KDE 3.4.3 Released

KDE 3.4.3 has been released. This release includes many bugfixes and increased translation coverage compared to previous versions. The 3.4.3 info page has the links to download the source and packages are available for Arch Linux, Kubuntu, Slackware and SuSE. Konstruct is the easy way to build from source.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by me (not verified)

first post0r!!!!111

by rinse (not verified)

Nou, geweldig :o)

by Artem Tashkinov (not verified)

As far as I compile every and each KDE release manually (I do not use precompiled rpm's, deb's whatever) I will patiently wait for the upcoming 3.5 release.

by Anonymous (not verified)

To keep you busy compiling there will be a KDE 3.5 Beta 2 next week first.

by rinse (not verified)

Maybe a Klik-version can be an option :)

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Hmm, I hope Kurt goes one step further and start promoting an automatic build&install of signed p2p binary packages only for KDE.

Doing this right can also mean a platform independend update. These signed packages could be used for an KDE auto-update. If you take care of user options and features this means an overhead in different libversions, but disc space is cheap. That way a developer team could also release debug-version to a wider user base.
I hope Klik is just the beginning. If an KDE update would be completely platform-, system- and distribution agnostic is this just great.

When you see things like GetHotNewStuff in control center or amarok, this one-click-type installation is so sweet.

Bye

Thorsten

by fish (not verified)

yeah, but the amaroK gethotnewstuff doesn't really work...

http://amarok.kde.org/component/option,com_simpleboard/Itemid,57/func,vi...

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Oh, don't mean amarok but superkaramba as part of kdeutils :-)

Bye

Thorsten

by coolvibe (not verified)

Why not use packages? Compiling KDE is a very long process (it's easy as heck, but it just takes quite a bit of time), so nobody will think you are a lesser geek if you use packages :)

And don't give me the "optimization" reason. Compiler optimization is one of the most overrated things out there.

by Jason Keirstead (not verified)

More people compiling with debug (esp. beta releases) means more helpful bug reports to developers.

by Ookaze (not verified)

The reason for me are that :
- By the time the packages are out for most distributions, I will have compiled KDE 3.4.3 entirely
- with support for the latest HAL and Dbus, so that media kioslave actually works (or perhaps it is already supported out of the box in this version)
- packages on my Linux are nALFS XML files describing how to compile apps
- it's compiled for my hardware, so it can't be slower than the generic version binary distro gives you (gcc visibility compiler optimization is surely not overrated like you said)
- I know exactly what changes have been done to the vanilla version (none) and the vanilla version behaviour
- I will be able to use the latest Qt with patches to make it work
- having my own Linux explains why I did not have to change "distro" since 2001, and as I can do it, I'm sure not to change my ways while I can do that

by Stephen Leaf (not verified)

I keep seeing things about this visibility flag yet I've never been able to find anything about it.
Is this a gcc4 or what's the details on this flag?

by Jon (not verified)

Visibility allows you to make symbols (variables, functions, classes, methods) in shared libraries hidden by default, which speeds up the load and link time of libraries (and reduces relocations) by a large amount.

it also helps you be explicit in which interfaces you choose to export to the outside world.

Hope this helps
Jon

by Stephen Leaf (not verified)

yes it does clear up how it speeds things up however how do I use it?
-visibility?
can I use this with gcc3 or is it a gcc4 option?
I checked the gcc3 man page and saw nothing on it.

by Boris (not verified)

It is in gcc 3.4 and up

by Ookaze (not verified)

It's a GCC 4 feature. It still is not present in qt 3.3.5, and I think KDE 3.4 does not work well (or at all) with QT 4.
If not present in Qt, it won't be of much use in KDE.
Compiling from source allows me to add the visibility flag even to Qt.

by Michael Pyne (not verified)

KDE 3.4 and 3.5 do not work with Qt 4.

Visibility support could theoretically still be useful if it was unsupported by Qt because the KDE libraries would still have symbols removed. However, visibility support is disabled unless Qt supports it due to several subtle bugs that are introduced otherwise that can lead to crashes.

by Stephen Leaf (not verified)

So will visibility work for most programs or should I just consider this option to be a more of an expensive optimization?
Is it safe to use. or should I just forget about it for a while?
speed is good however are you really running faster if the program loads 2 times quicker but crashes 2-3 times before you can actually do anything ;)

by Michael Pyne (not verified)

With Qt patched to support it, KDE enables it by default whenever it's usable now. So yes, it's very safe.

