MAR
21
2002

KDE 3.0RC3: Prepare to Fall in Love

Submitted by Dre

The KDE Project has announced the release
of KDE 3.0RC3 (on this, the first day of Spring). The release comes a month after the release of KDE 3.0beta2, with
two (semi-public) release candidates, as well as a well-attended 1-week hacking session for fixing problems, appearing in the interim. KDE 3.0rc3 can be downloaded through KDE's load-balancing system (source code, RedHat packages (only partially uploaded at this time), and SuSE packages). Additional packages should become available in the coming days, both on KDE's and some distributions' servers. Other than for show-stopper fixes, this release candidate will be released
early next month as KDE 3.0. Personal impression: love at first sight,
it simply rocks!

As much as I hate to admit it, with my
busy schedule I have not been able to keep up the KDE 3 releases. But yesterday morning I installed KDE 3.0rc3 and, to be honest, it is truly magnificent!
Konqueror is fast, fast, fast!
Never seen anything like it (except maybe Lynx) in
the main browsers - even
long pages in my Most Often Visited list all but instantly popped into
place.

The rest of KDE 3 is simply spectacular, too. Everything is snappier,
from menus (despite the addition of cool menu icons) and dialogs (these pop up much faster) to applications, and the look is even more professional than KDE 2. Wowwww, I am in total awe. Superb, excellent, amazing job, guys, KDE 3 absolutely rules!

Due to the imminence of the 3.0 release, for this release candidate only, please post crashes and grave bug reports directly to [email protected] rather than using the conventional bug reporting system. Let's see who of you can make KDE 3.0 even better by finding any elusive shot-stopper bugs before the end of the week!

Comments

I understand you are excited about KDE3 release, but remember this is mainly a port to QT3. Yes, Konqi renders web pages much better, it is faster (but Galeon, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape 6.2 are fast as well), and overall GUI has been improved.
And please, words like 'truly magnificent', 'simply spectacular', 'I am in total awe', are maybe a little bit too much :) Koffice has not been ported yet (a lot of development work is expected here), edutainment module is in heavy development, a lot of people still complains about speed (even those who have Pentium III 600 MGz with 256 RAM) especially when starting applications etc. etc. Things are not ideal and things are far from 'spectacular'.

Regards,

antialias

By antialias at Fri, 2002/03/22 - 6:00am

> I understand you are excited about KDE3 release, but remember this is mainly a port to QT3.

Not true, perhaps fifty to fifty port to new features (which are introduced now because of binary compability).

> Koffice has not been ported yet (a lot of development work is expected here),

Not true, see KOFFICE_1_1_BRANCH_KDE3 branch. Look on ftp.kde.org, SuSE provides KOffice 1.1.1 for KDE 3 rpms.

By Someone at Fri, 2002/03/22 - 6:00am

If you can state your opinion about KOffice not being ported and KDE3 being slow on on a 600MHz machine with 256M RAM, both being false, why can't he state his opinion that KDE is good and fast?

By ac at Fri, 2002/03/22 - 6:00am

'Not ported yet' and 'not being ported' are two different things.
I said lot of people complain about KDE being slow, they probably know what they are talking about. Personally, I think KDE is fast (not as fast as MS Windows on my machine), and I never said that he couldn't 'state his opinion that KDE is good and fast'. He used words like 'spectacular' etc. I don't see anything spectacular, sorry.

By antialias at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

I'd love to try KDE 3 out but do not have time at the moment to work through
resolving depenencies and conflicts. If anyone has simple instructions for installing
on a freshly loaded RH 7.2 machine, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks

Bob

By BOBS at Fri, 2002/03/22 - 6:00am

One word : debian

dependency problem on debian ? run apt-get install dependancy ... dep solved

By Oelewapperke at Sun, 2002/03/24 - 6:00am

I've been interested in python lately, and have heard 'round the net that zope is the "killer app" for python. So, I started paying attention to what the sites I frequent run, and of my (short) list, the Dot is the only one. It is also by *far* the one that is down the most. Is this pure coincidence? I never know if it is a zope error, some database thing, or something else entirely (hardware?), but the little admin message on the front page leads me to believe it is zope. Well, anyways, the point of this is, is zope really this unstable (in which case I will run away, fast) and what are other peoples experiences with it?

