KDE 2.2.2 Released

The KDE Project has announced the release of KDE 2.2.2, a service and security release.
A fairly complete list of changes from KDE 2.2.1, released two months ago,
is available
here.
If you are using KDE in a multi-user environment,
you are strongly encouraged to upgrade for
the security enhancements incorporated into the release. If not, you are
still encouraged to enjoy the many improvements. This may well be the last release of the KDE 2 series, given that the first
stable KDE 3 release is
scheduled
in about 3 months. Happy Thanksgiving!

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Comments

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't KDE3 mostly just a port of KDE2 to QT3? Sure there will be new features and bugfixes as there always is with new release, but mostly it's just to port the desktop to the new version of the toolkit.

I think that moving from KDE 2.2.2 to KDE3, is about as big as moving from 2.0.0 to 2.1.0. Or 2.1.0 to 2.2.0. What KDE3 provides is a stable foundation for the future.

KDE 3.0 will be a "KDE 2.3 for Qt 3". KDE 3 will be the stable foundation which will last at least as long Qt 3.x is current. KDE 2.0 was released too late so it will be outdated 12 months after it's release, KDE 3's lifetime will be longer.

There will be very few, if any QT3-caused problems in the KDE 3 release. Large QT2 applications can be ported to QT3 in hardly any time at all. It actually requires very few changes in the code. Since KDE 3 is now already using QT3, any bugs related to the change will certainly be ironed out by the release several months from now.

>>>For instance, when I apply a new widget style, it doesn't apply properly until I log out and in again, and it screws up the colour scheme.

Well, since QT draws all the widgets, I'd say this is a QT problem, and not a KDE one. I might be wrong, but I think that porting KDE to QT3 is actually what may fix this problem, as I hear QT's themeing engine is much improved in version 3. Also font handling is supposed to be better, which will help improve KDE's look.

Work on Konqueror hasn't stopped because of the move to QT3 either. Just today I read a post by David Faure saying that the Javascript engine was much improved. In stock KDE 2.x, you will notice, Javascript is turned off by default because of its problems and instability. In KDE 3 CVS it is now turned on by default because it has matured greatly.

I think that KDE 3 will meet all your expectations for a mature desktop. Even if it doesn't, though, you have no reason to worry. The plan is for KDE 3 to be long-lived, going through many minor versions (3.1, 3.2, 3.3 etc). The 3.x series will definitely mature to perfection.

> I still do not feel that the 2.x branch (even with 2.2.2) has reached the quality needed for KDE to be accepted by normal business users.

Oh, KDE troubles your business work ? Why ? You show two examples :

1)
> when I apply a new widget style, it doesn't apply properly until I log out and in again, and it screws up the colour scheme.

A "business user" does not need to change any widget style, it's not productive, you don't need to play with colours while working !...

2)
> Konqueror still does not draw many pages properly

But what are you doing while working, now, you surf ?

It's not serious, Mr the "business user". Happily KDE is here to avoid such amusements... Thank you KDE !

by Paul Mitcheson (not verified)

Alain,

I think the KDE people need to stop being offended so easily by a few comments. The community really needs to learn to take criticism. I think KDE is pretty darn good, but you can't argue that it is 100% right. To be honest the win2k GUI is more polished, more reliable, and certainly faster.

And don't bother to tell me to "use windoze then". That would be a silly remark. UNIX is the only way to work efficiently.

>1)
>> when I apply a new widget style, it doesn't apply properly until I log out
>>and in again, and it screws up the colour scheme.

>A "business user" does not need to change any widget style, it's not >productive, you don't need to play with colours while working !...

OK, forget changing the widget style at work. What about when I'm at home? Should I have to log out and in there?

>2)
>> Konqueror still does not draw many pages properly
>But what are you doing while working, now, you surf ?

Work, as I put it, is doing a PhD in electrical engineering. Have you any idea just how much academic material there is on the web, and how vital it is to research to be able to sucesfully view it all?

