KDE SC 4.6.4 Released

The KDE Community has announced the arrival of its next-generation Kontact Suite and published the fourth point update to the latest major release of the Linux and Unix desktop – version 4.6.4 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC). The Kontact Suite is a set of personal information management (PIM) applications, including the KAddressBookcontact manager, the KMail email client and KOrganizer, a calendar and scheduling application.

According to the developers, the latest release of the Kontact Suite is "a major milestone" that has received "a major architectural boost" through its new infrastructure layer, the Akonadi framework. The new scalable Akonadi groupware framework allows developers to build interconnected PIM-related applications for both desktop systems and touchscreen-based devices. They note that, while the underlying internals have been updated, minimal changes have been made to the user interface, so current users will still recognise it.

Improvements in Kontact 2 include faster email notifications, improved IMAP email performance and better interoperability with other applications. Users upgrading from older versions will have their accounts and underlying data automatically imported into Akonadi – old configuration and data will be left in place should a rollback ever be needed. Originally, the integration of Akonadi was planned for KDE 4.0, but it kept being postponed. The first application to use the Akonadi framework was the KDE address book in version 4.4 of the desktop environment.

As expected, the maintenance release of the open source K Desktop Environment (KDE) includes a variety of translation updates and bug fixes for the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Applications and the KDE Platform. The fourth in a series of monthly updates includes fixes to address bugs in the Dolphin file manager, the KGpg interface for GnuPG and the KDE Multimedia package, specifically JuK.

Further information about the KDE SC update and Kontact 2, including a video of Kontact Touch, can be found in the official release announcement, in the change log and on the KDE SC 4.6.4 Info Page. Source packages for self-compilation and binary packages for various Linux distributions are available to download from the project's web site. KDE is licensed under a combination of LGPLv2, BSD, MIT and X11 licences for core libraries and the GPLv2 or GPLv3 for applications.