KDE 3.1beta2 Hits the 'Net

Yesterday the KDE Project
announced
the release of KDE 3.1beta2, the third (and final) development release of the
KDE
3.1 branch
. On top of the large number of improvements over KDE 3.0 which have already been
announced, this release offers
a
number
of significant improvements, such as a new Exchange 2000®
plugin for KOrganizer and a KVim plugin for KDevelop
(screenshot).
In addition, release coordinator Dirk Mueller notes that
over 1,000 bugreports on bugs.kde.org
have been fixed in the last 4 weeks
.
Please run this release through its paces so that KDE 3.1 will be the best
we can make it! Thanks to all for the hard work in getting this release out.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by George Russell (not verified)

I've written some plugins for Konqueror to display details of Java, Python, Lyx, abd Bibtex files in the filemanager popups and property tabs. I'd like some wider testing and feedback. The source is downloadable from http://users.uk.freebsd.org/~grrussel .

Thanks

by fault (not verified)

Ah, nice ideas. I'll try it when I go home.

by Marco Krohn (not verified)

Sounds interesting. Thanks a lot!
Any changes that this code goes into the KDE repository? kdeaddons perhaps?

by Jos (not verified)

a KVim plugin for KDevelop

Hey, this might win me over to kdevelop...

by emmanuel (not verified)

i'm afraid you need kdevelop 3.0, which has not seen even an alpha release yet. it seems this code has a long way to go :O/
(disclaimer: never tried the code, i just give a mere *impression*)
however i use daily this component to have konqueror open text files embedded in the vim component :O)
and it even works with kde 3.0, don't need 3.1b2 :O)
(it's the vimpart project of kdeextragear-1).

emmanuel

by Rob (not verified)

Completely unrelated, I know. But while we're discussing kdevelop, does anybody know if you can now (or will ever be able to) use kdevelop on a makefile-based project?

I know kdbg can be used independently of the IDE (or at least could the last time I tried), and that's probably enough for me. But kdevelop would be nice too.

by emmanuel (not verified)

as far as i know, kdevelop3 aka gideon supports automake/conf, qmake, and other build systems, for instance ant for java. it's really extensible...

by teatime (not verified)

Unless I misunderstand what you want, Kdevelop-2.x has supported that for quite some time now. (Project -> Generate project file...). Try it. :)

by Kiki (not verified)

Ooooh! Shiny! *poing*

Oh, wait, wrong forum. Great work, guys!

by Anonymous (not verified)

Even over 2100 bugreports closed (not fixed) since the switch to Bugzilla.

by protoman (not verified)

You know, it looks like bugzilla is really helping bugs getting the attention they deserve.
Everyone can simply go to bugzilla and say: it's already fixed, close this bug please, mr. admin :)

by KDE User (not verified)

Looks awesome. Really cool stuff you've got here!

by emmanuel (not verified)

what i expect too is "a detailed list view with meta-information about files in the side-bar".
i saw screenshots a long time ago, it looked great and seemed useful too. i hope it's really what i think it is :O)

by emmanuel (not verified)

what i expect too is "a detailed list view with meta-information about files in the side-bar".
i saw screenshots a long time ago, it looked great and seemed useful too. i hope it's really what i think it is :O)

by emmanuel (not verified)

wait and this is good too!
"integration of file meta-information and multimedia files searches in file search utility"

i think i relates to http://devel-home.kde.org/~pfeiffer/kmrml/, http://devel-home.kde.org/~pfeiffer/kmrml/screenshots/

if this is not innovation, i don't know what is... i hope it works well :O)

by Anonymous (not verified)

The meta "info list view" is implemented and working. But there is no corellation to the sidebar. Meta infos only show up in tool tips and the properties dialog too.

by Mickael Marchand (not verified)

Hi guys,

the vim kpart is scheduled to be distributed in KDE 3.2 (kdeaddons pkg),
but for now it's available in the kdeextragear-1 module of KDE's CVS and it's not in 3.1.
But the current version of the kpart works fine, so you can give it a try anyway :) (I use it every day), it's known to work with kdevelop, kwrite, konqui and some other apps. In 3.2, hopefully we will have it in kmail too :)

Mik

by Sapta Girisa (not verified)

I'd be grateful if someone can atleast make a
tar ball for >= 3.1.1. available, as it'll be sometime
before 3.2 is part of any distro or is officially released.

by Nag (not verified)

Hi Girish,
This Nag from Bapatla, hope you can recognize me ...I am trying to find you from different sources but finally today I got your Name in KDE.NEW. If you are not Sapta Girisa and not studied in Bapatla College of Arts and Sceince then please ignore this email.

Sorry for the trouble...I am looking for my best friend.