For goodness sake guys, I think the KDE project is superb, but you can't say it is 100% yet. It's not and that's how it is.

Regards,

Paul

> I think the KDE people need to stop being offended so easily by a few comments.

You know, my message was just a joke... I thought it was obvious, but no... Perhaps I would have to sign "The boss"...

Of course I agree with your comments, and, here, it's not a joke...

by Gert-Jan van de... (not verified)

I regret to say that you're right about the stability of the windowz GUI. But fortunatelly KDE is progressing. Furthermore, I think konqueror has more support for protocols than windowz has. (e.g. ftp://)

I disagree on you, when you say KDE 2 be 100% ok first, before stepping to KDE 3. I've never in my life seen code that is 100% perfect, it's a farytail! Software should move on. A part of a desktop being accepted (regardless if thay are business users) is that there are new things to see. It keeps the users enthusiastic, "hey the new KDE is out, have you seen it?"

KDE still works on stability, as I understood the javascript in konqueror is being improved.

I use KDE at work and at home (on Solaris and Linux). I use KDE with joy, but I still get annoing stuff when using konqueror. It would be nice ift here was added some stability in KDE3. Making KDE2 more stable AND porting KDE3 is to much to ask I think.

Have they fix css image positioning? Check www.uniserv.krakow.pl This page wasn't displayed correctly but mozilla displays it good.

by Frank Rizzo (not verified)

I know in the previous releases, Konqueror didn't handle consistently the style=display DOM directive, such as these below.

blah

and

blah

for hiding and showing page elements.

2.2.1 came real close to doing it the right way. Unfortunately, I can't download & try 2.2.2. So can someone check a page that uses DOM like that and let us all know. One of the pages that uses this technique is the left navigation bar on www.vbrad.com.

Thanks.

Just a web developer trying to make Konq friendly pages.

by Sashmit Bhaduri (not verified)

It *almost* works right here,but I'm using Konq from CVS HEAD. The only quibble I can see si that once you click on a item and the subitems popup, and then you you select another item, the subitems from the first don't always close properly.

by Tobias (not verified)

I can confirm exactly this behaviour. But everything else looks good to my eyes.

by Julien Olivier (not verified)

If I click on "links", then "about us", there leaves a blank area under links (where the submenu was).
If I click on "reviews", then "articles", reviews's submenu stays.

Other tests seem to work fine

by Frank Rizzo (not verified)

I've submitted this bug to the Konq team a long while ago, when clicking on the sidebar did absolutely nothing and then it was marked fixed.

by George Staikos (not verified)

Well my post to the kde mailing list was rejected, so I'm posting this here too. I highly advise against using the Mandrake RPMs if you use SSL in any form in Konqueror. They have [partially unsuccessfully] attempted to disable strong encryption. You cannot consider SSL to be secure with these RPMs. I hope to recompile them without these patches and make them available soon.

When I compiled kdebase on a Solaris 8 machine ksysguard compilation
had a problem as it expects to have a Solaris specifc include file similar
to the Linux one ( the name of which escapes me and I am not at work :-).

To get this to compile I simlpy copied this Linux specific file into the Solaris
subdirectory. However I have not yet tried to make this run.

Is there a better solution ?

CPH

by Vladimir Annenkov (not verified)

It appears to work. Inadvertently ksysguardd.h must have been left out of the tarball. By the way, if anyone is interested, there are KDE-2.2.2 binary packages for Solaris 8 x86.

http://www.ms.uky.edu/~annenkov/solaris/kde-solaris.cgi
http://66.65.87.53/~ftp/pub/solaris/i86pc/kde/2.2.2
ftp://66.65.87.53/pub/solaris/i86pc/kde/2.2.2

The build script and patches for package creation are located in the "build" subdirectory.

by George Staikos (not verified)

Uncrippled Mandrake kdebase RPMs are ready at http://www.staikos.on.ca/~staikos/mdk/ They are compiled on i686 with Mandrake 8.1.

by BJC (not verified)

On my RH 7.2 box, entering text into any form element is like pulling teeth - typed characters take three or more seconds to appear on screen.

