KDE 3.1beta2 Hits the 'Net

Yesterday the KDE Project
announced
the release of KDE 3.1beta2, the third (and final) development release of the
KDE
3.1 branch
. On top of the large number of improvements over KDE 3.0 which have already been
announced, this release offers
a
number
of significant improvements, such as a new Exchange 2000®
plugin for KOrganizer and a KVim plugin for KDevelop
(screenshot).
In addition, release coordinator Dirk Mueller notes that
over 1,000 bugreports on bugs.kde.org
have been fixed in the last 4 weeks
.
Please run this release through its paces so that KDE 3.1 will be the best
we can make it! Thanks to all for the hard work in getting this release out.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by gunnar (not verified)

thanx.
i still didnt have the time to run this new beta. thanx for explaation
-gunnar

by Øyvind Sæther (not verified)

Error 1: kdeprint/cups will not compile if you got XFree compiled from Source (also affects some distributions).

Solution 1: Enter '#define HasZlib YES' into the host.def file when you compile XFree to avoid this error. If you already compiled XFree, the solution is to do a 'rm /usr/X11R6/lib/libz.a'.

Error 2: The kdepim package will not compile. There is no GLOBAL include library named kdateedit.h included on line 27 in dateedit.h by recurrenceedit.cpp in line 54.

Solution 2:
Copy kdateedit.h from ../kdepim-3.0.8/libkdepimin to the $KDEDIR/include before you compile this package.

This is, ofcource, a beta, so shit happens.

I got the impression from a developer that 'if a user fails to build xfree correct then it is the users own fault.'. My opinion is that ./configure should detect as many strange configuration errors as possible and adapt.

http://oyvinds.tk/

> I got the impression from a developer that 'if a user fails to build xfree correct then it is the users own fault.'. My opinion is that ./configure should detect as many strange configuration errors as possible and adapt.

Sorry for the problems, but

1. This IS Beta, this is known to have bugs. Please report them (thanks, you did), best would be bugs.kde.org

2. It will be impossible to handle all possible configurations. If you know such magic stuff for autoconf, your patches are welcome. Use kde-devel for posting or join the team :-)

3. Coolo is doing a great job. If he's missing something, fine with me. I don't know anything about all the configuration stuff and I'm glad to have some who knows. If there is a mistake, okay, can be fixed and done.

No need to blame or thinking there are wrong attitudes. Mistakes happen and as long as someone notices theme the right way, they will be fixed.

Philipp

by ac (not verified)

So normally I'm here saying "I wish I had RedHat RPMS" but now that I'm running "nullified" KDE, I have a different idea.

Although KDE people are in no way responsible for RedHat's f*ck-ups, they may be able to do things to improve their image to the RedHat-using world that only knows nullified KDE, and they don't want to change distros. Instead of providing RedHat RPMs for every KDE milestone, I think it would be interesting if some industrious KDE coder made "Corrected RedHat RPMS" that address the version of KDE most recently vandalized by RedHat in an official release. Or even "Differential Corrected RedHat RPMS" that only fix what's broken.

For example, RedHat 8.0 features a nullified KDE 3.0.3. A corrected 3.0.3 version could be released, and no more would be released until the next RedHat release. This would be considerably less frequent work than providing RedHat versions for all recent milestones. Also, since RedHat will have to periodically resync their branch with the main KDE tree, it will become increasingly easy to figure out what they're breaking and change it back.

Anyway, yes it's a lot of work still. But it would be a big public relations improvement over the current situation, when the world at large thinks we're just whining about a theme change (they really think we can just switch from Bluecurve to Keramik and it will stop being broken). If even some of the rest of the world sees everything RedHat broke, maybe things will improve.

Anyway, just an idea. Not even any code to back myself up. But I think it's worth thinking about.

by Hoek (not verified)

Yes, this is indeed a very interesting idea.

I hope KDE developers / webmasters / packagers also think this way and present `Corrected KDE packages` for RedHat users..

by ne... (not verified)

The thing is most KDE coders would rather code than produce rpms. KDE rpms for RedHat are produced by industrious users, you might want to target them instead. I would prefer that those who do not like what RedHat does either get their rpms from another source or compile the source.

Addressing your 'image' comment, I do not think KDE has anything to prove to RedHat users. I say this as a long time RedHat user. I use KDE and prefer it over the other desktops environments I have used. But then, I am quite comfortable compiling stuff. Now, if you were to volunteer to provide these rpms, I am sure the effort would be appreciated but the community. I believe all you would need to do is find the source rpms and compile them on an RH8.0 system. If source rpms are hard to come by, use the official tarbols and make a spec file. Good sources of info on this would be Texstar or Rex Dieter.

by Gaute Lindkvist (not verified)

Yeah.. that bit of patching KDE to comply with freedesktop.org-standards are the worst piece of vandalism I've ever seen.

