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  Third KDE 4 Development Snapshot Released: "Kludge"
KDE Official News Posted by Sebastian Kügler on Friday 23/Feb/2007, @08:45
from the get-your-latest-hacking-fix-now dept.
The KDE project announces the availability of the third development snapshot of the upcoming KDE 4. This snapshot is meant as a reference for developers who want to play with parts of the new technology KDE 4 will provide, those who want to start porting their applications to the new KDE 4 platform and for those that want to start to develop applications based on KDE 4. This snapshot is not for end users, there is no guarantee that it will be stable, and the interfaces are subject to changes at any time.

This new development version of KDE features the following new technologies:

  • Sonnet which has previously been covered on Linux.com.
  • Solid, KDE 4's unified layer to deal with hardware and network resources.
  • Vastly-improved support for the Windows and Mac OS platforms by cleaning up the source code from dependencies on X11. See kdelibs.com for more information.
  • The recently added filemanager Dolphin which will be the default filemanager for KDE. Konqueror will still be available and share much code with Dolphin.

After "Krash", the first development snapshot, this is another milestone towards KDE 4.0 which will be released later this year. The KDE developers aim at a release in summer 2007. Reaching this target depends on application developers picking up the new technology to use in their applications. While "Krash" marked the milestones initial Qt 4 port, the use of D-Bus as the inter-process-communication system, the merge of Phonon as the multimedia framework and CMake, KDE's new buildsystem defines this latest release.

The next planned change is new integration of Oxygen, the new artwork concept. Work on Plasma is also taking up pace.

Download the 3.80.3 source, or install packages for Kubuntu or openSUSE.

For those who want to keep track of the development process, KDE Dot News regularly covers new and upcoming technologies through the series "Pillars of KDE 4" (informing about upcoming technologies) and "The Road to KDE 4", which covers new functionality that has been integrated in the official development tree.

Questions about KDE 4 are answered on various mailing lists such as kde-devel and kde-buildsystem, as well as on #kde4-devel on irc.freenode.org. Documentation for getting up to speed with KDE 4 development is available from a number of sources.



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  Related Links
 ·   Articles on KDE Official News
 ·   Also by Sebastian Kügler
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whomever posted them.
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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Buildung
by Jan on Friday 23/Feb/2007, @14:21
Will there be Live-CDs?
Will there be nightly builds?
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default filemanager
by CHX on Friday 23/Feb/2007, @14:21
What's wrong with konqueror as default file manager?
Dolphin does not look so good...
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Digg this
by Tsiolkovsky on Friday 23/Feb/2007, @14:22
Digg this and help spread the news:
http://digg.com/linux_unix/Third_KDE_4_Development_Snapshot_Released_Kludge
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Documentation updates?
by Andre on Friday 23/Feb/2007, @15:05
I was checking out Solid again, but I was a bit dissapointed by the fact that the website that promisses comprehensive documentation for developers seems to lag behind the actual development of the system itself quite a bit. In fact, there is no documentation to be found at all. How do people expect developers to start using these technologies if you can't find how to use them?
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why you are afraid to show a screenshots !!!!
by djouallah mimoune on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @02:36
why not showing some screenshots, i know till now all the changes are under hood as some dev has said.

friendly mimoune
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Nightly builds
by Bert on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @04:31
For KDE/Win there seem to be nightly builds (and build warnings)

http://public.kitware.com/dashboard.php?name=kde

and tests. What about KDE/Linux?
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Suse Konqueror Opinion
by Malte on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @07:01
From the Suse 10.2 review

"Konqueror -- and other KDE-related bloat -- has to go. Nobody uses Konqueror for Web browsing -- I have Web stats from half a dozen sites to prove it. It has a klunky interface, doesn't work with plugins very well, doesn't easily do tabbed windows like Opera and Firefox do, and in general has no advantages over its competitors. Get rid of it! We only need one Web browser, and the market has spoken as to its preference -- Firefox. At very least, Konqueror should not have an icon in the default quicklaunch area of the KDE menubar. Konqueror aside, take a look through the kickoff menu sometime and notice how many software categories there are, and how many programs are in each one of them. How much of this crap do we really need? One of my chief complaints about SUSE for many years has been that there is too much standard KDE crap in the default install. People should choose what programs they want, not be force-fed programs that they may never use. This will also make the installation procedure speedier."

