KDE 4.0 Beta 1 has been released which marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications. Also the second Alpha of KOffice 2.0 has been announced.

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications.

As usual unsupported packages are available for openSUSE 10.2 and Factory in the openSUSE Build Service. If you want to test-drive the new releases: the openSUSE Factory-based and with

Cautious users might consider this more of a late alpha release than a beta. The codebase is “still moving quickly” according to the release, and a quick review of the openSUSE live CD shows that KDE 4 isn’t really ready for day to day use — even for testing.

Related: Novell Open Audio: Hack Week in Review and Preview of KDE 4.0

Novell Open Audio in its current episode features a retrospection of Hack Week including development site visit reports, awarded and other selected projects including this site. In the second part, Will Stephenson of the KDE Team gets interviewed about the changes and architecture of the upcoming KDE 4.0.