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  KDE 4.0.2 Brings New Plasma Features
KDE Official News Posted by Sebastian Kuegler on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @08:40
from the four-point-oh-receives-tlc dept.
The KDE community has released another update to its cutting edge KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.2 has, along with the bugfixes some new features in Plasma. The panel can now be configured to sit somewhere else than at the bottom and UI options for changing its size have been added. Do not let yourself be distracted by those new things, there are also plenty of bugfixes, performance improvements and translation updates in there, among which support for two new languages: Persian and Icelandic. KDE 4.0.2 is thus available in 49 whopping languages, and more are soon to come. More highlights include rendering improvements in KHTML and lots of bugfixes in Okular and Kopete. The KDE community hopes you enjoy this release which should be hitting your favourite packaging system soon. See the changelog for more updates and info page for download options.


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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Spread the news
by Jure on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @10:09
Digg: http://digg.com/linux_unix/KDE_4_0_2_Released_with_New_Features_in_the_Plasma_Desktop
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Reporting 'missing' features
by millhaven on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @10:37
Hello! First off, congratulations with the new release, just upgraded and it looks superb. It's great that features such as the ability to resize the panel is being backported to minor releases.

What i wanted to ask about is the following: My most wanted lost feature from 3.x is the ability to autohide the panel and the ability to have multiple panels. However, I'm a bit sure if such input is useful for the devs, and in that case, how to best communicate this. Any thoughts?
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Re: KDE 4.0.2 Brings New Plasma Features
by V. P. on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @11:10
>> The KDE community hopes you enjoy this release
I will I will. I believe in you.

I know there is something called 'birth pangs' but the aftermath is always great...

Congratulations to all who made KDE 4 possible.
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panel resize?
by Beat Wolf on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @11:29
i'm running the svn version of trunk. so i can't check it out myself. but is now possible to resize the panel like in trunk? i was surprised not to see this in the changelog.
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Cool
by Zayed on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @11:44
Really I impressed with the fixing rate. By the way, it seem that KHTML is in heavy fixing mode. I will try the gmail chat and digg.
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Great news
by Phil on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @11:58
Awesome work. Much kudos to the KDE devs for getting this turned around and out of the door so quickly. You guys really show commercial developers how it should be done ;-)
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Plasma panel?
by Sebastian on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @12:04
Hi there,

may somebody help me? I installed the new simple-glow plasma theme from kde-look. With 4.0.2 the plasma panel background does not look right. It seems that the background texture as truncated such that the panel borders are 100% transparent. This effect appears only if I turn the KWin effects on, if not, everything works fine. I tried changing back to the default plasma theme, but got the same effect. Did anyone else experience this problem?

I just want to ask, if that may be a packaging problem on opensuse or if I messed up configuration files.

Btw: When I start plasma in konsole, it says:
X Error: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) 8
Extension: 155 (RENDER)
Minor opcode: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
Resource id: 0x13a
Object::connect: No such signal Plasma::Icon::doubleClicked()
Object::connect: No such signal Plasma::Icon::doubleClicked()
Object::connect: No such slot Tasks::launchActivated()

This message is probably related (At least this is the reason why the panel icons are not functional at all for me)

regards, Sebastian
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Plasma eveywhere
by PlasmaLover on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @12:35
With all due respect to plasma and its devs, it does not make sense to highlight it in the title when all we got was ability to resize and reposition the panel. Am I missing something here? Wasn't that possible with kicker since a few years? Why do I get a feeling that someone is trying to push plasma in my face whenever I look at anything on the dot nowadays? Its not like its the only thing new in KDE4 but looks like its getting most hyp^H^H^Hpush from the marketing department.

Thanks for listening.
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When can we expect better usability/configuration
by Damijan Bec on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @12:47
Well panel is resizeable ... NOT

Can you set it to be just 70% of the total screensize? No? Well, then it is not.

Where have other 3 panels gone? I was always using 3 panels: left, top and bottom.

Top was with option to auto-hide on. Well still missing this option :(

What about the Desktop? I used to have 4 - 6 desktops with different wallpaper on each of them. That is not just a cosmetic issue, it is usability issue. When I switch to another desktop it takes a few seconds before I actually register which one is it (yes I know we have pager for this but that is not the point). It was also possible to enable the names for each desktop. If I am not mistaken this is still not possible. If it is can someone point me into the right direction please?

Where is the TRUE multi-desktop KDE? One desktop with one panel settings, one dekstop icons and one wallpaper

2nd desktop with different settings/wallpaper/set of icons?

Can we expect this in the foreseeable future? This would be more than just a cosmetic fix. It would considerably improve usability. And another win for Linux desktop.

It looks like drag and drop from the desktop to e.g. Dolphin still doesn't work :( Any progress on this? Is this doable?

And also right click on a desktop is as usable as in Gnome before tweaking. How to get options like Create new Txt file? Dunno just missing something or it is not implemented yet?

Does anyone know how to bring wordclock as a walpaper on desktop. Really miss this one on my desktop.

And what happened with the coolest clock ever? You still cannot set more than one timezone to it. I always used to have 4+ for NY, London, Taipei, Buenos Aires ...