The optimization itself *also* saves time compiling, since much less info has to be used during the link stage.

One problem is that kdegames (specifically kfouleggs and ksirtet) seems to have trouble compiling with visibility support. I've tried several times to fix it but each time it keeps popping back up. :(

by Alex (not verified)

Does Qt 4 support visibility for GCC?

by Vlad Blanton (not verified)

Same here, except I use gentoo linux. [www.gentoo.org]

almost everything is compiled from scratch with gentoo, its the gentoo way.

Yes, optimizations actually do make a very big difference. If you've used gentoo, you'll notice why. having the right flags turned on for your particular CPU and system set can make an enormous difference. Everything is stable and snappy except for the rare untested fluke.

But then again, everyone makes a choice. This was mine, that was yours.

Really, its all the same. Who cares what way you do things, its all *nix.

by kundor (not verified)

Vlad, have you actually done measurements?

I use Gentoo myself a lot of the time. But don't kid yourself that all that compiling is getting any sort of noticeable speed increase. It's not; any differences are nowhere near the human-noticeable range. If you want optimization to really make a difference you have to understand an app, understand its bottlenecks, profile it, and optimize for precisely those situations. Just compiling everything isn't really going to help -- do you honestly think the maintainers of binary distros don't put effort into making sure their packages are compiled with the best options for speed and stability? Speed-tuned binary distros are liable to actually be faster than Gentoo, because they have dedicated professionals working on tweaking the packages that actually matter for the best performance.

There are many valid reasons to use Gentoo, but the "optimalizations" are not one of them.

by Vlad Blanton (not verified)

As much as I would like to believe you, and as much as I would like it to be true. Binary distro maintainers can't be as optimized as Gentoo because they are forced to compile for a wide range of processors. I also doubt that binary distros have the time to make sure the package works the fastest with certain flags turned on, its more likely that most of them make sure it works without any kinks and then move on to the next package.

-Vlad Blanton

by kundor (not verified)

Again. Do measurements. If you gave me reproducible numbers, you'd have a case.

Otherwise, I conclude that you are suffering from a common Gentoo delusion.

by ne... (not verified)

Well I have an Athlon 64 that only gets a workout playing spider solitaire, surfing the web & reading the dot (-:. This is the perfect way to give it
a workout. Can't have it sitting there doing nothing most of the time.

by Janne Karhunen (not verified)

> Why not use packages?

Ah, the irony. As far as the Linux packaging systems go, it's probably easier to compile it :)

That said, problem with Linux packaging system is that (be it RPM, DEB or what ever gizmo you like):
a) there are HUGE amount of SMALL packages (unix legacy)
b) packages depend on each other on multiple ways
c) linux is not linux is not linux (different distributions).

This leads to the case that even within single distribution package dependency graph can be staggering. System can be installed in gazillion different ways, and this causes headache for ISVs, package maintainers and users. If package maintainers themselves cannot keep up with all the internal dependencies, how the hell user (avg. Joe) could?

And it doesn't matter what kind of a clever kludge you build on top to resolve this (YAST, YUM, APT, ..) - in the end you're just introducing more complexity and code that shouldn't exist in the first place. There's just no way you can hide a mess of this magnitude.

The cure? One possibility is to reduce the amount of packages drastically and standardize on some basic set of applications (and package names) that we could call Linux. But due to Unix legacy, that's quite unlikely to happen any time soon :/.

by PC Squad (not verified)

AFAIC, self-compiled KDE (well, Gentoo in my case) is much more stable than pre-compiled packages (SUSE, Debian). All those annoying little crashes I had especially in SuSE 8.x times vanished when I switched to self-compiled packages. That is worth leaving the machine running one night.

by fast_rizwaan (not verified)

Missing "kdesktop" application and "startkde" script.

by JC (not verified)

I'm currently checking for that problem.

by JC (not verified)

Sorry for that.
I'm uploading kdebase-3.4.3-i486-2.tgz that fix the missing apps.

Enjoy

by JC (not verified)

sorry I mean version -3 of kdebase :)

good night:)

by Fast_Rizwaan (not verified)

you've been very kind to compile and upload slackware packages. I thank you for that :) keep up the good work! Good night... sweet dreams ;)

Thanks Fast_Rizwaan.

