The second beta of KDE SC 4.4 has packages available in the Kubuntu beta PPA. There are also betas of Amarok and KDevelop available.

The first beta of KDE SC 4.4 has packages available in the Beta PPA. Ubuntu Lucid users can simply "sudo apt-get upgrade" to upgrade to the latest packages.

Ubuntu Karmic users have to add the following PPA (although I strongly advise you not to upgrade to KDE 4.4 beta, especially on a production machine):

RecordItNow is an Linux application similar to RecordMyDesktop, but for KDE, designed for recording your desktop. It has more features than qt-recordmydesktop, thus if you are using KDE, you should really give it a try. Another great thing about RecordItNow is that it supports plugins (see below).

KOffice 2.1 was released yesterday, bringing a number of new features as well as general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications. Import and export of foreign file formats have been given an overhaul, and especially the import filters for Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt) and Word (.doc) have been much improved.

Amarok 2.2 RC 1 was released a few days ago. For complete changelog, visit this page.

Although designed with the GNOME desktop environment in mind, Font Manager (for Linux) should work well with most major desktop environments such as XFCE, Enlightenment, and even KDE, as long as PyGTK is available.

Here are 5 of the most popular, standalone feed reader applications for Linux. I didn't include feed readers which come with applications like Firefox, Opera or Thunderbird for example, but these can also be considered a viable alternative to the ones below.

Akregator

The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu.

KDE Partition Manager allows you to manage your disks, partitions and file systems: Create, resize, delete, copy, backup and restore partitions with a large number of supported file systems (ext2/3, reiserfs, NTFS, FAT32 and more).

KDE 4.3 was released just yesterday, and it comes with a lot of great new features and improvements, like the the new Plasma theme called Air, new Plasma widgets, several improvements to Dolphin, the default KDE4 file manager, improvements to the KDE games, and these are just a tiny part of all the improvements KDE4 introduced.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala simply have do an apt-get upgrade to update to the latest KDE 4.3 (which was released yesterday) but (K)Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope users have to add the Kubuntu PPA backports so they can install the latest KDE 4.3.

khtml2png is a helpful tool for capturing an image of a webpage with ease.

The first release candidate of KDE 4.3, the next major version of KDE4, was put out on July 1st and comes with new features and a lot of Plasma improvements and bug fixes.

QGtkStyle makes your Qt/KDE programs look similarly to GTK ones. But there were no easy .debs for a long while so I searched everywhere and found deb files for Ubuntu on the ubuntuforums.

With the release of KDE 4.2, Google Gadgets became fully integrated into Plasma. You can add them to your desktop with a few clicks of your mouse, unless you happen to be a Kubuntu user. For reasons that are outside the scope of this article, Kubuntu developers decided to remove the Google Gadget code from Plasma. Being the stubborn hackers that we are, however, we are going to get them back.

Features:
- manages your tasks and launchers;
- tasks filtering, grouping (including manual) and sorting;
- launcher to task transition (icons of launchers with running tasks are hidden);

K9Copy is a KDE application which allows to transcode and backup your DVDs.

Ubuntu 9.04, codenamed Jaunty Jackalope, was released on April 23rd, also celebrating the 10th Ubuntu release. Since its first version back in October 2004, Ubuntu went through many and quickly became one of the most popular distributions out there, with a huge and continuously thriving community and a fast development method.