testers users to the project during the release candidate cycle, to help us find any bugs we might have missed.