No other applications appear to suffer this issue.

Help?

by Dirk (not verified)

Your're not alone.
Same problem on RH 7.1.
Funy thing is: Once I've killed konqueror and run it agian, no problems anymore....

Any ideas?

by someone (not verified)

Downgrade Qt to 2.3.1 or as a work-around disable Klipper.

by BJC (not verified)

>> Downgrade Qt to 2.3.1

that would break the dependencies on all of the kde* rpms.

>> or as a work-around disable Klipper.

how?

unfortunately it looks like i'll be waiting for the RH-blessed packages, or wait for a bugfix release...sorry guys, i love kde, but this release is broken.

by Jon (not verified)

No, KDE is not broken - it is a known problem with Qt 2.3.2, which is why you are not recommended to use Qt 2.3.2 with KDE 2.2.2.

As the announcement says:
"""
Library Requirements. KDE 2.2.2 requires the following libraries:

Qt-2.2.4, which is available in source code from Trolltech as qt-x11-2.2.4.tar.gz, though qt-x11-2.3.1.tar.gz (rather than Qt-2.3.2) is recommended;
"""

There is no easy way to work around the Qt bug.

by BJC (not verified)

>> No, KDE is not broken - it is a known problem with Qt 2.3.2, which is why you are not recommended to use Qt 2.3.2 with KDE 2.2.2

I know I'm kicking a dead horse here, and I don't want to sound unappreciative, but the RH 72 rpms I downloaded from the official kde download site -require- qt 2.3.2. The rpms for this version of qt are also on the download site. If they are not recommended for use someone should tell the packager.

So obviously the resolution is updated packages from Troll. Any idea when these might appear?

by Xanadu (not verified)

OK, is anyone else (besides me) tired of MDK? I mean, I love them, I *REALLY* do. But I'm, growing VERY tired of the hand-holding and the broken RPM builds. I just finished installing MDK's KDE2.2.2 RPM's on 2 boxes. Both are now broke. BOTH worked PERFECT prior to the "upgrade". One has no sound, (thats the big problem, there are others...) with the other, KDE boots to errors of kicker and noatune not wating to play nice (crashes...).

The funny thing is I'm typing this via Konqueror! I had to boot to Gnome to use it! KDE WILL NOT LOAD... :-(

I guess I'm off to Debian or something similar (read: BSD).

by abracadabra (not verified)

Heh...Mandrake is the only distro where I can run X (and KDE) on my machine. I have Via (S3) ProSavage graphic card . SuSe 7.3, Red Hat 7.2 and all Debians fail to find this shit of graphic card. Go on Mandrake :)
Yes, Mandrake's RPMS from Cooker are not the best solution. I checked Cooker this night and all kde 2.2.2 packages had not been uploaded yet. For example, kde-pim is still 2.2.1, kdelibs-sound is not there...
But, you can always compile kde 2.2.2. It takes a loooot of a time (even on my Athlon 1.2 machine) but it works great.

by Xanadu (not verified)

Yes, I indend to compile from source (as soon as I can get to it). THe only problem with that is it breaks apt-get to no end. :-(

by DiCkE (not verified)

If you want new KDE packages fast and stable i would suggest you to try SuSE I did and I never went back;)

by David Johnson (not verified)

Try FreeBSD out. It won't hold your hand, but I guess you're tired of that anyway.

by seb (not verified)

I can not start kde 2.2.2 from my mandrake 8.0 as a user.
.Dcopserver...._:0 file is missing.
But If start kde as root no problem.
any idea ?
I tried to remove from /tmp mcop folder and co.
but still nothing ..
Thanks in advance for your help

by Rukhoven Netherlands (not verified)