And switch user is still not working. It brings the Krunner window. Well I don't want to run anything :) ... I just want to run another session as different user

Ah, last but not the least. Where is the 'Showed removed tiles option' in Kmahjongg? Really useful feature.

I guess will need to leave without it for a while.

Otherwise guys/girls, great release and thank you!
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Very good
by blendo on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @12:50
Im here on OpenSuse System. Looks good. Thanks alot for your Work on KDE.
For german speaking visit http://www.kde4.de
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I can understand that
by Mo on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @12:53
I think one reason might be that many have been disappointed by the new, not-so-perfect kicker implementation. At least I have got the impression that not being able to resize the panel was one of the major complaints, and I can understand that the marketing crew wants to make clear that that is being successfully worked on.
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Train Station Clock (again...)
by MichaelG on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @13:25
Hey you guys, i noticed that the train station clock is still not available as plasma applet, at least not in the official 4.0.2 ... when 4.0.0 was coming out i made a tounge in cheek sort of comment about a conspiracy of a bunch of lame people about quietly killing the cool train station clock (previously promoted by Aaron's screencasts and nuno's mocks) and replacing it with a generic clunky one, instead of just beeing a cool Desktop and giving users what a majority of them really liked in the first RCs.

Someone from the devs said "you know, it's actually in playground, just be patient" ... but seeing it not in the release AGAIN just makes me thinking about that lame people's conspiracy all over again... if you can't bring it over you to ignore a few ignorant nay-sayers who supposedly didn't like the train station clock, at least provide it as an alternative please.
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debian packages
by Lee on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @13:57
Ahh, but will Debian package it, even in experimental, some time this year, instead of sticking to a broken, old mis-packaged version of 4.0? There's the question! ;)

No, I'm not being completely serious. Yes, I respect the debian dev's hard work. Yes, I just thought I'd post this and gently nudge them into doing a little more ;)
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Remember last statistics
by olimpiu on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @14:01
Commits: 2612 by 245 developers, 6750 lines modified, 1558 new files.
Open Bugs: 16124
Open Wishes: 13711
Bugs Opened: 278 in the last 7 days.
Bugs Closed: 193 in the last 7 days.

Source: http://commit-digest.org/issues/2008-02-24/

There are a lot of open bugs & more are coming as the features extend. But there is plenty of time to fix them. (!?)
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Desktop effects for 4.1?
by Max on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @14:15
Will we get a cool desktop transitioning effect in KDE 4.1?

Like Compiz Cube - or something even much, much cooler?

I can't wait to be blown away. Those effects really help visualize having virtual multiple screens.
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Shouldn't that be....
by kde-user on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @14:33
Shouldn't that be "available in a whopping 49 languages" and not "available in 49 whopping languages?" It is indeed the number that your adjective is stressing, not the languages themselves.
--
Best Regards,
Grammar Nazi KDE User
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Black Icon Background
by fish on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @14:46
Why hasn't this bug gotten fixed yet? Sorry to say, but...it looks so ugly! :\

I have stopped using desktop icons with KDE4 just because I can't stand the black background they draw.

Please, someone fix this.

Other than that, KDE4 is a great release! <3
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Proxy?
by Patrick Stewart on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @15:22
Has proxy support been fixed yet? This is the only thing that's keeping me from being able to use kde 4. It's kind of useless without internet support, and I have no direct connection at uni.
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Like Kubuntu? Like KDE? - Vote for it.
by Jon on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @18:31
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/478/

Like Kubuntu? Want it to get better? Want KDE to gain more exposure?

-If yes, please vote at the link above. (sign up required, but it's fast)

I'm reposting this for new people that haven't seen it yet.

To download KDE 4.0.2 with Kubuntu go to: www.kubuntu.org
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and still
by anon on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @20:15
and still msn doesn't connect with kopete, thank god for pidgin, at least that connects, and to far much more than the very lacking kopete
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My favorite problems with KDE...
by Stefan on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @20:55
There are some problems that itch me more than others when using KDE:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=154774
Makes Konqueror4 unusable for me - cannot connect to the net. Yes, it might be a weird router problem, but as no other internet program (including Konqui3 and Mozilla) does have this problem, it should get at least a workaround in KDE4, too.

Speed, speed and again speed:
As far as I see, with the (not so unusual) NVidia cards you will in many cases get a very sluggish desktop, even with no special effects. Again, you might say that is a driver issue, but I think for a popular piece of hardware working flawlessly and fast with all kind of non-KDE4 2D and 3D effects, this should nevertheless be addressed

Visual distortions of the panel:
OK, that's minor, but it shouldn't happen. Quite a lot of icons in the panel, and some other panel elements, too, are often only displayed distorted (or in the case of icons, simply wrong).

