KDE 2.2.1 Goes Live

The KDE Project has just released KDE 2.2.1. Though a week and a few days late, I am happy to report that the delay made this (perhaps the last stable release of the KDE 2 series) better. Read the announcement or go straight to the source. Please note that some of the packages -- RedHat and Yellow Dog spring to mind -- were uploaded late and may take some time to sync to the mirrors. Also, there were some problems identified with some i18n packages late yesterday; these problems are being corrected, so if the i18n package you want is missing or broken, please check back in a few days. Update, Wednesday September 19, @08:22PM: Mandrake has advised its users to (i) update to "cooker", the
development version of Mandrake 8.1, which has KDE-2.2.1 packages
here; (ii) update to the release candidate of Mandrake 8.1 (please visit here for more info); or (iii) wait for the official packages, which should be available next week. Also, for those who have not read the announcement, I should highlight that TurboLinux has announced that they have made KDE the default desktop in the next TurboLinux Workstation release.

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Comments

by Don Knott (not verified)

I found that there is a bad link in /usr/share/config for kdm. It is supposed to be a link to /etc/kde/kdm. There was a kdm directory with a kdmrc in it. I renamed this one. Then I deleted the bad softlink and recreated it. Now kdm works.

by Erik Kjær Pedersen (not verified)

Yes that did it. There must be some way to get kdm started and functioning without rebooting. Hoq is that doen?

Erik

by Leo Milano (not verified)

Hi Erik

To restart KDM after a new install I kill the KDM process which is currently running. I works fine for me at least ...

Leo

by kamal (not verified)

I deleted the directory in /usr/share/config as well as the bad links.

Then i made a link to /etc/kde/kdm ( ln -s ../../../etc/kde/kdm kde)

Then I rebooted and kdm didn't work.

When you say you "renamed this one" do you mean the directory kdmrc is in, or the file itself?

Out of curiosity, why did you need to do that? Feel free to expand on this; I'm new to this whole thing.

thanks

kamal

by gusgus (not verified)

the link should be as follow:

ln -s /etc/kde/kdm /usr/share/config/kdm

cheers,
gusgus

by Joshua Penix (not verified)

You guys rock! That was exactly it... in my /usr/share/config there was a 'kdm' directory, as well as a 'kdm3b;as5712' (or something like that) file which was the softlink to ../../../etc/kde/kdm.

I check the RPM database and it turns out that nothing owned the files inside of /usr/share/config/kdm, so I just blew that directory away. Then I blew away the softlink with the screwball name and recreated one named 'kde' which pointed to ../../../etc/kde/kdm.

Shabang! It worked perfectly!

Excellent work, thanks KDE-ers ;^)

--Josh

by Colin (not verified)

Yep thanks all for the tips I was begining to swear.........

Now it is all working fine.

by Eric Rose (not verified)

I had the same problem caused by the /usr/share/config/kdm being a directory
(something leftover from before) and not a file. I deleted the
directory and reinstalled the kdebase package (--force, since it was already there) and that fixed the problem.

-Eric

by Bryan Feeney (not verified)

There's a mention of substantially increased startup times in the announcement. Does this mean they've built objprelink into the compliation process, or will I still have to manually prelink everything myself? BTW, did anyone notice their font anti-aliasing not work in 2.2. I'm hoping .1 fixes it, but even so, KDE's looking great.

by Leo Milano (not verified)

In one of my computers I had to upgrade the Xserver to XFree86-4.1.0 in order to get fot antialiasing in KDE-2.2

Good luck,
-- Leo

by Bryan Feeney (not verified)

No, I know the server can do anti-aliasing, it was doing it fine with 2.1.1. It was when I upgraded to 2.2 that KDE seemed to stop using it (though I used the pclinuxonline RPMs, and I'm wondering if they compiled QT properly).

by James Pole (not verified)

Anti-aliasing is only supported in XF86-4 with the RENDER exenstion. Make sure you have anti-aliasing enabled (`Fonts' in the Control Panel).

