This month saw two more releases from KDE-an update to the 4.0 branch on February 5 and KDE 3.5.9 on February 19. v4.0.1 is the first bug fix and maintenance release in less than a month after the official release of KDE 4. The maintenance release provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug-tracking system, and enhanced support for existing and new translations. KDE.org lists some of the following improvements:

•Konqueror, KDE's Web browser has seen numerous stability and performance fixes in

its HTML rendering engine, KHTML, in its Flash plug-in loader and in KJS, the JavaScript engine.

•Stability problems have been addressed in components that are used all over the KDE codebase. Translations in this release are more complete.

•KWin, the KDE window manager, has improved detection of compositing support, and some effects have been fixed.

The announcement further states that " ... work has also been done in many applications like Okular, System Settings and KStars. New translations include Danish, Frisian, Kazakh and Czech." The new release can be obtained in source and various binary formats from download.kde.org and can also be obtained on CD-ROM or with any of the major GNUILinux systems. Coming to v3.5.9 of the desktop, this is again a maintenance release, but for the 3.5.x branch.

There have been made to the KDE-PIM applications, including the Kmail and Korgan izer. According to the announcement, "The KDE-PIM enterprise branch, that has already been shipped by some distributions, has found its way into the stable branch of KDE. While KDE 3 has been in bugfix mode for quite a while now, the release team has decided to merge the enterprise branch and release it as KDE-PIM proper in 3.5.9, since no regressions are known and it makes packagers'

Jives easier. New features and bugfixes in this branch include, but are not limited to:
•A favourite e-mail folders.viewinKMail.as well as drag and drop support for folders.
•Easier scheduling in KOrganiser through various improvements in the user interface .

•Improvements in KAlarm and Kaddressbook. A complete list of changes and improvements since v3.5.8 can be obtained from the changelog available at www. kde. org/announcements/changelogs/changelog3 _ 5_8to3_5_9php. As usual, KDE 3.5.9 still ships with a basic desktop and 15 other packages (PIM, administration, network, edutainment, utilities, multimedia, games, artwork, Web development and more), in 65 languages.