Ubuntu Brainstorm is undergoing the much waited upgrade to Ideatorrent. With more than half of it done, Nicolas (nand) and Chris Jones (Ng) are working hard as ever to make it up and running perfectly! 
Be ready to roll at 1800UTC (approximated, and liable to change) when the baby is ready to sail!! 
This weekend, KDE Forum mentor msoeken will conduct the 3rd session of klassrooms. This session will involve fixing krazy2 bugs.
The participants will get to learn about sevaral KDE development activities. They will learn something about:
They will get a chance to work on their favorite application and learn tricks to write better code.
Prerequisites: The participants should have some Qt skills and should have some ideas regarding KDE development.
To apply for this kourse, reply to this thread here: http://forum.kde.org/showthread.php?tid=24491
Hurry!! 5 out of 6 seats have been taken already!
Do you think that you have significant amount of experience to work as a mentor at KDE forums? Then you should consider joining the team! Read on…
What do mentors do?
Mentors are responsible for conducting Klassroom sessions. For those who aren’t familiar with the KDE Forum klassroom concept, read this post.
You will be conducting a “Kourse” (lesson) at the Klassroom area. The lesson can be something like “Fixing XYZ bugs” or “Documentation kourse for project ABC”. You will guide a team of “students” (who will apply for your kourse beforehand). Your motive will not only be to contribute to KDE but help them learn how to do so.
Why are mentors needed?
With the great success of the klassroom concept, we are looking forward to have more sessions (at higher frequency). For that, we would need more contributors who can undertake and organize sessions. Existing mentors are listed here.
What all would you have to do?
After joining the mentors group, you will have access to the mentor team forums and moderational access to the Klassroom forum. You can start by posting a draft of the kourse you will be conducting, which can be reviewed by other mentors and forum staff. Once ready for shipping, your draft will be announced for public viewing and you can start with the kourse at the Active Kourses area. Your kourse can be based on any of the following:
At present, you would be handling a small team of 5-6 students, though this limit may go up depending upon the interested candidates and kourse popularity. After joining, you can also optionally have a “Mentor” badge for your username.
How can I apply?
If you are interested to contribute, you can send a PM to neverendingo (requires registration on the forums) or find him on IRC: channel #kde-forum, network freenode.
In case you send a PM, don’t forget to include a short introduction of yourself and your plans (if any) for upcoming kourses.
Thanks to Sayamindu (who else?!) my blog feeds will now come up on Planet FLOSS India.
Btw, I am Sayak Banerjee. I’m a 20 year old student, doing B.Tech CSE from Jaypee Engineering college. I work with the KDE team, and I’m a part of the Ubuntu Community (You can find me as LinuxIsInnovation on all forums and as glade88 on IRC). I belong to that species which spends 18 hrs a day in front of the laptop, and I usually struggle to devote time to everything else.
I’ll be torturing you all with regular KDE forum updates.. please don’t shoot me 
Cheers and Happy New Year!
Following the first Kourse which is still hot Kourse 2 is already out into wild. Do you want to contribute to KDE, but not sure whether to jump into coding straight away? Then this is what you must check out!
Kourse 2 will be focussing on creating Plasma screencasts. Have some questions in mind? Let me answer a few of them
What are screencasts and how are they useful?
For those who don’t know already, screencasts are video recordings of your desktop, aimed towards creating (audio) visual HOW-TOs of anything, say configuring a widget to perform in a certain way.
Why and how are they useful? Well, screencasts can be thought of an easier way to demonstrate a tutorial, maybe in some way an alternative to extensive documentation. Imagine reading a 10 page guide to setup your desktop or watching a 5 minute video: guess which one’s easier? 
Want to see an example? Take a look at this.
How will we proceed with this?
Your mentor for the kourse will be einar, who will guide you through the whole process. This kourse will not need any coding (programming) skills. All you need is the recordmydesktop program and a vague idea how things should go in a screencast. If you think you need help with that, be free to ask for guidance, your mentor will be ready to help in the best possible way. Where should you ask? Let the kourse begin first..
What else should you know?
Well, you’d know most of the things as einar publishes his kourse draft. That would cover how to record your screencast (not only record it but make a good screencast). He would also explain to you other important characteristics of a screencast.
Where do the screencasts go once completed?