I'm preparing 3.5 beta2 packages... :)

by Jo Øiongen (not verified)

But did you guys see this at http://madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=5304&page=2 ?

To quote the article: "KOffice has sent David Faure, who may be the single greatest individual threat to Microsoft's information dominion yet seen."

That is what you might call a compliment :-)

by Fast_Rizwaan (not verified)

No doubt David Faure is one of the best persons KDE could have. KOffice is alive because of David Faure...(my opinion)

I wish Aaron, Rik, and other exceptional developers join Faure in improving koffice. Then in no time KOffice will be much better than Openoffice.

Thanks D. Faure for kword and konqueror :)

by Andrey V. Panov (not verified)

I have downloaded ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.4.3/src/*.xdelta files and applied patches to kde 3.4.2 sources. Then I archived tar files by "bzip2 -9" (1.0.3) version and md5 sums for all resulting files excepting kdeartwork-3.4.3.tar.bz2 are fail. I use to done this operation successfuly for previous KDE versions before several times. Which bzip2 version and options are used for archives?

by Artem Tashkinov (not verified)

Use bzip 1.0.2

by hein (not verified)

Just use KDE 3.4.3 on the new Kubuntu and I must confess it is absolutely broken, I guess this is kubuntu's fault.

I tried Amarok and was unable to use it. It's usability is horrible and I was unable to configure it so it play any sound. System sounds however work well.

by hein (not verified)

No I tried to use Kaffeine and entered an URL.

the error message:
"No URI handler implemented for this"

I think I do not have to understand it, do I?

Plus: there is a useless "details" button on that dialogue.

by hein (not verified)

Now I started KPDf, good tool. Unfortunately the file dialogue does not really support typing in URLs.
So: I try it in Konqueror, the plugin opens it. Perfect. But how do I increase the zoom level, no buttons found.

guess: ctrl + '+'

Ahhh.

Well....

by hein (not verified)

Konqueror menu tools has a strange submenu. "minitools".

lets figure our what it is.

"edit minitools" open the bookmark editor.

hmmm????

by hein (not verified)

Now try Kontact.

Let's look what "News" is.

"cannot load part for news. Library file for libknodapart.la" not found"

Okay. Forget about Kubuntu....

by Captain Apparent (not verified)

Maybe you should be reporting these glitches to kubuntu instead of KDE?

by mikeyd (not verified)

Just use KDE 3.4.3 on the new Kubuntu and I must confess it is absolutely broken, I guess this is kubuntu's fault.

Primarily-gnome distros have a way of shipping broken KDE packages. If I were more paranoid I'd suspect a conspiracy.

by Michael Pyne (not verified)

Uh, Kubuntu is the KDE-specific port of Ubuntu, which is the GNOME-centric distro you describe. The point of Kubuntu is to make KDE on Ubuntu not suck.

by mikeyd (not verified)

I thought the point was to make sure Ubuntu had something to point KDE fans at so they didn't complain too much about its lack of support. Kubuntu's still part of a gnome-centric distro, and from what I've read, very much a second-class citizen next to the main Ubuntu.

by anon (not verified)

> I thought the point was to make sure Ubuntu had something to point KDE fans at so they didn't complain too much about its lack of support.

I think this is an insult to those people who put a lot of time and effort into creating this distribution.

> Kubuntu's still part of a gnome-centric distro, and from what I've read, very much a second-class citizen next to the main Ubuntu.

Have you ever tried Kubuntu? "From what I've read" can be used as an argument for or against just about anything.

by mikeyd (not verified)

I think this is an insult to those people who put a lot of time and effort into creating this distribution.

I don't say it lightly.

Have you ever tried Kubuntu?

Personally, no, but friends I trust have.

"From what I've read" can be used as an argument for or against just about anything.

Oh yes, we should never believe anything unless we've personally verified it, and never discuss anything without absolute proof for our position. Nice in theory, but in practice you end up just not saying anything.

Has anybody encountered a problem with Konstruct and digikam? For me it refuses to compile digikam because the checksum does not match the file:

hecke@eckepc:digikam 10025> cat checksums
18d0153511fb6221c21043b1a90ac355 download/digikam-0.7.4.tar.bz2
hecke@eckepc:digikam 10026> md5sum download/digikam-0.7.4.tar.bz2
3df53700ff78caca60cab4ea4116c7c5 download/digikam-0.7.4.tar.bz2

Does anybody know what this is about?