Thanks, and have a nice day.

P.S. If this is deemed too offtopic, please feel free to email me.

By David Bishop at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

I am not sure of how off-topic it is. And I am not sure about Zope. But I have been using Python for OO programming and I say it is beautifull. Python + KDE should be an ideal platform to quicly develop small size KDE apps. I have the feeling that KDE can benefit a lot by promoting the use of the python bindings. Why ?. Development is a snap in python. So, for a small app it could make sense to reduce the development time in a factor ... 3 or more, at the cost of a performance loss.

By Leo at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

Well, I am truly liking python, and love the idea of zope (combine the power of python with a webserver!). And, I've been poking a bit at PyQt, and finding it much more friendly than perl/gtk ever was. However, I have to admit the dot is making me somewhat hesitant to trust any "real" website to zope. Well, as I mentioned to someone in a private mail regarding this, I will simply have to install it on one of my machines and test it thoroughly for a few weeks, and then see how I feel about it.

Thanks for the reply, it was much appreciated.

D.A.Bishop

By David Bishop at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

Hm. If I get it right, I have to buy QT-licences if I program with PyQT as I have to with each KDE-program I write, if I (or my company) don't want to give the sourcecode away or be completely uncommercial. For this reason I start trying wxWindows instead of QT but am not sure, if a wxWindows-application integrates well into KDE. Has someone experience with this problem? (To me it's a pity that such a great free-software product doesn't make use of free software as a GUI-Toolkit. QT cannot be seen as "free" because one company controls the development and it is not possible to make non-GPL applications without paying enormous fees [for a small shareware-developer])

By Michael at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

Haven't noticed zope.org being down much. Maybe if you look around here...
http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZSP

There's a few places you can get free zope sites to play with also. Of course you can't really do any "real" development on them, as far as your own products or external methods, but they can be useful and instructive playgrounds.

http://www.zopesite.com , http://www.freezope.org , http://www.nipltd.net , and of course http://www.zope.org itself.

By Tim at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

(getting even more off-topic)

Do you mean "killer app" as in: this app kills all confidence in python? I once caused a crash of zope on www.freezope.org by running a ballot-stuffing script on a poll that a friend of mine had set up there. Zope crashed after only 200 votes have been submitted. (absolutely no hostile intentions by me btw, after apologizing to the very friendly admin there everything was ok)

Yeah, I know that this incident is no proof for any suspicions about zope whatsoever, still I just had to tell you ;)

What's maybe more relevant is that developing for the web with zope has not that much to do with python. The bigger part that has to be learnt will be the API's and zope way of doing things, not the language itself. Just the same that applies to doing web development with OpenACS and it's language - tcl.

By Olle at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

I've been working professionaly with Zope for 1.5 year now.

I've worked on big portals, sites and all, and have written
things ranging from DTML scripts and ZPTemplates to ZClas-
ses and Python Products (all previous are Zope terminology).

I found it to be extremely stable. I can't even think how a
poll script could hang up Zope, even if it was a seriously
brain damaged one!

As for "killing all confidence in Python", Guido (python's
creator) is working for Zope Corporation for a while now.

So there!

P.S regarding the "dot.kde.org" being down a lot, one
could do a search on the postings by the dot.kde.org admins,
to see what the ACTUAL problems are. It would yield:

------

Sorry guys, the dot went down again this weekend after
51 days of uptime on the new server. We suspect that
the problem is an overworked harddrive.

------

The dot was down again this weekend as many of you
had noticed, and while I myself was blissfully enjoying
Halifax. This time it was the result of somebody exploiting
a security hole in our apache configuration and DoS'ing us
in the process.

------

For what has seemed like an eternity, but really was closer to
a week, our beloved dot, as well as the kde.com sites, were down.
Now, thanks to the tireless efforts of Dre and MieTerra, the
server has been moved across the country and is again up and ready
to serve. Many thanks to all those who made generous offers to host
or help us in the meanwhile.