The screencasts will be uploaded to blip.tv – which hosts both free (OGG) and non-free (Flash) version of videos. You have to give your videos a kde4.2 tag on blip.tv video tags. Further instructions on einar’s draft.
How do I participate?
To participate in the Kourse 2 programme, you have to reply to this thread here: http://forum.kde.org/this-weekend-kourse-2-plasma-screencasts-t-22515.html (you have to register on the KDE Forum to do so)
Please note that we have kept a limit of 6 students who can participate in this programme. After we have 6 names on that thread, the thread will be closed, and so will the entries for this session. Unless we have a situation where one or more participants decline to contribute beforehand, we would not make any changes to the selection. Also, if we have more than 6 requests in the thread (in case we are not available to close the thread), the first 6 requests will be considered for participation.
Kourse 2 will not only be fun, but you would be contributing to a very aspect of KDE — documentation. So hurry!! Apply now before the entries are closed!
For any questions related to this programme, feel free to start a topic at the Feedback area of the forum. You can also find us on IRC – Channel #kde-forum on network freenode.
KDE Forum Klassroom Kourse 1 is in progress! This kourse is being led by msoeken & the topic for this is “Fixing KSnapshot bugs”.
The Kourse started with 5 bugs as aim. Students would be required to fix them and will be guided by msoeken while doing so.
But thanks to the KSnapshot developers, three of those bugs were found fixed already! Beta 2 indeed has many bugfixes.
msoeken came up with 4 wishlist bugs he had in “stock”, just in case if they are needed. So presently, Kourse 1 has 6 open challenges for it’s participants and the kourse is in progression. We have 5 students participating, among which, 2 of them found us on IRC and were willing to contribute. Since now there is a significant amount of work for the participants, the kourse may extend for a few days.
After the patches would be checked and found effective, msoeken would do what is planned.
So stay tuned!
References:
I made a small KDE 4.2 counter. The small icons in the counter indicate (left to right) a great interface, security (good ol’ *nix), ease of usage, customizability and support that KDE offers.
This one is just a static image. Click on the image to view the counter on my webserver.
You can download the counter from here. Please note that the counter would suit on pages with white background only. As I made it in a bit of a hurry, the oxygen tooltip was not given a transparent background.
Also, special thanks to Arne Kamola for helping out to make it better.
I’m pretty much excited about KDE 4.2, though beta 2 has been more than satisfactory
Changelog:
As I realized that one with a transparent background was needed (2 mails and a blog post asking for a dark background compatible one), I have changed the archives to work with any background color.
Enjoy!
For all those who don’t know already, we have the channel #kde-forum (Network: irc.freenode.net) set up.
What is the purpose of this channel?
What can I ask/discuss there?
Any forum related queries are welcome. You can discuss about all activities going on at the forums, Klassrooms and kourses (though the best place for kourse discussions would be at the kourse discussions area within the Klassroom forum), forum design as well as forum teams. You can definitely discuss registration problems, MyBB bugs (KDE Forum is powered by MyBB boards), forum/subforum requests, as well as user specific issues.
So all those who participate (and also those who don’t ) at KDE Forums are welcome to join us there.
We now have badgets for KDE Developers that go with your profile information next to your posts.
So if you want to be added to the Developers group, visit Group Memberships in your UserCP and select to join the Developers usergroup, explaining your role in KDE Development in the Reason area.
This weekend, KDE Forum will have it’s first Klassroom session. This one would be involving coding (patching/bug fixing).
msoeken will present 5 KSnapshot bugs and will help the participating students to fix them.
As this is the first session, a limit of 5 students has been kept.
If you wish to participate in the session, reply to this thread as soon as possible. The thread will be locked as soon as there are 5 participants (or in any case, the first 5 will be selected).
Also, don’t forget to read the prerequisites mentioned in the thread.
A son, brother and friend. An Infoscion. Enjoys programming and making small bits of apps here and there. Wants to conquer the world (well, who doesn't ;D). A geek who has an obsession for ponies. Loves acoustic and wants to play guitar sitting on the Hollywood hill one day!
KDE is a versatile software compilation for all platforms. It is an intuitive and powerful desktop environment that focuses on finding innovative solutions to old and new problems, and creating a vibrant, open atmosphere for experimentation.
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