- James

by Bille (not verified)

Thank you, KDE team, for all your hard work putting together this excellent desktop. As of KDE 2.2.1 I can finally use online banking services (lloydstsb.co.uk and smile.co.uk) with Konqueror, making me a very happy surfer. Well done.

by Macka (not verified)

Really? I tried lloydstsb.co.uk and get a Javascript error msg that says:

"SubmitOnce - You have already submitted this form.
If you have had no response then please Refresh/Reload and try again."

.. and I can't get any further than the login to personal account stage.

Macka

by Macka (not verified)

Oh .. just discovered that if I take "localhost" out of the https proxy field, I can get a bit further. I think my squid setup is ok, as I can pass through it ok with https from other boxen on my network.

Odd.

by Kurt (not verified)

I hope that they have addressed the support (or lack thereof) for Codeweavers Crossover Plugin.
This did not work with KDE 2.2.

by MegaBite (not verified)

the codeweavers folks need to fix this in their plugin, AFAIK<>

by ac (not verified)

I think it's time to update screenshots section on kde.org

by Simon Perreault (not verified)

I totally agree, and here's mine. kde.org webmasters can use it if they wish.

by Simon Perreault (not verified)

Ok, I suck. Here it is for real.

by Joshua Penix (not verified)

Wow! Your fonts are gorgeous... I've never been able to get KDE's AA fonts to look this good... would you be so kind as to share the settings in your Font control panel?

TIA!
--josh

by Simon Perreault (not verified)

First of all you have to use MS's fonts. I put Arial 12 everywhere, except it's at 10 in the taskbar and bold in the window title bar. Some people like fonts sizes 8-14 to not be AA, and they play with their XftConfig to do that, but I like them better AA and I think MS does that in windows only so that it does not eat too much CPU.

by Rob (not verified)

Two comments from the screenshot. The fonts are still not up to Windows standard. Are they anti-aliased? Second - one thing that annoys me about KDE is the size of the tabs (in this case in KDevelop). They take up too much screen area.

by ghw (not verified)

Hello,

I wonder if anyone out there experiences the same problem:
After the beta1 of KDE2.2, in KDE2.2.0 and KDE2.2.1, I noticed
a strange behaviour of kwm(?). After switching windows
using Alt-TAB or the task bar in the panel the keyboard seems
to be dead until I explitely click into a window.
That also means that cycling through the windows with Alt-TAB
doesn't work any more :-(

Besides the click that brings the keyboard back to life
doesn't seem to get passed to the window. So setting the cursor
in a text editor requires two clicks instead of one, for example.

I'm using the binary packages for S.u.S.E. 6.4
The focus policy is set to click to focus and worked as
expected up to the beta1.

Any ideas?

Regards,
ghw.

by sventek (not verified)

Had the same problem on my FreeBSD system. It turned out that I forgot to compile the kdebase package. Maybe you forgot to install it or the installation didn't complete?

by ghw (not verified)

No, the installation of kdebase was ok.
But thanks anyway.
I tracked it down to a problem with my .Xmodmap.

Best regards,
ghw

by Nobody (not verified)

The same thing happened to me. I solved it by recreating my home directory and moving my files to the new one; everything EXCEPT kde files/folder. That solved it.

I know this is a heavy handed solution, but I wasn't able to track exactly where the problem was since it must have been something in .kde or some rc file. . .

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction.
I tracked it down to a problem with my .Xmodmap:

The line
keycode 64 = Meta_L
caused the strange behaviour.
It didn't in Beta1...

I cannot say I understand what happens,
but after removing it the problem's gone.

Best regards,
ghw.

by Androgynous Howard (not verified)

I am really amazed how fast it is. Not only the application startup time, but also the responsiveness of the GUI has improved tremendously. I have only an old K6-2 350 and an ancient matrox mystique pci graphics card, and still the performance just rocks!

To the KDE developers: you are really brilliant! Keep up the good work.

by Sami (not verified)

It's the same problem happened with me!
I lose my Arabic ( cp 1256 - iso 8859-6) codings in all KDE 2.2.1 and the same happend with KDE 2.2 with SuSE 7.2 RPMs... WHATS WRONG SuSE with supporting Arabic?!
Just why do they tack it out of KDE?!
as always downgrade to KDE 2.1.1 :(

SuSE GET A GRIP I'M A LONG LONG USER BUT NOT ANY MORE!

any help getting this coding in "again" well be great! tell i buy another destro.