It even (shock horror) includes unified panel-notification between GNOME and KDE, so developers won't have to code them twice.

by Paul Seamons (not verified)

A closer inspection of the site freedesktop.org would show that it is hosted by Red Hat. So I guess we can infer that it was easy for them to comply with their own standards.

by Paul Seamons (not verified)

Oops my bad - read further in:
http://www.freedesktop.org/about/

"Nothing on this site should be taken to be endorsed by any entity, commercial or otherwise; including Red Hat, Inc. or any of the desktop projects. freedesktop.org does not have a list of supporters or sponsors because it is an informal collaboration site. This site is what its contributors make it. "

by L.Lunak (not verified)

That still doesn't change anything on the fact that some of the standards on freedesktop.org are just "standards" (for example, the systray spec is version 0.1 and I doubt even GNOME fully implements it). But that of course can't prevent RedHat from claiming that are making KDE more standards compliant.

by Gaute Lindkvist (not verified)

Red Hat has patched GNOME and KDE to comply with the systray spec. These will be merged into GNOME and I hope they will be merged into KDE as well.

by Stof (not verified)

Great! At least some people are mature about this.

by ac (not verified)

You're right, of course. The items you mentioned are much worse than, say, needing to go to the command line to shut the computer down, or, say, needing to go to the command line to edit the KDE menu, or, say, the fact that the KDE font installer has been completely broken, or, say, the fact that the KDE login manager tools don't seem to have any effect on your login process. These are trivial issues. Practically "features" even.

Yes, unified panel-notification is a much, MUCH bigger deal. Thank you so much for bringing that earth-shattering discovery to our attention.

by Gaute Lindkvist (not verified)

"needing to go to the command line to edit the KDE menu"

So Red Hat didn't do as good a job with this as Mandrake. Mandrake has also added their OWN menu-system that is not the same as KDE-standard.

"needing to go to the command line to shut the computer down"

Totally untrue. Even if there aren't any menus about it in Red Hat KDE, you can just log out and choose shutdown from the login-manager

"the fact that the KDE font installer has been completely broken"

That is a pretty sad and buggy side-effect of Red Hat patching KDE to go with the new and soon to be everywhere fontconfig-system. The system is really much better than the current one, and will hopefully be added to KDE-standard sooner rather than later.

"KDE login manager tools don't seem to have any effect on your login process"

GNOME uses GDM by default. It is a nice and good-looking login-manager, and frankly I couldn't care less wether Red Hat uses GDM or KDM. People still have a choice of Desktop Environment, and Red Hat's KDE is actually pretty nice.

by Stof (not verified)

> the fact that the KDE font installer has been completely broken

Are you sure it's not because the KDE font installer doesn't support fontconfig?
And why use the font installer if you can throw all your fonts in ~/.fonts?

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

You miss 2 things entirely here:
1. Proposal's aren't standards. If RH wants to see them adopted by KDE and to become standards, and they provide patches that implement them -- that's great, and it's good that they did it with SysTray stuff, if only in a weird half-backwards manner.

2. Even if something is the best idea in the world, it's not always good to changes sources to include it. Why? Because writing stable software is hard, and freezes exist for a reason. KDE3.0.x has been hard frozen for more than 5 months -- the *only* changes made to the source code were bugfixes, and it shows. KDE3.0.3 and the upcoming 3.0.4 are much better desktops than 3.0.0 was. But the stuff you allude to isn't bugfixes at all, and is of various degree of invasiveness (the icon stuff is minimal; since the icon spec proposal is basically KDE icon theme format; the tray is more invasive, but localized, and the vfolder stuff is insanely invasive, triggering massive renames, etc.); thus there is a significant potential for introducing noticeable regressions.

There is a big tradeoff here -- one must weight the potential for things going really wrong (which they'll nearly certainly will, as they have gone wrong with less invasive MDK-menu changes, for instance), and the potential benefit to users and to the distrubutor (I certainly understand why RH, MDK or Debian don't want to provide separate menu entires for every concievable desktop in each package). And here, the issue of qualification and Q&A comes in. Would you agree that the more experienced a developer is, and the more resources are spent testing changes the smaller the chance that something will go wrong?