------

As the Dot has been getting more and more successful, and more
and more popular, we've been attracting script kiddies and trolls
like flies. As Dre previously reported: "On March 13, 2001, at 1:33
am EST, someone using the anonymizer.com service succeeded in
putting malicious Javascript code into one of the posts. While the
code was relatively harmless -- it changed all links on the page to
point to a shockingly disgusting porno site -- we feel this security
lapse requires us to disable all posting until the problem in the
Squishdot code is solved."

------

So in each and every case it has nothing to do with Zope being
buggy or anything.

(Zope is also used in Gnotices, the Gnome equivalent of the Dot).

By BugPowder at Sun, 2002/03/24 - 6:00am

> I found it to be extremely stable. I can't even think how a
> poll script could hang up Zope, even if it was a seriously
> brain damaged one!

Well, it was exactly as brain damaged as someone who clicks on form submit button and reload in the browser as fast as possible.

But it was propably a misconfiguration on the webserver that caused the crash, not Zope itself being unstable. I did not mean to imply that.

> As for "killing all confidence in Python", Guido (python's
> creator) is working for Zope Corporation for a while now.

But I guess this is some sort of sponsoring, like Alan Cox hacking the linux kernel while working for Red Hat? Or is Guido actually working on Zope?

By Olle at Sun, 2002/03/24 - 6:00am

Hi. I compiled the recent rc from kde 3, but when it tries to run
kicker it marks an assert error on file qgarray.cpp. I even tried to
follow the compiling advice in README.qt from the qt source (the snapshot
that came in the release). Could anyone help me. My distro is
Slackware 8.0 with gcc-2.95 and glibc-2.1.5. Thanks.

By Jesús Antonio S... at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

> Could anyone help me. My distro is
> Slackware 8.0 ...
Here, with slackware8.0, glibc 2.2.5, gcc2.95.3
I have no problem to build kde3rc3
with the following step:
-> download qt3.0.2 from www.trolltech.com
-> configure qt with
./configure -shared -qt-gif -thread -sm -system-zlib -system-libpng -system-jpeg
-> compile qt
-> configure kde with
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde3 --with-qt-dir=/path_to_qt_on_your_disk
-> compile and install arts, kdelibs, kdebase, ...

some time ago I have done an installation from cvs (including kdesupport)
and don't know if kdesupport have solve some unresolved dependencies ?

in the hope this help you

regards.

thierry

By thil at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

What is the system requirment for KDE3 ?

KDE2 is running on a Pentium1 processor and what about KDE3 ?
Many people and enterprises have Pentium / PentiumMMX class machine.

By cosmicflo at Sat, 2002/03/23 - 6:00am

The most important system requirement is memory. 64Mb is about the minimum, but I would recommend at least 128Mb.

KDE3 does not seem to have higher system requirements as KDE2, in fact KDE3 will probably run somewhat better than KDE2 on the same hardware.

Cheers,
Waldo

By Waldo Bastian at Sun, 2002/03/24 - 6:00am

I have tested KDE3 on my P180MMX/128Mo with no KDE effects :
It's slow.
A windowmanager like Icewm is very faster (->better).
Please, optimise performances of KDE3 !

By cosmicflo at Fri, 2002/03/29 - 6:00am

Sorry guys, I can't say anything bad about this new KDE3 release, other than possibily a little about a few 'inconsistencies' with Koffice, but I'm sure they will go away soon, also.

I'm extremely impressed with KDE3. I've been building the CVS releases for a while, and it amazes me at how stable the releases are - from one time to the next. I personally like KDE3, and think its probably the first "desktop GUI" that respectably compares with Windows (ugh! did I say that word?). A number of people that are running on other X-window systems have been suitably impressed when I roll in with my laptop, running KDE. I have people who are running that other "32-bit OS" who have begun to ask me how they get the 'kool' graphics and things on their system. You wouldn't believe how many people have never heard of 'gimp', or even Linux for that matter, and are amazed at what you can do without "bro' Bill's" influence in their machines.

