Remember last year? We asked you to send us your best cocktail recipes to win free entrance to LinuxTag in Berlin. It seems all our developers survived trying your creations and we are pretty sure some of you tested them, too. So, a year has passed, the next LinuxTag is going to start in less than two weeks and we again have some eTickets to give away! 15 tickets to be precise and maybe, if you work hard, we might get some more.

This time send us your best "Amarok Everywhere" photos. Talk to the Klingon High Council about their boring logo, use your "laser" to project a howling wolf onto the moon or... do whatever crazy idea comes to your mind. But beware: starting a war with the Klingon Empire leads to instant disqualification. You can send the pictures to our promo mailing list (amarok-promo 'ätt' kde.org) or give us a link to them in the comments (make sure you add a valid email address). Deadline is Wednesday, 21st May, 0:00 UTC.

As last year we will have a booth and talk there, so it's the perfect opportunity to have a look at our latest developments.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you - the Neon!

Neon is our shiny new nightly builds service for Amarok. Neon makes it easy to follow development of Amarok by regularly providing packages for you to install.
It is set up to be usable alongside your stable version. Even though we try to keep your data secure, you should be aware that Neon is providing mostly unreleased and untested software, which might as well eat your system. Neon is intended to be used by everyone who wants to help us find bugs, keep track of development, join development or just wants to live on the bleeding edge. It is not intended to be used instead of a stable and full featured Amarok.

We started this service with packages for Amarok 2 for Kubuntu but packages for openSUSE will follow soon and we hope more distributions will join.

To install it on Kubuntu Hardy add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu hardy main

check for updates, install amarok-nightly and enjoy.

Please be aware that Amarok 2 is still in heavy development and therefore it is very likely that you will encounter bugs, things that are not finished and features that will change before we release Amarok 2.0. We welcome everyone to send patches and help us get Amarok 2 ready soon.

If you want to stay up to date on all things Neon please subscribe to the dedicated mailinglist. Availability of packages for other distributions will be announced there and on the Project Neon wiki page.

When reporting bugs please consider that for now we only accept bug reports for bugs that are not obvious and are easy to reproduce or have a useful backtrace. Of course we like bugs with attached patches the most ;-)

Photo copyright 2008 by Maximilian Fellner, licensed under by-nc-nd 2.0

We, the Amarok team, are busy developing the upcoming Amarok 2 series. Our 1.4 users are anything but forgotten: we have another bugfix release of the Fast Forward 1.4 series. Amazon informed us about changes in their system that affected cover fetching in Amarok. We changed the necessary bits and pieces in Amarok to ensure that you can download covers for your favourite albums again. All of our translations have been improved and various small bugs have been squashed. Amarok developer Mark Kretschmann says, "There are no more bugs in Amarok 1.4.  It is perfect, like a lotus flower.  In fact, we think we may cancel development on Amarok 2.0, as there is no point...you can't improve upon perfection." Have fun with Amarok 1.4.9.1 Fast Forward.