Well, it just happens that RedHat8's version of BlueCurve has about 9 or 10 bugs that I found in about 15 minutes of examination; many of them are kind of cornercase and it's not at all surprising that they weren't detected (seeing that they have 0 experience and allocated very little time to develop a bug-free widget style), and there'd probably be at least a dozen more really cornercase ones I didn't notice and which would take a while to notice; but about 2 or 3 of those bugs are blatantly obvious, and really should have been flagged by Q&A people. They weren't. I'll not even comment about the default kstylerc, since I am afraid I'd get rather impolite (HINT: If you switch from BlueCurve away to a KDE Style like HC/Default, dotNET, or the CVS Snapshot of Keramik that's out of date by about half a dozen bugfixes, make sure to go to the effects tab and reset the transparency settings to something sensible -- if I understand their file setup right, the defaults would be absolutely and utterly useless unless one feels that KDE shows popup menus too quicky). Now, hope you enjoy your desktop experience; and I hope RedHat made all those changes without breaking anything, since otherwise users will suffer the consequences..

by Marc Tespe (not verified)

It's interesting idea, that's right. But where is the advantage for KDE?? It's a lot of work for a distributor who don't want support him?? What about the other distros, then they asking too "Make my packages. I must pay for that and RedHat get it for free". I think that's the wrong way.

by ac (not verified)

How many times have you seen someone say "I'm going to try out Linux 7.3" or "Linux 8.0". To a lot of people *including reviewers who should know better but don't* RedHat IS Linux. And furthermore, RedHat's KDE is the only KDE they will ever see. Sure it's wrong. But you certainly can't solve the problem by ignoring it.

When a recent RedHat (pre-8.0) release came out, I remember the reviewers IMMEDIATELY crowing about how wonderful the new KDE interface was. Does anyone else remember? It was in practically every review.

Well, imagine a review from the future of RedHat 8.1: "The new Gnome interface is slightly better than the last version, but the new KDE interface--what happened?!? KDE apparently no longer supports anti-aliasing! There does not appear to be any printer integration in KDE 3.1! What are they thinking?"

Do you really think a few angry e-mails combined with the knowledge that they're wrong is going to fix this? What about when KDE is referred to as "You know, that interface that crashes all the time..."

Like it or not, RedHat is KDE's showcase to a lot of the world. Yes, the world should know better. What better way to educate the world than to have a very public resource for more knowledge about all of the errors in RedHat's KDE, and a way to fix them?

by ne... (not verified)

I think you are making the mistake of equating the USA or maybe even North America as being the whole world. In Europe, SuSE and Mandrake are 'fighting' it out. In South America, RH is not king. Africa, Asia and Australia I am not sure about. What you might say is true is that in the USA, RH has a large percentage of the marketplace for Linux. Especially when you consider how the suits look at things. However, what you speculate might happen in RH8.1, I do not think will come true. RH will not stoop that low. At worst, they may drop KDE. RedHat's image is what will be on the line, not KDE.

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

Sure, but for those of us living in North America, it's kind of an important part of the world ;-)

by Stof (not verified)

> How many times have you seen someone say "I'm going to try out Linux 7.3" or
> "Linux 8.0". To a lot of people *including reviewers who should know better but
> don't* RedHat IS Linux.

Most people I've seen *know* that RedHat is not the only Linux. If reviewers are as stupid as AOL users then that's their problem.

> Well, imagine a review from the future of RedHat 8.1: "The new Gnome interface
> is slightly better than the last version, but the new KDE interface--what
> happened?!? KDE apparently no longer supports anti-aliasing! There does not
> appear to be any printer integration in KDE 3.1! What are they thinking?"

And people think "Bah, Linux sux!", switch to Windows XP and never look back again. RedHat loses potential costomers and profit.

I don't know what reviews you read but in all the reviews I've ever read, the reviewer has at least a little understanding of what's below the Click&Drool interface and knows about the existence of Xft and that the GNOME/KDE projects are independent. Clearly your reviewers are just idiots.

> Like it or not, RedHat is KDE's showcase to a lot of the world.

You're making RedHat bigger than they really are. The vast majority of Linux users are not that ignorant, otherwise they wouldn't be using Linux in the first place. Desktop Linux users are scattered among RedHat, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, . RedHat != Microsoft, and will never get the same kind of power that Microsoft has.

> Yes, the world should know better. What better way to educate the world than to have a
> very public resource for more knowledge about all of the errors in RedHat's
> KDE, and a way to fix them?

K button->Panel->About KDE?

by Stof (not verified)

Uhuh. Ac is actively trying to kill RedHat again.

by Chris Parker (not verified)

After putting Red Hat on my desktop I was expecting to be dissapointed. I had heard all of the press by how bad Red Hat had fucked up KDE by changing around all sorts of default KDE applications and putting in GNOME applications.

