The KDE team has just made the sources available for the first beta of KDE 4.10. It will take until next week to release that beta1 to the public but I had already decided to skip the Betas for the KDE releases and wait until a Release Candidate. I am afraid that I have very little time for absorbing any more time-consuming projects… like getting a KDE Beta built and tested for Slackware.

In exactly one week I will be traveling to India. Not a holiday, but a business trip to spend a week with my helpdesk team. I will give some training there and talk about “our” side of the work in the Netherlands where I work for the IT department on the ASML campus. My visit should be beneficial to our helpdesk team members who have never actually seen anything of the customer they are working so hard for. There will be plenty of room for socializing as well, and I hope to see something of Hyderabad and its suurroundings at least. I will try and order a meal of the original Hyderabadi Biryani, of which I have a recipe in my own blog as well. And pictures of course… I want to make a lot of photos while I am there.

But, preparation time for that trip is very short, because my employer gave an approval only this week, and that leaves less time for Slackware related stuff. As I said, no new KDE 4.10 beta packages. I have no idea if I will be on time with the KDE 4.9.4 packages which are due early December.

What I did manage, was to update my multilib repository for Slackware 14.0 (something I had forgotten when I updated the -current packages) so that you can try out the new Skype for Linux on a multilib Slackware 14.0. I will try using Skype while visiting India. And I will package a new version of Sigil, the EPUB book editor. For those who regularly update to my newer Calibre e-book management packages – there was no new release this friday because the developer Kovid Goyal took a week off (he lives in Mumbai, India and they had Diwali Festival over there).

I can’t leave you without at least informing you about a new and promising fork of UDEV software. Initiated by Gentoo developers, they are calling this “udev-ng“. You may have noticed in the past that I do not speak favourably about the band of Redhat developers who are trying to destroy anything that is not Redhat by forcing SystemD on everyone – alienating everyone they should be co-operating with and killing software which other distros depend on. With the prospect of an independent fork of UDEV (which Lennart Poettering and friends have merged into systemd with the intent of dropping support for it later) we in Slackware land stand a better chance of keeping systemd out of our distro. In fact this is the second fork of UDEV, I hope the teams will be working together.

Cheers, Eric