Thanks,
Nagaraju Dogiparthi
[email protected]

by Anonymous (not verified)

Who wants to have a friend who doesn't know what email is?

by chris (not verified)

hi , just wanted to say " please dont make kde expert-ware ", you are implementing tons of features , i dont think thats the way to go.

by ddd (not verified)

Oh, shut up!

by somekool (not verified)

KDE IS FOR EVERYONE !

many kde user/developer use vim, so having a vim kparts is just the way to go.

i think we can expect KDE to keep is user friendliness.

by anon (not verified)

Now we just need KEmacs so that we can have a real editor ;)

Let the editor wars begin!

by not me (not verified)

The problem with embedding emacs is it's like embedding GNOME or something. You get a mail client, tetris game, web browser, psychologist, file manager, etc, all at the same time. Emacs isn't exactly suited for embedding.

by fault (not verified)

That's why there is a difference between the kvim application and the kvim part. Only one is used for embedding. While many people would prefer using the kvim part in applications, I think people would generally prefer a kemacs application.

Much more suited to a emacs kpart would be something like joe or jed (can't remember which), which is a lightweight emacs.

by Bill (not verified)

Come on. The reality is you can strip all of that out by removing the respective .elc/.el files and only provide limited functionality. Did you know that you can do VI bindings via the VIPER module in Emacs? OK, so why don't we use it since it's heavily developed and upgradeable? Religion is probably the number one reason why. Another is language -- everyone thinks lisp is old.

Anyhow, the future is more expandable with a KDE emacs equivalent. I guess you could write a Kate plugin to do this stuff, but why? Why do we keep reinventing the wheel? Maybe I'll write another editor with the Numbers 1 2 3 4 as directional keys just so I can integrate Ruby as an embeddable scripting language.

It's like artsd vs esd vs oss. I mean, come on! I gotta 1.6GHZ machine running nothing but noatun and konsole. And my music STILL skips!! And because I did some funky update to the www.math.unl.edu version of kde for redhat 7.3, the ogg/vorbis stuff got upgraded to where xmms can't use it. So, guess what, I'm using mpg321 ... after killing artsd of course. I hope 250 of the bugs they fixed were centered in artsd.

later.

by Jiffy (not verified)

I've got an 800MHz machine running three simultaenous compiles and I haven't noticed my music skip yet. I have artsd set to run with realtime priority. I am also using kernel 2.4.19 with Robert Love's preemptable kernel patch.

by Bill Gates (not verified)

This is such phooey I cannot believe it. Everytime I approach this topic with anyone, they always mention they have Kernel vWhiz.Bang.Baz or some other godsent sound system and it magically fixes artsd. That's so wrong. If esd, oss, et al can handle it with non-preemptible kernels, then artsd has a design problem. Period.

Yeah, artsd is network-transparent, blah blah. No excuse. It's as if they started with the waveform of the sound and tried to objectively describe it using C++. He he, good luck. Maybe when we get beowulfs-in-a-box on the market, it'll be okay and this won't be a discussion any more. How about integrating artsd into Java?

Out.

by Jonathan Brugge (not verified)

Ok. I'm using aRts on a 700MHz box (overclocked to 770MHz), kernel 2.4.18 without any special patches. I can compile three KDE CVS-modules and still listen to my music, without any hickups whatsoever. Does that satisfy you?

The reason might be that my box has enough RAM (384MB won't be filled during the compile jobs, so no swapping required) and uses a separate harddisk for the KDE-sources I want to compile.

by balerion (not verified)

Some suggestions for your mp3 skipping problems:

- run a pre-emptable kernel
- tune your HD with hdparm. Turning on UDMA and tweaking a bunch of other options completely eliminated my mp3 skipping problems. I have a 400MHz P2 running KDE 3.0.3 under Debian unstable (512MB RAM, tho)

by Jiffy (not verified)

Well, frankly I don't know how much of a difference the kernel actually made. OSS is built into the kernel. I believe esd uses realtime priority. For all I know, things work well because I use realtime priority. Another possibility is the size of your audio buffer (mine is 232 milliseconds). The bigger your audio buffer, the longer artsd can wait before processing more sound. You can change both settings using the soundserver panel in kcontrol.

The preemptable kernel should only make a difference when your machine is busy doing other things. Let's say you're updating the slocate database. Slocate constantly accesses the disk. When a process is accessing the kernel (i.e. reading a directory from disk), the kernel will not switch to another task, so artsd has to wait longer before it can process more sound. The preempt patch allows the kernel to switch processes even when another process is accessing the kernel. The result is an all-around more responsive system. Under heavy load, the preempt patch makes a "Whiz.Bang.Baz" difference.