Well, surprisingly enough - I love the new Red Hat. It is not for the way that Red Hat changed around applications, but how KDE and GNOME applications have the same look and feel. I use KDE and GNOME applications next to eachother and being able to have a consistant look and feel just feels a whole lot better.

I think that Red Hat has some good ideas, if not just about having the two desktops fit together and give me, the user, the idea that I am using one cohesive application.

Just my $0.02.

by Anonymous (not verified)

> I had heard all of the press by how bad Red Hat had fucked up KDE by changing around all sorts of default KDE applications and putting in GNOME applications.

Search KOffice (btw only 1.2rc1) in the menus or try to start it when running the GNOME desktop. It's missing/fails miserably on my test installation here.

by Chris Parker (not verified)

Yea, I heard that KOffice was missing from the GNOME menus (not really an office app user myself, so I just kept the default OO install). Was there a bug report filed on this app? I sent in a general bug report that a whole lot of KDE apps were not showing up in the GNOME menus, and it looks like they fixed most of that. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that it wasn't intentional.

by Stof (not verified)

Is there ANY reason for them to do that intentionally? What do they gain by "killing KDE"? The only things they will get are tons of new anti-Linux trolls, lots of negative publicity and lose potential customers.

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

> Is there ANY reason for them to do that intentionally? What do they gain by "killing KDE"? The only things they will get are tons of new anti-Linux trolls, lots of negative publicity and lose potential customers.

And Mandrake came up from a happy accident of adding a default KDE to Red Hat years ago and has since overtaken them by some counts on US desktops. RH has gotten really bad press like the recent event where they asked KDE people to showcase RH even though the sponsored developers in KDE are from SuSE and Mandrake and RH has done nothing but pour money into GNOME development. Not that one can fault them for who they sponsor, but it's telling when you consider that their desktop push coincides with GNOME 2 and could have easily begun with KDE 3.

Of course there's more history than this. Where have you been? I'll never buy RH nor let my friends without recommending Mandrake instead. However RH continues to wrap up lots of sweet corporate contracts. So I guess they can affort to piss away a lot of people like me who bought a box in 1999 and will never spend a dime on them again.

by Stof (not verified)

And the reason why RedHat chose not to include KDE in the first place was because QT wasn't Free Software. KDE *was* included in RedHat 6.0 and up.

I don't get you people... 50% complains that Linux will never succeed on the desktop because of *lack of corporate support*, and the other 50% complains that GNOME sucks because "they're taken over by evil corporations". Sigh....

by anonymous (not verified)

> KDE *was* included in RedHat 6.0 and up.

Come on. There was *one* RedHat developer for packaging the entire KDE. And no support at all.
Oh, and this developer (Bernhard Rosenkraenzer a.k.a bero) has left RedHat. He didn't want to be involved in a dubious crippleware.
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-devel&m=103294657505181&w=2

by loopkin (not verified)

> And the reason why RedHat chose not to include KDE in the first place was because QT wasn't Free Software. KDE *was* included in RedHat 6.0 and up.

check the dates, it doesn't work out right. RH shipped QT1 (with KDE1), that was still under QPL. Only QT2 was under GPL.

RH shipped KDE simply because they were loosing "market shares" to Mandrake. And their poor KDE packaging has awlays helped Mandrake a lot. RH8.0 is just another bad step in that direction, but i think they don't care anymore.
There is a very simple truth i see nowhere. I'm almost sure that Sun, Redhat and co are pushing GNOME for one very simple reason: GNOME uses GTK, that happens to be under LGPL. QT is under GPL (and only QT/X11). You have to pay to Trolltech if you want to develop proprietary software for KDE. You don't have to pay anyone if you want to do it for GNOME. RedHat and folks are aiming at corporate business, where some apps don't have any free software counterpart (or where the free software counterpart is thousands light years from that), and probably will never have. So, what do you think they will do ?

1- push GNOME as much as they can
2- do everything so that KDE looks like GNOME, and is compatible with GNOME, even if that should break KDE (see point 1).

Pay attention: no big conspiracy theory here, just flat reasoning leading to obvious consequences.

by dwt (not verified)

I haven't tested KDE-3.1beta2 yet, but I'm running KDE-3.0.3
Finally there's nothing that bothers me anymore.
(I know of some bugs, but they don't interfere with my daily usage,
so for me everything is a-ok)
Truly, for my daily desktop chores, everything works fine.
Linux ownz!
Tnx developers.

by Metrol (not verified)

Been a while since the feature plan page has had an update. It'd sure be nice for us non-developer types to follow along with what all is going on.

http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-3.1-features.html

Any chance for an update to this now that Beta2 has hit the streets? Love to know what all to look for in testing it out over here in FreeBSD land.

