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  KDE 4.1 Beta 1 Released
KDE Official News Posted by Will Stephenson on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @07:33
from the rolling-at-you-like-a-big-rock dept.
The KDE Project is happy to set the first beta of KDE 4.1, codenamed Caramel, free today. KDE 4.1 is intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users and we therefore respectfully request you to get testing Beta 1. Beta 1 is not ready for production use but is in wide use by KDE developers and is suitable for testing by Linux enthusiasts and KDE fans.

Highlights of 4.1 are a much more mature Plasma desktop shell that returns much of the configurability that was missing in KDE 4.0, many more applets and look and feel improvements, the return of Kontact and the rest of the KDE PIM applications, and many improvements and newly ported applications. The feature set is now frozen, so the developers look forward to using June and July to metamorphosing your bug reports into rock solid code, completing documentation and translating everything into your language. A series of Bug Days where users can contribute quality assurance to the release will continue towards 4.1's final release on the 29th of July, so watch the Dot for details.

For more details, see the release announcement and info page or if you are at LinuxTag, see KDE 4.1 being presented in Berlin this Friday.



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Rough guide to plasma
by sebas on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @08:28
For those wondering how this Plasma thing works, I've written down directions how to use its various new features on my blog at http://vizZzion.org/?blogentry=817
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News posted to Digg and Reddit
by JLP on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @08:29
http://digg.com/linux_unix/KDE_Project_Ships_First_Beta_of_KDE_4_1
http://www.reddit.com/info/6ky82/comments/
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Woohoo!
by d2kx on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @08:52
Both the OpenSource AMD Radeon and the KDE team have presented huge milestones today. What is going on? I love this day :D Great work to all the developers involved! Looking forward to using KDE 4.1 as my primary desktop environment, replacing my KDE 3.5.9.
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Fedora packages
by Paulo Fidalgo on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @09:09
Since fedora ships KDE 4 by default, it will ne nice to have packages to test this beta...
Anybody want to step in, and make some rpm's?

PS: I cannot switch to other distro, but I would like to test and report bugs, while I'm at work.
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Mistake on site
by Paul on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @09:43
"On 29th May 20008"... Seems a bit TOO behind schedule for my liking.
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KDE PIM
by ad on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @10:04
How stable is KDE PIM for KDE 4?
Would you guys recommend it over the KDE 3 version?
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krunner question
by taerde on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @10:14
does the new krunner have the possibility to run a program as another user? i could not find this when i tried the beta.

thanks to all the developers, beta 1 looks great!
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C#
by Darwin Reynoso on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @10:24
we need a plasma binding for c# :-)
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Konqueror and WebKit
by Zubin Parihar on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @11:37
In the announcement it says that "KHTML get a speed boost from anticipatory resource loading, while WebKit... is added to Plasma..."

So is Konqueror going to have WebKit or KHTML?
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Thanks KDE for all your hard work & perseverance!
by Martin Fitzpatrick on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @12:01
That is all :)
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Missing Bits
by Bobby on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @12:34
First of all thank you all who are involved in this wonderful work and for another important beta release.

There are a few things that I am personally missing, they are not vital but nonetheless missing.
Flickr - could somebody tell me where Flickr disappeared to?
Thumbnail preview (composite) doesn't seems to be working although it's turned on and the KWin compositing effects has brought my system to a crawl once again although it was quite fast with previous builds. Anyone here has similar problems?
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no proxy support :'(
by Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @12:56
Well... I still don't see any word on proxy support in the release notes. More is a pity, but I cannot even try KDE 4.x in a reasonable fashion (well, that is try KDE and KDE programs) without fixed proxy support. I could always use firefox, pidgin, liferea, thunderbird and other non-KDE programs to access the net, but in that case I don't see the point of using KDE. I hope they will fix this soon.
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proxies
by anon on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @12:58
Any news about proxy support?
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any chance for stable plasma?
by Tom on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @13:02
I was wondering why plasma widgets can crash plasma with simple actions like remove widget.. ?? After the first crash plasma starts again, but with the second one, kde doesn't start again...only remove .kde* dirs helps.. :((
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Fast
by D Kite on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @13:27
I don't know what changed in the last few days, but my last build from yesterday was downright snappy. Konqueror renders quickly, kmail loads suddenly.