http://www.softwareinreview.com/cms/content/view/66/

I think Konqueror has an advantage: it integrates with KDE applications but that is mostly Firefox fault which does not integrate sufficiently and wants to open all videos with totem, all pdf with evince etc. etc.
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two graphical shells to core KDE functions
by Arnomane on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @07:12
Most people commenting on Dolphin and Konqueror here seem to be focused on the file management part only and argue which app would be a better default (an argue I am not interested in).

I would be interested to know *how* Dolphin will affect the default web browser GUI of Konqueror because Konqueror will stay as web browser if I understand it correctly. KHTML/KJS will stay anyways regardless if it is the Apple or KDE flavour (a replacement chance has gambled away by the closed-minded Mozilla foundation at least two times).

I personally must confest that I have often two Konquerors opened in order to confuse myself less. ;-) One browser Konqui and one file manager Konqui, although I also very often I open on the fly a web page in the file manager or a directory on the web browser (Konqui lets you "just do" things ;-).

So what I particular would be interested in?:
* A pure file manager (Dolphin?) for local *and* remote files (I am pretty sure that Dolphin will only have a chance if it is network transparent). So basically a grahical (pseudo-)file management shell for all KIO-Slaves.
* A viewing shell (Konqueror?) for all kinds of KParts, for example KHTML, image plugins, documents...

So Dolphin and Konqueror would be just two frontends to basic KDE features any application knows to handle implicit, too (saving files on remote places, displaying HTML emails and so on...).
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OT web based Kopete???
by fast_rizwaan on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @10:26
http://wwwl.meebo.com - web based multi messenger, no downloads, no installs, just works!

do we still need gaim, kopete, other multi-messengers when web based are available?
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Summer 2007
by devnull on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @13:39
So as I'm in Australia, does this mean the release by summer of KDE4 is imminent?
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Oversized dialogues
by Andy on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @15:00
With KDE applications I often get bugs like you can see in the attached screenshot file. Oversized dialogues because text fields contain text other than expected.

Cant there be a KDE gui testing environment which prevents this to happen, which tests windows, a smarter windows management code? Is that provided by QT4? I really hope that KDE will put an end to these annoyances.
Click to download attachment amabug.png
152KB (156022 bytes)
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GUI-Effects
by ENFORCER on Saturday 24/Feb/2007, @17:18
Will there be any UI-Effects like in E17 or Opera. Or at least it should be possible. Polyester is cool, but I think some hacks were used:
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/09/qtimeline-timers-and-what-to-avoid-in.html
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Kludge
by whatever noticed on Monday 26/Feb/2007, @16:52
"A kludge (or, alternatively, kluge) is a clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem or difficulty. In engineering, a kludge is a workaround, typically using unrelated parts cobbled together. Especially in computer programs, a kludge is often used to fix an unanticipated problem in an earlier kludge; this is essentially a kind of cruft. Those illustrating the tenor of the term often say that it takes a skilled craftsman intimate with the task, the material at hand, and the operating environment to construct a workaround clunky enough to be called a kludge."

From the wikipedia.

Did kde choose this word to indicate why they added Dolphin to kde4?
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Kubuntu packages don't work
by Jeroen van Disseldorp on Wednesday 28/Feb/2007, @04:21
Apparently the startkde script needs /usr/bin/qdbus, which is not provided by the libqt4-core-kdecopy package, which kde4base-dev depends upon :(

Whenever I start KDE4 from /usr/lib/kde4/bin I get the message "Could not start D-Bus. Check your installation."
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Slow :| why?
by patpi on Saturday 03/Mar/2007, @05:10
I thought porting to QT4 will increasy speed? It didn't happen? why? I hope it will be fixed before stable relese

btw. other improvements are realy great
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  "When I'm not hacking on a computer, I like to play the guitar and get drunk. Sometimes both at once." -- Richard J. Moore
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