Sami

by Frédéric L. W. ... (not verified)

http://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/latest/distribution/ is listed here but doesn't work. Of course, it worked before the move from SourceForge. What was the reason to stop using it ?

by thuswa (not verified)

I guess you can integrate an Mp3 encoder for instance LAME into the AudioCD/slave thing? Can anyone tell me how this is done.

BTW I also guess it is a little hush hush, since there are copyright issues, otherwise an mp3 encoder would be shipped with KDE?

Please ignore the politics just give me the facts.

Most humbly yours,

thuswa

by Will Stephenson (not verified)

Download, install and compile the LAME sources from http://lame.sourceforge.net. I haven't seen any binary packages, due to licence issues.

The usual ./configure; make; make install puts things in /usr/local and konqueror detects them there the next time it is run.

by ICARuZ (not verified)

I've found an binary (rpm) pakage at:
http://rpmfind.net/linux/RPM/falsehope/home/rathann/lame/lame-3.92-1.i38...

I restarted KDE(3) but it don't work.
Can you help me?!

I've Red Hat 7.3 installed

by tgill430 (not verified)

same damn problem here... its crap, or at least not as scottisch as they say it is.

by Somebody (not verified)

I havent noticed any bugs getting fixed per se. Konqueror still munges vBulletins (it didnt before v2.2, btw), KDevelop still segfaults on startup and Noatun still cant start up without SIGABRT because aRts doesnt seem to work with NAS (well it does... KEvents work with it just not MP3s or anything particularly swish).

My fault for not filing bug reports I guess. *sighs and waits for KDE3*

by Janne (not verified)

I just upgraded to 2.2.1. And again, it nuked my KDM :(. What was the fix to that problem again? I forgot :(

And I have been having a problem ever since 2.2. When I click on a mp3-file, it launches xmms, and starts to play that file. No problem. But if I then click on another mp3-file, it starts to play it, but it appears that it tries to launch second xmms. The xmms-icon pulses nest to the cursor for about 10-15 seconds, and the disappears. there's also new xmms loading in the taskbar which then disappears. No big deal, since everything works. But it is annoying.

by Janne (not verified)

I forgot: Running SuSE 7.1 pro (nt)

by Carbon (not verified)

This is because it IS launching another XMMS. KDE has no way of knowing that XMMS automatically makes sure that it only has one window open at a time.

by Janne (not verified)

But if my memrory server me correct, it didn't do that earlier (pre 2.2). And it seems to load XMMS much longer the second time than the first time (first time being nearly instantenious).

When I start listening to another mp3-song. I have one XMMS in the taskbar playing the song, and another XMMS loading.

by Carbon (not verified)

Oops, sorry. I responded to your message, but it's marked as a response to my own post.

by Carbon (not verified)

No, you don't understand. The taskbar icon/cursor doesn't mean it's loading it, what's hapenning is that since XMMS doesn't let KDE know when it has a window open, KDE has to guess. It assumes, as is true with many other apps, that it will open an X window, and so it shows the loading status for a while, waiting for that to happen. The 2nd program that was launched long ago sent the first one the neccessary information, and left.

You'll notice this happenning if you use alt+f2 to start an xkill.

Well, what it perhaps should be doing is stopping the loading cursor and taskbar entry if the process it just started ends OR shows a window. Did KDE do this before 2.2?

by Christopher Young (not verified)

After fixing kdm via the instructions of other, very helpful dot participants (THANKS!), I noticed another problem with using kdm (not sure if this is a new one). When using kdm, I can not change resolution on the fly (using Ctrl-Alt-+ and Ctrl-Alt--) without X crashing.

Now, before you start telling me this is a problem with X, let me note that this problem does NOT happen when using xdm or gdm as the login manager - ONLY with kdm. This also affects applications that try to change the resolution fly (Example: kwintv TV tuner application changing to 'fullscreen mode' at 640x480 -or- sne9x SNES emulator fullscreen mode), which then crashes X.

Also, when you DO attempt to change the resolution while in the login manager (kdm), if you then try to change to a virtual console, everything is unusable (the screen appears locked or corrupted). I have to ssh into the system remotely to reboot it properly. Other than the kdm issues, I've been extrememly impressed with KDE 2.2.1. Everything seems very stable and many things that were crashing before are gone.

