The past few months I've been a little quiet about KDE4 on OpenSolaris, but that's not to say that nothing happens. Pavel Heimlich and Jan Hnatek have pushed the packages and dependencies forward. For instance, the 4.5.1 release of Plasma Desktop for OpenSolaris along with KDE Applications happened entirely because of their efforts. Pavel is now part of the kde-packagers group, so we should see a slight improvement in release timing -- that is, KDE4 on OpenSolaris should release packages on release day alongside SuSE, Fedora, Ubuntu and PC-BSD.

The Korona distribution of OpenSolaris -- that is OSOL plus a Plasma Desktop and KDE applications by default -- is also a result of their work. There hasn't been a recent update of it (not with 4.5.1 that I know of) but there will be, once the dust settles a little around OSOL.

Ah yes, the dust. Einsturtzende Betriebssystemen or something like that. Oracle has managed to collect epic amounts of ill-will from Sun fans, ex-Sun employees, Free Software enthusiasts, Open Source folks, software packagers and whoever else I've left out. Examples of annoyance and exasperation can be found on most of the OSOL forums. Here and here are two examples (mirrored from the OSOL forum site, though).

So, what's up for us? Well, various dependencies are being updated -- like testing Sun Studio 12.2, upcoming Qt 4.7 -- for KDE 4.6 releases. The breadth of available software in our tree is increasing -- see the inclusion of PyQt and QScintilla as of this week -- and our coverage of KDE Applications including the office suite is getting better. I don't think we have a full KOffice available yet, but it'll get there eventually.

As always, our software development happens in the open and patches get pushed upstream as much as is feasible. Communications happens on #kde4-solaris on Freenode and on the kde-discuss@opensolaris.org mailing list. Join us. OSOL is still more popular than Plan 9, after all.