I Installed both the "Ben" and the normal RH 7.2 RPM's on my system. They really seem to speed things up, but one great annoyance took its entry. When I log in, the system really hangs on browsing through my filesystem with Konqueror, or any "open file" dialog. It feels a bit like WinXP on a very large lan with the default setting where every Directory change may take up to 5 sec before responding. After say 20 minutes it dissapaears however and everything returns to "normal" Also, during this slow start, logging out and returning to KDM for log in may take upto 15 sec. I have to as here that my system does not have a qualified machine nake as it is behind a NAT server. It has a typical backe-end IP address. Does anyone know what this is? Does it have to do with my not having a machine name?

I am having the same problem with SUSE 7.3 rpms. Anybody out there how knows
what this is?

Read the other comments! They tell cause and solution or work-around.

It seems Qt 2.3.2 is the problem... I installed qt 2.3.2 in kde 2.2-10 and the same problem arose. After downgrading to QT 2.3.1 the problem was gone...

by mark (not verified)

The debian unstable packages seem to be a bit messed up-for example all of the drop down lists have multiple entries!!! and konquer seems to duplicate every button. Is this a buggy qt or the kde debs?
neone also have this problem

by Janne (not verified)

I have KDE 2.2.2 from Debian unstable and I have no problems with it.

by Andy Marchewka (not verified)

In 2.2.1, I was able to map the "Windows" key to the "K" menu through the keyboard mapping applet in KControl. The left "Windows" key showed up as F13.

This doesn't seem to work with 2.2.2. The key does not register at all in the mapping applet, and after editing the rc file to force it to "F13", it still doesn't respond. Has this been disabled, or is there something more I need to do to make it work?

Thanks.

by Hoek (not verified)

For all you who say KDE is slow: Yes, i fully agree, KDE is damn slow. At least in the standard distributions such as Mandrake or SuSE.

I got SuSE Linux 7.2 on an AMD 1200 Mhz with 256 MB RAM.
KDE was slower than Win 95 on my old P133 with 16 MB RAM (no that's no joke.)

Then i got Slackware 8.0 and compiled the 2.2.2 release on my own.
I used the following CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS: "-O3 -march=k6"
(You also could try to use -march=i686 on a non-AMD processor)

KDE now is so damn fast that i can't read the status msg's when ksplash starts =)

More optimization tips:
- Try to compile as much as you can for your own platform. LFS (linuxfromscratch.org) is the best you could do. Also, you could try to compile XFree86 on your own.. (at least TRY to.. =)

- For even more performance, maybe you should try to compile it with gcc-3.x. It has the new -march=athlon switch, interesting for Athlons =)
Or, you even could try to compile it with intel's C compiler (icc). I don't know whether QT/KDE compiles with it, but icc gives MUCH more performance to a program than gcc. (see the -ipo switch, for instance).

So, as discussed above, if KDE runs slow, it's because your distribution blew it =)
Just try to set everything up on your own, and you'll see the difference.

by aleXXX (not verified)

Well, I experience the same.
KDE 2.2.1 on Suse 7.3 on an Athlon 1GHz doesn't feel *that* much faster than
my self-compiled 2.2.1 on Slackware 7.0 K6/200.
Even without march=k6

I think I heard some times that -O3 might introduce various problems ?

Alex

by Clemens (not verified)

Yeah, nice release but still has some minor bugs. Two things that I really find nasty.

a) after installing the 7.2 RPMs X doesn't start in init 5 anymore. I can only start it as a user. Many thing, but shouldn't be.

b) That stupid KDE clock is even more stupider and sucks. After update I suddenly had a total wrong time, setting it (timezone) didn't help any only a force restart of the kicker. Later that day I hade a wrong time in the clock again, although it was shown correct in the "Adjust Date & Time ..." dialog. Somehow it is very strange why KDE doesn't use the System settings ...