by Richard (not verified)

me too ;)

by Jarl Gjessing (not verified)

One thing I really liked with RedHat was, that I could download the latest kernel from ftp.kde.org, copy the .config to the new kernel directory, do some selections anc compile, the same with KDE and much other stuff. I found this a bit difficult in other distros because of strange patches.
With the null version things has changed, I cant even compile the kernel. It faisl due to missing includes, damn I thought, lets try to compile KDE so it looks more "KDE'ish", but ney.. KDE would'nt compile either (and damn the Nullified version is ugly!)
Well, Ive gotten a new distro with gcc-3.2, it must be really fast I thought.
So, I made a race between my two identical machines. (They normally booptup within the same time, only a few seconds apart) this time it was way big difference!!
The old one (with the same services enabled) booted way faster!!! So the nullified version if way gone from my machines, and I'm happily back to SuSE,

If anyone ever gets to know why kde wont compile on RH, I'd like to know so I can make alternative RPMS to the nullified version.

by Anonymous (not verified)

KDE 3.1 Beta 2 compiled just fine on my new Red Hat 8 system (tarball sources). I have some minor issues with the kdepim package, but everything else compiled with no changes, and it is very responsive. I was also able to compile Beta 1 on a (null) system. You must have been missing some packages.

As for the kernel rebuild, it does seem to be broken on RH 8. I haven't had a chance to see why...

by Jason Katz-Brown (not verified)

Hi all,

Just a reminder that new in this release is Kolf, a minigolf game.

http://katzbrown.com/kolf/

You can design your own courses (read the http://katzbrown.com/kolf/About/secret/editing.html documentation), or download more courses from the Kolf Courses page:

http://katzbrown.com/kolf/Courses/User Uploaded/

You can also upload your own courses:

http://katzbrown.com/kolf/Courses/Upload/

I like comments: [email protected]

Thanks so much,
Jason

by Shamyl Zakariya (not verified)

Hey -- I really, *really* like Kolf! It's replaced Mahjong as my favorite game to play when I want ten minutes off from programming.

I'll read the editing tutorial and perhaps even contribute a course or two.

Thanks for the game!

by snoop d-o-doubl... (not verified)

this is the shiznit...i been playin this nizzle whenever i need a break from smoking the wizzle...yo send me some more courses fo shizzle....help a brother out

repra-Z-ent my nizzles

by anon (not verified)

That's quite poetic, snoop d-o-g.

by Snoop D-o- doub... (not verified)

fo' sho' foo. That is tha most poetic shizzle you'll eva see in yo' cracker lyfe fo' hizzle. Now, down with some of them kolf courses or imma 187 on yo' ass n pimp yo ride, biznatch. Peace, holla, repre-Z-ent.

by Maarten Rommerts (not verified)

I wonder if there are plans for relasing LSB-compliant RPM for KDE 3.1. Now that all major ditributions support this standard, we can work on one real good RPM for all distibutions. It should make live a lot eassier for all people.

Cheers!

by Anonymous (not verified)

Really for all? I thought Red Hat is now (again) incompatible to all others due to the glibc snapshot.

by Malte Cornils (not verified)

Redhat's new glibc "snapshot" is backwards compatible. Apps compiled for the LSB libs should work without problems, at least regarding glibc.

What you cannot do is compile stuff on the new Redhat with the shiny new glibc headers and expect them to work on all distros. You'd have to install compatibility libraries, use a chroot to build or another distribution (Debian oldstable or stable are good systems, they're ususally not using the latest libs).

-Malte

What does the LSB have anything to do with binary compatibility?

All major distos using the Redhat rpms ...
Don't forget those who are using .deb, .tgz, and others

by Spark (not verified)

Just install rpm and install those packages. Not very clean and no dependency handling, but better than nothing. :)

No standart - no future!
Please support LSB

by Daniel Dantas (not verified)

Hey, there is a mimetype icon named sownd.png in icons directory. There is a icon named sound.png too.
It is located in $KDEDIR/share/icons/crystal/64x64/mimetypes/sownd.png.
Is it a mistake or a real icon??

by Øyvind Sæther (not verified)

[x]$ cd /opt/kde/share/icons/crystal/64x64/mimetypes
[x]$ ls -al sownd.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4756 aug 20 15:43 sownd.png
[x]$ ls -al sound.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4756 aug 20 15:43 sound.png
[x]$ diff sownd.png sound.png
[x]$

I'll bet you Svalbard (who want's it anyway) this is a typo error, they _are_ the same files. I haven't reported this to bugs.kde.org, maby someone should, or maby it's a too insignifficant bug.

Should small bugs like this be reported?