Very nice.

Derek
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No More Desktop Icons in 4.1
by T. J. Brumfield on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @13:59
No More Desktop Icons in 4.1 = No longer a KDE user.
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sigh
by anon on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @14:34
wish i had my computer to try it on, but alas, HP technicians are friggin hopeless and damn slow when repairing a hardware fault under warranty. Can't wait to get it back and try beta 1
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Not there yet
by Adrian on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @15:32
I've tried it in a debian machine, but I can't live without autohide panels.
Does anyone know if this feature will be implemented in 4.1? If it's not in the beta1 I think it won't be a new feature.
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Waiting to test
by Iuri Fiedoruk on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @17:22
I was hoping ubuntu packages would be ready for this night... but seems like I'll have to wait a bit more for the fun.

Any previews from people who are running it, comparing to 4.0 and telloing how stability is (remembering 4.0 is still a kind of beta in terms of stability).

:)
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kedit
by Raul on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @17:25
where is kedit?? is used to be in kdeutils (at lest in version 3.5.9), i just compiled and is not there :\
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printing support ?
by levin on Tuesday 27/May/2008, @22:51
And what abou priting support in KDE 4.1 ? because in KDE4.0 is not...
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WONDERFUL!
by fhd on Wednesday 28/May/2008, @01:32
Many people bitched about KDE 4.0, including me (though only in my head).

After some clarifying words in aseigo's (and others) blog(s), I was assured that KDE 4.1 will kick ass, and have been at war with KDE 4.0 bitchers from then on.

But I've tried to use KDE 4.0 all the time. In fact, KDE 4 is the only reason I'm using KDE, I never liked KDE 3 a lot. Approximately one and half a year ago, I discovered first mockups of KDE 4 and became certain that it will just rock. To become a KDE 4 user, I got rid of Gnome (have been a gnomie for years) and got myself KDE 3. I never managed to get a "beautiful" desktop with it, because I never wanted to put much effort into it. So it looked like kindergarten but was a very powerful tool to me.
I've been following KDE 4 development very actively all the time, and now the day has come I've been waiting for - the 4.1 beta!

When I get home from work today, I will do nothing before the beta is not installed on my system.

Judging from the screenshots and changelogs so far: GREAT WORK!
This looks like a total usable release, I'm ESPECIALLY looking forward to finally using the new Kontact, Kontact is IMO the best out of all KDE programs. I hope my kitchensync setup continues to work nicely.


So to sum this up, thank you for KDE!!!
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Conclusions after using it a few hours
by Adrian Ribao on Wednesday 28/May/2008, @10:17
First of all I want to say I know:
- This is the first beta, not ready for production
- It's a big project and developers had too much work to do
- I'm using packages from the experimental branch of debian, and this is not good at all.

after all I must say I really like KDE, I think it's the greatest project made by the open source community, but... imho, KDE 4.1 isn't what I was waiting for, at least at this point (beta1).

I found some problems just starting, some of have already been posted here.
1.- No autohide panels, I really need them
2.- The widgets can't be moved in the panel (I mean change the position in the panel)
3.- It's not possible to configure the widget to be on the TOP of all the other windows, this would be even better than 1 & 2, since we could have a menu on the top left corner. 1 & 3 together would be the typical stuff that makes KDE the best desktop ever. Example: One widget on the top-left corner always over all the windows, and an auto hiding panel in the bottom with the task bar, paginator...
4.-Plasma was using 50-70% of my CPU. I don't know why. My system was very slow.
5.-I don't like the theme, but this is not important, I just wanted to say it :-)
6.- I can do the same things in KDE 3.5.9 much faster than in 4.1. This is what is killing me, when you upgrade the software, you must:
1.- Increase productivity of the users
2.- Make it more attractive
If you change priorities you'll get a copy of Windows.
There are a few things you can do in 4.1 and you can't do in 3.5 to make your life easier, and a lot of things in 3.5 you can't do in 4.1.