Apart from this points, I would say, that after the rushed release of KDE4.0, that KDE is now getting to the point where it starts to live up to the hyped expectations marketed before the first release.
Go on in this direction, I'm looking forward to the next releases!
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Wake me up when 4.1 is released
by Marc Driftmeyer on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @21:05
When 4.1 is out, then I'll be ecstatic.
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More Buggy or Is it just on my machine?
by Swaroop Shankar on Wednesday 05/Mar/2008, @21:14
First of all thanks for this release. I installed KDE 4.0.2 once it appeared in opensuse repository(which was much before the release announcement.) On testing I could find some enhancement to the plasma desktop but at the same time I felt there were some bugs which was not found in the 4.0.1 release. One such bug was when I try to remove the Kget applet the desktop crashes. Another one was that the desktop settings are not saved on log out of the system. Another issue is once I change the wallpaper I need to log out and log in back for it to get applied. Another problem that I faced from the very KDE 4.0.0 is that even if I remove some of the icons it always come back on each login. I thought I would confirm these bugs with others and then post it to the bugs tracker. Not sure if these bugs are only on my system.
One enhancement I would like to see in KDE 4 is with the icons. Desktop icons is taking more screen space than KDE 3.x version. Due to the same reason I am not able to add any applets, since there is no space for additional applets. So I request KDE team to provide much better icon set up for KDE 4. I am still playing with KDE 4.0.2 and would post the bugs details if I found any. Thanks
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SuperKaramba Widgets & Wallpapers
by Bobby on Thursday 06/Mar/2008, @01:32
First congrats and thanks to the devs for another very fast release.
There are two little problems that I am having since I am not that demanding ;)
1. I still can't figure out how to run Liquid Weather on Plasma. It even shows up in the add widget dialogue box after I tried to run it using SuperKaramba but when I tried to add it to the desktop I got a message saying that one or more components of the Kross scripting architecture is missing. Do I need to install one or more packages here and which?

2. I set up sideshow for my wallpapers but after the first wallpaper changes the desktop just gets white - no wallpaper anymore. One can see that the wallpapers continue to change after the given interval but they don't appear on the desktop! And the white desktop + panel turn all kinds of colours when I write in Firefox (like now). It changes to black with white shadows around the Plasmoids then a mixture of green, blue, red yellow etc. with a funny pattern. This only happens to some of the Plasmoids but not the desktop and panel when I use openOffice Writer.

Well, the desktop is working and seems to have improved in speed but these teething troubles are a bit frustrating since I don't know how to solve them.
Btw I am using openSuse 10.3 with the Suse packages installed. Don't know if that could be the problem.
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I really hate
by anon on Thursday 06/Mar/2008, @01:48
I really hate the retarded time consuming way of logging out of KDE

Go to the menu, select to shut down the computer, then more time wasted as the screen changes shade, and a box pop's up asking if you want to restart, log out, shut down. For frigs sake, If I wanted to reboot I would of friggin picked that in the start menu, if I wanted to log out I would of bloody picked that. To pick something from the bloody menu and to not have it do it straight away, but to get a bloody time consuming, time wasting screen come up making me select what option I want is bloody retarded.
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Double click still not working on plasma icons
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Thursday 06/Mar/2008, @02:14
For what I know this bug is still present.
Is it *THAT* hard to fix? :-(
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About shutting down
by deniseweird on Thursday 06/Mar/2008, @06:37
Just having it shut down right away might be annoying though. Let's say you accidentally press Shut Down. Then you have to start up the computer again. Just having a Quit button, and then choosing more in detail if you want to shut down, log out, or just cancel, or whatever might be more fitting.
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Screenshot please?
by Parminder Ramesh on Thursday 06/Mar/2008, @22:51
Could someone please put up a screenshot of what the configuration dialog for the panel looks like so far? It would be interesting to compare with the KDE3 one. Pic at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kde_config_panel_arrangement.jpg
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rlz
by Mihail Mezyakov on Friday 07/Mar/2008, @01:24
KDE rulezzzzzz forever!
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nice work
by debianita on Friday 07/Mar/2008, @06:46
Congratulations people, amazing progress, i canīt wait KDE 4.1, cheers.
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Great progress
by mkrs on Friday 07/Mar/2008, @10:26
I've written some bitter words once but this time I have to say that a lot of great work has been done. I am really impressed. There are still some stability issues (esp. when I use System Settings) but I can really see that KDE 4.0 has become a nice and - what's even more important - usable environment. Good job! Thanks for all those who made this cute thing work.
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Visual inconsistency woes
by ac on Saturday 08/Mar/2008, @02:24
Still much to be done to achieve visual consistency, as per this screenshot: http://beranger.org/blogo12/kde4_visual_consistency.png
But KDE4 is looking increasingly great!
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I Removed KDE 3 Completely :-)
by lord_rob on Monday 10/Mar/2008, @03:08
I decided KDE 4.0.2 was the time to switch my main desktop environment from KDE 3.5 to KDE 4.0.

When you use the Debian packages, the old version is automatically overwritten by the new one (so there's no way to install both KDE version in separate folders). Anyway, I could revert to the old KDE 3.5.9 if I really wanted to but I sure don't want to ;-).
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tech demonstrator
by szlam on Monday 17/Mar/2008, @14:40
Still, 2/3 of features missing (well, maybe 3/5), java doesn't work in Konqueror, etc.
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