If someone has a good solution to this problem, PLEASE let me know. In the future, it would be really nice if kdm had some debugging switches and logging mechanisms in order to help troubleshooting. This issue is really weird because it affects the entire X session after you have logged in via kdm. If you use xdm or gdm, there are no problems with resolution changes.

I am running XFree86 4.1.0-3 RedHat rawhide XFree86 packages. I tested this with previous 4.x version of XFree86 and get the same problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

by Christopher Young (not verified)

One additional note on this one:

This bug is in RedHat's Bugzilla bug tracking system. It is listed as Bug # 38717
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=38717

It appears that it is associated with having DRI enabled with Voodoo3 video cards (and possibly OTHER video cards, but I've only seen it with my Voodoo3). It is unusual that this problem does NOT happen with gdm or xdm, which would lead me to believe that it is a kdm issue of some sort. Hopefully, I will hear about this one really soon. I should problem post this to the KDE lists :)

by Harshad (not verified)

Is SMTP auth included in this release? Will it be there anytime soon? Is it available as a patch? The changelog under Kmail is "various fixes", but I could not find more details.
It was marked as done in the developer mailing lists quite a while ago.

thanks,
Harshad

by Benjamin Reed (not verified)

For those that were waiting for my RPMs, I've got them up now at http://www.opennms.org/~ben/kde-2.2.1/ and ftp://ftp.opennms.org/people/ben/kde-2.2.1/. I've posted this as an article, but you get a sneak preview if you're still reading this here. =) If you mirror it, please post! Thanks!

by Jamon (not verified)

Hello. I am using Slackware 8.0, and I am having a horrible time trying to compile KDE 2.2.1. This is the error I am recieving when compiling KDELIBS:
c++ -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I./.. -I../dcop -I../libltdl -I../kdecore -I../kdeui -I../kssl -I/usr/lib/qt/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/opt/kde/include -D_REENTRANT -O2 -fno-exceptions -fno-check-new -ftemplate-depth-99 -DQT_NO_TRANSLATION -DQT_CLEAN_NAMESPACE -DQT_NO_COMPAT -DQT_NO_ASCII_CAST -c deviceman.cc -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/deviceman.o
deviceman.cc:53: linux/asequencer.h: No such file or directory
make[2]: *** [deviceman.lo] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/root/updates/kde2.2.1/kdelibs-2.2.1/libkmid'
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/updates/kde2.2.1/kdelibs-2.2.1'
make: *** [all-recursive-am] Error 2

I have tried both autoconf 2.50 that comes with Slack and 2.13. Any ideas? thanks!

Jamon

by mplotskr (not verified)

i an a relative linux newbie and would like to get better and more detailed instructions on how to install kde 2.2.1 over kde 2.1.1. i can't find any usable instructions on the kde site. i am running RH 7.1.

i don't understand how people can think linux will succeed on the desktop if installing programs is so difficult.

thanks for all your help in advance

by Sean Pecor (not verified)

It's been eight days since KDE 2.2.1 was released and I'm still waiting for Mandrake to release official RPMs. Even Redhat has beat them to the punch. While customers of other distributions enjoy the new features and stability, I am stuck waiting on Mandrake again.

KDE is an integral part of my workstation. Getting the latest stable KDE is extremely important to me and others as well. They should understand this and should not underestimate the amount of bad P.R. this lack of consideration creates. I switched to Mandrake from Redhat after getting the impression that they were a smaller, more agile firm. I'd like to continue to support Mandrake, but only if they continue to support me.

There, I feel better now :).

by Risto Treksler (not verified)

KDE 2.2.1 peppers folders with files with .directory extensions.
I do not mean the hidden .directory files, but instead the
files that get created when you move icons around in a directory.

eg: i go to /home/me/development and (inadvertantly) move around someicons.
this creates a (non-hidden) file called /home/me/development.directory

This is a very annoying behaviour on the part of KDE.
Why on earth is the file not inside the (development) folder
and why is it not hidden and maybe called .layout

eg : /home/me/development/.layout

Does anyone know how to turn off the creation of these files??