mfg clemens

With RedHat 7.2, fully up2date, trying to update to KDE 2.2.2 gives:

[root@HardHat i386]# rpm -Uvh *.rpm
error: failed dependencies:
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdeaddons-kate-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdeaddons-konqueror-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdeaddons-noatun-2.2.2-1
libSDL-1.2.so.0 is needed by kdeaddons-noatun-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdeadmin-2.2.2-2
librpm-4.0.3.so is needed by kdeadmin-2.2.2-2
librpmbuild-4.0.3.so is needed by kdeadmin-2.2.2-2
librpmdb-4.0.3.so is needed by kdeadmin-2.2.2-2
librpmio-4.0.3.so is needed by kdeadmin-2.2.2-2
libvorbis is needed by kdebase-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdebase-2.2.2-1
libcrypto.so.2 is needed by kdebase-2.2.2-1
libssl.so.2 is needed by kdebase-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdebindings-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdebindings-kmozilla-2.2.2-1
python2 >= 2.1 is needed by kdebindings-python-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdegames-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdegraphics-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdelibs-2.2.2-1
libpcreposix.so.0 is needed by kdelibs-2.2.2-1
libpcre.so.0 is needed by kdelibs-2.2.2-1
pcre-devel is needed by kdelibs-devel-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdelibs-sound-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdemultimedia-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdenetwork-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdepim-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdepim-cellphone-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdepim-pilot-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdesdk-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdetoys-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdeutils-2.2.2-1
libfam.so.0 is needed by kdevelop-2.0.2-2
kdesupport is needed by koffice-2.0.1-2
kdesupport is needed by kpppload-1.04-23
kdesupport is needed by kdbg-1.2.0-3

KDE runs fine in a single directory. Why all this complex install nonsense anyway? Why scatter the files throughout the filesystem?

by Asif Ali Rizwaan (not verified)

Visit http://rpmfind.net, and search the files which are needed. Just enter the 'libfam.so.0' in the search field, and you will get the package. I don't have any problem with update except that kdeadmin which needed rpm 4.0.3, which is a package of RH 7.2 not RH 7.1, so a "rpm -Uvh kdeadmin*.rpm --force" will be good. but before that copy the 'kpackage' of kde 2.2.1 or 2.1 somewhere then restore to use it. and KDE 2.2.2 is much faster than KDE 2.2.0. and many bugs have been fixed.

by S Ware Developer (not verified)

Typical of Linux developers I'm afraid.

Apple, and that other company, insist on standards for developers.

Obviously, the Opensource community cannot impose such standards.

It's up to Joe Public to boycott devlopment work which means that we spend more time trying to install the stuff that to actually use it.

Only today, I tried to install KPHPDevelop, but the ./config script refused to work as apparently my gcc compiler is a bit old.

Unless Linux developers realise that binary installers are the way forward, such as those employed by win32 and MacOS systems, then Linux will forever be a darkroom toy.

Me? I'm waiting for LindowsOS. Then I won't have to worry about all this lack of discipline shown by developers.

Linux as an OS is excellent. Unfortunately, those who develop for it, are not.

by Dale Drummond (not verified)

In the process of upgrading to 2.2.2, I ran into a dependency,
which led to other dependencies, which led me to a dead end, like
so:

libfam-->xinetd-->rc-scripts-->iproute2-->libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2.3)

In attempting to install the packages for glibc 2.2.90-8, I got
this:

/bin/sh: /lib/i686/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_PRIVATE' not found (required by /lib/libdl.so.2)
/bin/sh: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: version `GLIBC_2.1.1' not found (required by /lib/i686/libc.so.6)
/bin/sh: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: version `GLIBC_2.2.3' not found (required by /lib/i686/libc.so.6)
/bin/sh: /lib/ld-linux.so.2: version `GLIBC_2.2' not found (required by /lib/i686/libc.so.6)

Is this a kernel module that I need to upgrade?

Geez, this is so much more difficult that I thought it was
going to be.