The KDE community announced yesterday (January 13th, 2008), in a press release, the immediate availability of the fourth maintenance of KDE 4.1 and the release candidate of the upcoming K Desktop Environment 4.2.0. The KDE 4.1.4 release is dubbed "Cod" and it brings many bug fixes and improvements, especially for the Okular, KMail and KGpg applications. On the other hand, the KDE 4.2 RC release brings lots of new features and thousands of bug fixes, it is dubbed "Cilense" and it is the final version until KDE 4.2.0 will hit the streets, in late January. For a complete list of changes, please visit the official KDE 4.1.4 changelog and the KDE 4.2 RC changelog.

Currently, the KDE 4 desktop environment ships with many packages, including web development applications, educational tools, administrative programs and more, all of which are available in over 50 languages. Everyone currently using KDE 4.1.3 is advised to update to the most recent version. Moreover, similar updates of the 4.1 generation will follow in the next months, culminating with a new feature release, KDE 4.2.0, expected at the end of January or the beginning of February 2009.

Are you a Kubuntu user? ...and don't know how to update your packages to KDE 4.1.4? Look no further, we have a quick tutorial for you:

The following instructions are for users of Kubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) or Ubuntu 8.10 with KDE 4 (must have kubuntu-desktop package installed).

1. Open Adept (Kubuntu users), or the Software Sources tool (Ubuntu users), and enable the Recommended/Unsupported Updates (backports) in the "Updates" tab;
2. Add the following line in the "Third-Party Software" tab:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu intrepid main

3. Reload the software repository information and update your system!
4. That's it! Reboot and your KDE 4 environment will be updated to version 4.1.4!

If you want to compile KDE 4.1.4 from sources, download them right now from Softpedia. The source code of KDE 4.2 RC can also be downloaded, for testing purposes only, from Softpedia.