4.5 RC2 Available

While many KDE developers are enjoying, contemplating, hacking, discussing, designing, planning and promoting KDE's trinity of software products (The Plasma Desktop, the Application Suite and the Development Platform), the release team also found some time to make another release candidate available. 4.5 RC2 is now available in source form from KDE's FTP servers for everybody to give a test run. There is still some time to fix last minute bugs, so please help us by reporting them, so we can make this a smooth release.

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Where are the tarballs?

Are they going to be in the "stable" folder on mirrors, as the announcement says?

Apologies, the ftp server was not set to be readable. It now is but will take a wee while to sync the images to ftp.kde.org and elsewhere.

could you please say when the ftp server will be set to be readable?thanks

The first line of the linked page say: "KDE Software Compilation 4.5 RC1 Release Announcement". Guess that should be RC2.

What's the point ? I've reported a number of serious issues in both packaging and KDE, and nothing has happened despite many people saying 'yup, broke here too'.

Ex 1: a problem in the powerbtn.sh ACPI support script Ubuntu uses that makes the machine always shutdown when you press the power button, no matter the KDE seting, because of
Ex 2: there is always a 'defunct' kded process
Ex 3: serious graphic glitch in system monitor applets

If you've filed bugs then you can track the progress there. If you haven't then the developers probably don't know about it and won't fix it. The 'point' is that there is still time to get fixes in before the final release.

1. sounds like it might be Ubuntu/Kubuntu specific, but I don't know

could you please provide us with the bugnumbers for this? the fisrt is not a kde problem, but the third i thin is fixed in rc1 a and the second i never heard of.

Is there a changelog from rc1 to rc2?
I didn’t manage to find one.

Also the distribution information for Gentoo on

kde.org/download/distributions.php

is wrong.

I currently run 4.4.90. The latest versions and even SVN versions are available via the kde overlay.

The stable version in the main tree is 4.4.4, the testing one 4.4.5.

244169, 244173, 244174.

I'll be waiting for 4.6.

P.S. I'm not a spammer.

Dude.

The first one is definitely an issue, it's not huge but annoying nonetheless. The second is a minor visual glitch - something we can't fix during an RC cycle, it'll have to wait until the first bugfix release.

And the third is technically simply impossible - and completely irrelevant for normal users anyway.

BTW there is no 'kicker' anymore, that one is dead. The new desktop technology is called 'Plasma', and there is nothing else there but applets (including the panel & background themselves).

Either way, not using the Plasma desktop for these reasons is imho a bit silly - they don't hurt normal usage.

Besides, you can use KDE apps in Gnome or on Windows or Mac - so if you don't like the desktop shell, fine, don't use it, use something else. No reason to delay the releases of Kate, Dolphin or Gwenview for that :D

Cheers,
Jos

I don't care about fanboys but I'm getting really upset when KDE developers deny some common sense.

An environment experience is a sum of many little subtle things and if I'm able to discover 5 bugs during 10 minutes of usage (I wasn't actively trying to break something I just played a bit with this or that feature), something tells me that someone cares much more about new features, not about how already existing features function.

The second RC IMO must be a paragon of clarity and speed, alas, it's not a case for KDE 4.5 (from the point of my short failed attempt of trying to use KDE4 for the 20th time - yes, I still cannot make myself migrate from KDE 3.5.10 to KDE4).

P.S. dot.kde.org antispam protection is incorrectly set up - and I'm reminding everyone about that for the 10th time, but who really cares? ;)

I haven't seen any developer deny any common sense in the bugreports. Can you give an example?

Oh and what is the problem with the anti-spam setup? I have never seen any issues at all...

And if you found so many bugs, why did you only report these three minor or irrelevant issues? I'm not saying they should be fixed at some point, but they're hardly showstoppers and will be fixed as soon as someone gets to it. We've got limited resources and little control over how they're used so that's just life.

I'm not affected! I get a flash after three seconds and the Plasma theme is fully switched.

OTOH, what's really a bug, biting us since ever, is metrics. Some Plasma themes have different metrics for the pager and for Folder Views, and, when a theme defines them and I want to switch to another theme that doesn't define them but uses the defaults (like Air), I get wrong metrics.

Please, require always a definition or impose the defaults after the lack of definition. But do not forget to impose defaults on those themes who don't have metrics defined!

That people vote you down is to be expected, if you post only bugnumbers (without eve nan info what they are about) and then say “4.5 is bad”.

Noone can see any reasoning from your post without first checking the bugtracker, so you force people to read external stuff before being able to understand your reasons, which isn’t really nice to other people discussing here.

And if you’re not nice to others, don’t expect them to see your post as worthwhile for reading.

I just want something as polished as any Windows release, and believe me, if you run Windows without shitty software this OS barely has any visible bugs or crashes or misbehaviour.

Or maybe I want too much from something that's given to me for free. OK, I step back and shut up.

And mind that those bugs number weren't meant for a general public consumption. I don't care about Gnome/KDE/Windows/MacOS/etc fanboys - most of them are pathetic and don't see beyond their nose.

P.S. I'm not a spammer, f**k! Even this little pestering problem cannot be solved here.

After upgrading I can't find any obvious way to switch to webkit instead of KHTML in Konqueror, any hints?

sudo apt-get install kpart-webkit

...restart konqueror and voila!

Every time i log in, i get a random small window and a thumbnail in the taskbar. If i right click on the taskbar and close is, plasma desktop exits and doesnt restart. Strange bug. Seems to correspond with desktop effects because when i suspend compositing, the window disappears.

Could you report this as a bug on bugs.kde.org, please, if it's still relevant with the latest RC?