I don't know how realtime priority works, but like the preempt patch, it tries to make artsd run more frequently.

by just_linux_user (not verified)

You guys simply don't understand the problem..
it is kde having a performance problem. If it continues to be so slow Gnome will make it since multimedia stuff simply won't run with KDE as people expect it. It is so much slower than Windows that it is hard to imagine that anyone without having religous reasons will prefer KDE over Windows.
And forget about your stupid patches. If it doesn't work with the standard kernel users won't care. Or do you really think the avarage user is going to patch its kernel for listening to mp3????

I wish you good luck and some professionality! Finally!
just a linux user

by Anonymous (not verified)

Everything starts as a patch and ends in released products. This was true for the C++ speed deficiencies of gcc and the linker and will be true for the scheduler and other things in the kernel.

by montz (not verified)

heh. i always get those stupid responses too. it's impossible.
arts is slow! i have tried preempt, low latency and everything but still i get glitches in sound. esp when switching apps.

by Shane Simmons (not verified)

I realize I'm more than a month late on this, but aRts doesn't work around OSS bugs. OSS bugs plague chipsets like ess1371. Everyone out there just works around the bugs. But not aRts. Oh, no. The author is above that. aRts is apparently so important that leaving the bug workarounds out will get driver writers in gear and busy fixing their drivers.

Yeah, right.

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

It *does* workaround OSS bugs. That's what the "Threaded OSS" driver is all about.

by bonito (not verified)

I had this problem too, and I can honestly say its not the kde software that caused problems, and my machine is a p3 700 256 mb ram. In my mandrake days playing music was hopeless on kde and less hopeless on xmms but it still skipped on there too. I then managed to install gentoo on my machine and tried playing music and have never had it skip to this day. Often its the packaging thats the problem more than the software.

by Datschge (not verified)

I'm running an older Knoppix distri from CD (first in August I think, which contains KDE 3.0.2) on my old AMD K6-2 300mHz with 228MB RAM of which afaik 60MB are used as ramdisk etc. And guess what, no skippings at all. Before this I used to have KDE 1.x on my computer until I noticed that I was still using Windows most of the time since KDE was so slow in most regards (and yes, music skipped back then).

Knoppix rocks, and I'll toss it on my harddisk as soon as there's a release which includes KDE 3.1. =)

by Androgynous Howard (not verified)

How do you put knoppix on your harddisk? It is meant to be a distro that runs from cd, isn't it?

regards,

A.H.

by gunnar (not verified)

this is a german tutorial (with many screenshots) to install knoppix at a harddisk.
maybe this can help u anyway!

http://www.pl-berichte.de/berichte/knoppix_hdinstall/knoppix-hdinstall.html

greetings
gunnar

by Tim Jansen (not verified)

Actually, when compared to Windows or MacOS, KDE+Linux lacks may features, ranging from telephony APIs to network authentication. Many of them are 'under the hood' or well-hidden somewhere in the application menu. If KDE+Linux really wants to be an alternative, it must have them all (or better: have even more). No company will decide for an operating system that fulfills only 90% of their needs.

by Peter Antonius (not verified)

What sort of network authentication API is mission. Linux has eks. LDAP, RADIUS, PAM, NIS and tons of different other network autentication API's ! When you talk about API's they are udally well hidden 'under the hood'. API's is ment to be used by programmers not by the enduser. The API's in Windows is not a part of a application menu.

by Tim Jansen (not verified)

But how are these systems integrated? Can you log in on a workstation, and then access all fileservers, printers, databases, webservers and custom applications without logging in again? Under Windows with Active Directory this is possible. Under KDE+Linux there are implementation for protocols that you could use to build such a solution, but nothing that works right out-of-the-box, is integrated in a desktop environment or easy to set up.

by Bill Gates (not verified)

Whereas Active Directory works right out of the box. ALL complex environments will require qualified people to initially configure the systems and generally require day to day maintenance to keeps things sane.

by Tim Jansen (not verified)

Compared to KDE/Linux it is pretty easy to do. On Linux systems you are on your own, you can be happy if you find a few scripts to configure the directory. The KDE libs do not support network authentication (yet :).

by Ian Eure (not verified)

KDE does not need network authentication support. I'm logged into a workstation with no local user accounts at all right now. All the user accounts are stored in a LDAP server, and I use libpam-ldap and libnss-ldap to authenticate against it. KDM doesn't know anything about this, it just calls the lower-level getpwent() & friends and works.

I'm able to access file shares via NFS with autofs, and printers via CUPS. I really don't see the problem here.

by Paul Allen (not verified)

Bill is right. Buy MS products.

by Bill Gates (not verified)

Whereas Active Directory works right out of the box. ALL complex environments will require qualified people to initially configure the systems and generally require day to day maintenance to keeps things sane.

by Jiffy (not verified)

> Under Windows with Active Directory this is possible.

Just thought you'd like to know, the SAMBA team is working on Active Directory client support [1].

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[1] http://techupdate.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t481-s2122363,00.html