By David Dudley at Sun, 2002/03/24 - 6:00am

thank you everybody, for every effort of making KDE a reality,... my problem always was i can't install the new version of KDE i'm always using the KDE system comming with the Linux distribution ( Mandrake...:) my favorite..one).. when I try once to install a difference Version of KDE , i have to download a different QT 3.0 and recompile it with some - XXXXX... parameters....but never succeeedded..

Please... HELP me for a Survival Guide of tunning/installing the QT 3.0... and KDE 3.0 RC .

IT will be Greatfull if you helping in a SHORT Survival GUIDE for installing the KDE 3.0 rc3 and its prerequests...QT 3.0 library.....

Thanks

By KED LOVER at Sun, 2002/03/24 - 6:00am

women.kde.org ...go tutorial in the projects section...

By Patrick O'Keefe at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

If you don't wish to be helpful, just be quiet instead!

Stephen

By Stephen at Sun, 2002/03/31 - 6:00am

Can I get a release for Debian somewhere?

By Mikhail at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

What to do.
I prefer RH since I think their /etc/* and config files are the most sane ones around, but WHY are they so anti KDE?
I am free to have my own opinion and for no particular reason, I hate the Gnome desktop. I dont know why, I dont care why, but it just makes me irritated.

Installing new KDE releases on RH has always been an "adventure", usually it resulted in reinstalling prehistoric X and KDE 0.000001 before it would start working again.
This time I thought, hey they have RH rpm's they link to, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps this time I can safely install it without having to reinstall RH from the CD after it has crashed and burned and fckd my entire disk this time?

Well, it has improved, it just complains with about a million failed dependencies on crap that should be upgraded with rpm --upgrade *.rpm
stool.
I dont want to spend a day or two searching for crap before I can upgrade KDE.

What distribution should I switch to to get it working reliably and that would work when I upgrade? KDE is more important to me than the distro.

By Anonymous at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

I have SuSE 7.3 on one partition. downloading the rpm's and typing rpm -i *.rpm worked without any problem whatsoever. kde 3 started immediately, using my kde 2.2 settings, and I haven't encountered any problems after that. it's totally amazing :) although I would love to recommend Debian, they still haven't included kde 3 (which is, well, totally incomprehensible)

By mark dufour at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

I use Debian unstable, and it works fine most of the time. A few times it fucked up my X config, but I always got it working again. You could also use a more stable debian version and get the latest KDE from some special apt-source.

Using APT (the debian package system) you can easily keep your system updated. You'll never have to spend a day downloading rpms again. Just select Special->APT:Debian->update and then ...->upgrade in KPackage and your distro is as good as new! Or just write "apt-get install programX" and you get that programX (including dependencies) that your friends were talking about...

By Johan at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

Am I the only one to get my desktop messed up with strange stripes in all programs after visiting International Herald Tribune - www.iht.com?
I'm suspecting that something might be wrong with the way Konqueror handles Java but maybe it's unique to my istallation?

PS

The real mess comes when you slect something from the dropdown menues!

By Sten Holmström at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

runs fine for me using a checkout from March 21.

By eze at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

WOW. This one really does exceed my expactaions based upon previous kde3 releases. Really fast and snappy. Konqueror snaps up in appx 1 sec, where it took upto 2 sec in kde 2.2.2. Als much faster than previous releases of KDE 3, where it was definately slower than kde222.
On small problem however. It might be a bug:

The page http://www.tweakers.net does not come through properly anymore in KDE 3 (all versions from beta 1 till now). It does in all other linux browsers weher javascript is enabled. maybe a small error..

I have the error in redhat rpm's as well as the one I compiled frm source. For the rest this is all realy great!!!

By Rukhoven at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

WOW. This one really does exceed my expactaions based upon previous kde3 releases. Really fast and snappy. Konqueror snaps up in appx 1 sec, where it took upto 2 sec in kde 2.2.2. Als much faster than previous releases of KDE 3, where it was definately slower than kde222.
On small problem however. It might be a bug:

The page http://www.tweakers.net does not come through properly anymore in KDE 3 (all versions from beta 1 till now). It does in all other linux browsers weher javascript is enabled. maybe a small error..

I have the error in redhat rpm's as well as the one I compiled frm source. For the rest this is all realy great!!!

By Rukhoven at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

Hi there!

