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  KDE 4.0 Alpha 2 Released
KDE Official News Posted by Sebastian Kügler on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @10:23
from the glescas-glory dept.
The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the second alpha release of the K Desktop Environment. This release comes straight out of Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland where aKademy is currently taking place. Hundreds of KDE hackers are working like crazy to hunt down bugs, complete features for KDE 4.0 and sit together developing and finishing new and exciting applications for the new major version of the leading Free Desktop.

The most exciting new development is currently going on in Plasma, KDE 4's new shell for the desktop. Plasma provides krunner, an application to directly launch programs and start other tasks. Plasmoids are applets that display information such as the time, information about hardware devices and also provide access to online resources, for example showing RSS feeds, images or providing dictionary lookup.

System Settings, the replacement for kcontrol is an improved user interface hosting various modules for configuring the desktop and other aspects of the system is another addition worth mentioning.

The upcoming weeks will be spent on further stabilizing and streamlining the underlying KDE libraries to provide a stable interface for programmers for the whole KDE4 lifecycle. Furthermore, the focus will shift to finishing the applications that are shipped with the base desktop and polishing their user interfaces.

The end of July will see a full freeze of the kdelibs module, manifested in the first beta release of KDE 4.0 with the final release currently planned for the end of October this year.

For the bravehearts who want to try KDE 4.0 Alpha2, please refer to the alpha 2 info page to find ways to have a peak at the current status yourself. As the pace of development would outdate screenshots very quickly, the best way to find out about progress is to refer to sites such as The Dot or Planet KDE, the collection of KDE developers' weblogs.

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  Related Links
 ·   Articles on KDE Official News
 ·   Also by Sebastian Kügler
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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Live-CD
by binner on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @11:03
KDE Four Live: http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/
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isn't too early for an alpha2 !!!
by djouallah mimoune on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @12:38
ok it 's an aplha release, but at lease i was expecting a working kicker ( or whatever it will be), the system tray is totaly broken, how i am supposed to test amarok.

and where is the icons !!!!!!!!
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Wrong link
by Dorin on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @13:08
Hi, the link to PlanetKDE is wrong (you have two double-colons there)
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Impressive!
by Ascay on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @16:03
I'm just playing around with alpha 2 in a VM and I'm really impressed! The first alpha was nearly unusable slow for me and crashed all the time. Alpha 2 is much, much better.

The programs show really nice improvements compared to KDE3.x, Oxygen looks just beautiful and I really like the little animations in Dolphin (zooming of icon size preview, fading of status messages) or Konsole (themes sliding in).

And everything including Plasma is very fast and responsive - in a virtual machine without any 3D acceleration and without compositing.

Great work!
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Systemsettings
by liquidat on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @16:26
I wonder what the reasons are behind replacing kcontrol with Systemsettings.
While it doesn't matter for me I'm pretty sure that others had some thoughts about it.

Is Systemsettings easier to maintain? Or does it fit better to HIGs? Or does it offer more options? And if yes, which?
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Fedora Packages
by Kevin Kofler on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @16:50
As with previous alphas, the core components (kdelibs4, kdepimlibs and kdebase4) are packaged for FC6 and F7 in the kde-redhat unstable repository. Those packages are designed to be safe to use in a KDE 3 environment: they install to /opt/kde4 and save settings in ~/.kde4.

We (Than Ngo, Rex Dieter and me) are working on getting you a more complete KDE 4 experience for Fedora 8, see:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/FeatureKDE4
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So...
by me on Wednesday 04/Jul/2007, @21:53
So... are you Celtic or Rangers KDE devs?
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kiosk in kde4
by robert on Thursday 05/Jul/2007, @00:42
does anyone know the status of kiosk in kde4? has it been ported yet? is there a development team for that project?

- Thanks!
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Codename?
by Joergen Ramskov on Thursday 05/Jul/2007, @01:00
Has codenames been abandoned?

Example: First Development Snapshot of KDE4: "Krash"

Not that it matters to me :)
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Impressive!
by Jab on Thursday 05/Jul/2007, @08:32
I just tried out the KDE Four Live CD with alpha2 on my machine and i have to say that i am impressed by the progress that has been made. I am sure KDE4 will just rock :)

One remark about the LiveCD: It would be very nice if X starts in 24bit mode instead of 16bit. I had to do some editing to get KDE started in 24bit, and it looks much better then :)
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Getting started with Plasmoids
by Peter on Thursday 05/Jul/2007, @12:16
Having downloaded the LiveCD, I would like to try my hand at making Plasmoids. Are there any tutorials available? Documentation? Where is the clock plasmoid stored?
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DPI problem in the LiveCD
by Capslock on Thursday 05/Jul/2007, @20:01
The DPI is way too high. I have a widescreen laptop and the screen is crammed.

Setting the DPI (after a long fight with every piece of the GUI) to 96 fixed the problem. I found that it was originally undefined. But the problem now is that I have to log out and then log back in to restart the desktop which was useless because the settings are forgotten.
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Wow!
by S. on Friday 06/Jul/2007, @02:20
Hi peeps,

Just wanted to say, I made a VMWare Player image out of the KDE 4 alpha 2 LiveCD (available on demand :)) and I am VERY impressed with what the KDE developpers are on to. It's still alpha and not very stable, but the general feel of it is very, very smooth and polished. So thank you all for the excellent work. :)
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Booting with hardware-accelerated kvm fails
by yves on Saturday 07/Jul/2007, @05:28
on my intel CPU, with this error:

http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/FAQ#head-34a6ebff198dc73f61f9c0fb269cfb8b70e97018

As I understand this is related to the bootloader on the CD.
Would it be possible to use or modify this bootloader in a way that we could
use fas hardware-accelerated kvm for running the live CD?

Or... instead of a LIVECD, offer an image of a preinstalled OS with KDE ontop :-) ?
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