In my case, I can't give up productivity in favour of eye-candy.

I want to make this clear: This is just an opinion.
I understand KDE developers, and I'll support them, but this is the second time I don't like a KDE release, and I feel like if I say it, it might help. I just want to be constructive.
What do you think about this?
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No character encoding selector in KWrite's menu?
by Lie_Ex on Thursday 29/May/2008, @02:29
Now user has to be determine character encoding by oneself when opening a external txt file.If he wants to change encoding after erroneous judgement,he must reopen it,and re-determine the file encoding in drop listbox until everything is OK.

IMHO,it's less convenience than before.More dialog,more click,more waiting.
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Where are the packages for FreeBSD?
by Unga on Thursday 29/May/2008, @07:52
KDE 4.1 Beta packages are available for even MS Windows and Mac OSX!, for those who do not need KDE. Where are the packages for FreeBSD, the ones who really need it?

Does this mean KDE developers do not use FreeBSD or any other BSD?
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Submenu delay?
by samwyse on Thursday 29/May/2008, @09:38
I think this is a QT4 thing, but is the long delay in displaying submenus going to be fixed? It makes using apps seem heavy compared to KDE3 where submenus are displayed nearly instantly.
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Daily SVN Packages For ArchLinux
by markc on Friday 30/May/2008, @02:54
It may be of interest to some users to know that ArchLinux has had daily binary packages from SVN available every day for the last 2 months and will continue to do so for at least the rest of this year, and maybe always. Even if you don't primarily run ArchLinux it is easy to install into a separate 5Gb to 10Gb partition and dual boot, or run in a VM. More details here...

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=44507&action=new
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Some problems
by KejPi on Friday 30/May/2008, @04:56
I am periodically testing KDE4 SVN under Gentoo. I have never seen flash working in Konqueror so far :-( Some users told me that it is working but all of them are using nspluginwrapper. I have 32bit system so I don't have it and flash is not working.

Next is session management. In KDE3.5 I want some application to be started automatically (e.g. kopete, kmail). I'm using "restore session saved by user" (or how is it called in english) option in KDE3.5. This option is also present in KDE4, but I haven't found how to save the session. What is working fine is "restore previous session" option. What it the trick there?

I have read somewhere that tasklist in panel should support more then one row of applications. It should decide when to use more then 1 row and when not. I opened about 15 windows and still I had just one row of very small application "buttons". They are in fact bigger in height then in width and it was not nice. Is there any option to enable more rows?

And the last point is that Phonon doesn't see my sound card in list of devices. I can se there just "arts" and sound is not working. My sound cars is SB Live 1024, quite old but well supported by ALSA.

But nevertheless KDE4 is a huge step forward and I hope that in the end it will be better than 3.5.X.
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this might be a stupid question, but....
by Janne on Saturday 31/May/2008, @00:36
...How do I move widgets inside the panel? I tried the 4.1-beta LiveCD, and couldn't figure this one out.

Suppose that I want to move the taskbar or the clock around to a new location in the taskbar, how do I do it? Dragging didn't work. IS this merely a bug, or am I missing something?
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HTML and Javascript support for Plasma?
by Anonymous Coward on Monday 02/Jun/2008, @10:58
Does anyone know if Plasma supports plasmoids written in HTML and JavaScript yet? From what I've read, this is a feature scheduled for 4.1, but I can't find any documentation on Techbase nor any examples in SVN. :(
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Dashboard widgets
by Yves on Tuesday 03/Jun/2008, @00:51
Hello,

is it now possible to use Dashboard Widgets on Plasma?

If yes, is there an example on how to download and install them?
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NetworkManager Plasmoid
by Yves on Tuesday 03/Jun/2008, @03:20
Will it be included in KDE 4.1?

It's the last piece of KDE which I currently need
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Date with KDE 4.1
by Umesh Sirsiwal on Sunday 08/Jun/2008, @19:31
I tried using KDE 4.1 for one day at my work. I have summarized my impressions at http://kashi.webhop.net/blog/Technology/index.php/archives/29
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