I downloaded and compiled KDE beta1 and beta2(only libs) and saw that there is no libksycoca.so after compiling beta2. I can't believe that some of the libs were skipped or stuffed into one new library between two beta releases. This is also one reason why I can't compile kde-base-beta1 with kde-libs-bet2. Are they even source imcompatible?

NIC

By Nicolaus Andratschke at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

Maybe you should go for KDE RC3?
In my case it has much improved performance!!

By Rukhoven at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

KDE3 look awsome. Speed is great on my system P866.

One request, in KMail

I would like to see a way to change to color of the highlighted lines in the main mail window. I'm talking about how kmail highlights every other line. I would like to change that from white to something else.

Is there a better place to post these types of comments?

Other than the above I love it!!!!!!!!!

By AC at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

Seems I'm not the only one having problems with libkfile.so.3. It is nowere on my system. Anyone know what redhat package it is supposed to be in. Seems a lot of kde apps want this darn file.

By Just-Me at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

Flash seems to still not behave right under konqueror I was hoping this would be fixed on this version.

By qgriffith at Mon, 2002/03/25 - 6:00am

Same here...loads and starts to play the flash, then crashes.....

She seems a little faster though!!!

By AC at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

I think KDE 3.0 is OLD looking!. Mac OSX's GUI is the standard now for Unix based GUI's. KDE 3.0 doesn't even come close. Give it up KDE!!. You will NEVER top Mac OSX in looks or functionality. Apple blows away KDE in everything. So much for Linux on the desktop and open source!!!. I'll use OSX or Windows XP!!. THE MODERN DAY OPERATING SYSTEMS!!.

By Bob at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

http://www.kde-look.org/

By ac at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

Tux sayeth:

Feed not the Beast of Redmond nor it's minion trolls.
For they are an Abomination.

By linwins at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

Amen... Besides, let's not forget where those guys from redmond and the fruit lovers got their inspiration.. They didn't invent it themselves, you know :o)

By Shoikan at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

I wonder why you even bother and come to the site, dedicated to such a shitty desktop, and tell us you'll never use it...

By Bojan at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

Good for you. Now be quiet.

By Peace Loving Sa... at Fri, 2002/03/29 - 6:00am

I totally respect your opinion and value your input to this thread. Now sit down and shut up.

THx
-Leenix

By Leenix at Sun, 2002/08/04 - 5:00am

I am a Mac user! And I like KDE! So does my Mom, we both find it very attractive and useful. And a nice augmentation to OS X via a rootless X11 and fink. I like some of the programs in Gnome but the desktop....not so much.

As a Mac user since '78 I extend MY apology for the chucklehead's comments.

I like the Aqua gui but honestly I wish I could get rid of it on an occassion and at least have a choice of the look OS X had when it first came out as a server. I liked that one.

By chris c at Tue, 2002/12/24 - 6:00am

Looks wonderful, but kcminit crashes on startup, and then ksplash crashes too. At least it loads, and seems to be working. Maybe it's just something I broke on my system due to too many experiments. I used objprelink, --enable-fast-malloc=full in kdelibs, and --enable-final. Anybody else has problems with that? I will try to submit a bug report later.

By Vadim at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

> I used objprelink, --enable-fast-malloc=full in kdelibs, and --enable-final.

You use too much experimental and unsupported stuff to complain.

By Anonymous at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

Umm, if the stuff it's there I guess it's supposed to be used, right? --enable-final never caused me problems with previous versions, and objprelink seems quite widely used too. Maybe it's the malloc one, but I checked the URL in the malloc.c file and the latest source is already in KDE.

I think complaining is exactly what I have to do, those are nice features I'd like to be stable.

By Vadim at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

The Splash screen crashes with the SuSE 7.3 rpms too.
Sound isn't working either.

By Sagdalon at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

Anyone else not able to print ever since the upgraded to KDE3.0? I printed right before I upgraded now I can't at all and all the errors are just can't talk to to the printer. (yes i checked the printer lol) Gnome won't print either so it may not be a problem unless somehow my cups is hosed.

By qgriffith at Tue, 2002/03/26 - 6:00am

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