KDE 3.1 Alpha1: Brings New Eye Candy, New Features

A brand new alpha of the breath-taking KDE 3.1 development branch has been announced. This release sports everything from wonderful new eye candy to tons of popular new features including new and exciting "easter eggs" (aka bugs) just waiting to be discovered. Remember, this is not a stable release -- those of you concerned with stability should use KDE 3.0.2, whereas those of you who want to help KDE 3.1 be the best KDE ever should use this alpha. Kudos to Dre for writing the announcement and to the tireless Dirk Mueller for coordinating this release. Party!

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Comments

by gunnar (not verified)

hi,
i love kde. its looking great and i am doing all my work with it!!!

i would love an integrated pim (like evolution/outlook). maybe sometimes it becomes reality.

greetings
gunnar

by Walther (not verified)

What i would like to see are the minimum system req's for KDE 3.1alpha1. I have alot of friends willing to do this "linux/kde" thingie with decent hardware although not the latest and greatest there is.. (bit hard when you a student..).

Further more i would like to congratulate the developers on another great release. Keep up the pace and good work guys..

On a sidenote, i hear / read alot of article about how UI design is bad on KDE or how developers are only interested in personal quirks and dont care for users in general. I myself take these comments with a large grain of salt but it does raise some problems. Perhaps some PR could turn the tide around for the good.

Kudo's on another good job...

Walther

by Rizwaan (not verified)

It would be good for KDE to have this KXine player which is quite good. visit:
http://kxine.sourceforge.net.

by Simon MacMullen (not verified)

KDE 3.1 will ship with a xine arts wrapper that will use xine to play movies through noatun and kaboodle (and anything else that supports arts).

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

That doesn't look much like a KDE app to me, though it does look a lot more usable than anything from Xine's UI people. :-)

I'll stick with Kaboodle and aRts, though. Though I watch Kiki using Ogle and my DVD drive, I have been watching Lain with Kaboodle from CVS HEAD in recent weeks.

by jaysaysay (not verified)

it would be nice to have patches against stable releases tarball:
like a kdebase3.0.2-3.1.a.tar.bz2 so that modem users can test them too.
please?

by Neil Stevens (not verified)

If you're on a modem, use cvsup so that you can pull down patches that way. http://developer.kde.org/source/cvsup.html

otherwise, feel free to make your own patch downloads and make them available to people.

by jaysaysay (not verified)

anyway i did get arts libs and base, wow it's impressive.
Konqueror is much faster on this pIII 600.
great work!

by Cihl (not verified)

Is the login process faster in this release?

On my default SuSE 8.0 install it takes up to 30 seconds on a 433MHz Celeron box.

by Mark (not verified)

depending on ram size, subsequent logins happen very quickly. most of the stuff stays in cache, and is readily available. my win2k can also take up to 30 seconds from login to the time i have an available desktop. they just show you the desktop a little sooner.

if you need fast logins, might i suggest ICEwm, fvwm2, for for blazing logins, twm.

by Sven (not verified)

I know Suse 8.0 rpm's exist for KDE 3.1 alpha but I was wondering
if there were any specific instructions available to guide someone
in the proper install order?

Thanks,

Todd

by Frank Rizzo (not verified)

Here are the problems that I (as a relative linux newbie <1yr) ran into with KDE 3.x

1. Installation, Installation, Installation - you download a million RPMs, get someone in the newsgroup to give you the exact -Uvh or whatever command and install. Then X goes nuts - the system still tries to start kde2 - the system is useless. Back to Windows and to newsgroups, thankfully someone points out how to change the start-up sequence. Now kde 3.x starts fine. Still pain in the ass. On the other hand, I went to Ximian.com, downloaded their little utility and it updated gnome without my intervention - beautiful.

2. Fonts - yeah, I know, every distro has its own "import your true type fonts" utility, but they all suck compared to KDE utilities. It would be wonderful, if the Fonts node in the KControl center would include an option to install your fonts either from a folder or a windows partition or a just a single font.

3. Resolution - This is probably not a KDE function, but again, it would be great if it were an option in the Control Center. Dropping to a console to do this is silly, given that it changes the resolution of the desktop, not the console. Is there a technical reason that this can't be done, because I can't believe I am the first person to be annoyed by this.

4. Themes - I heard that someone has already committed the code, but, yes, an applet that combines icons, windows decoration, etc... is sorely needed.

5. Default KDE look is ugly. All the screenshots are great. Why not make the default look that way.

Other than that, very nice.

by Craig (not verified)

Look under KControl/System/Font Installer...

by Chris (not verified)

1. I really think 'rpm -Uvh *' is not that difficult to remember (not much more than the name of 'you know this kde installer thingy'). But anyway some people are working on this already, I'm not sure if that's going to be part of 3.1 though.

2. KDE is not limited to Linux/XFree86, that's why there is no font installer in the 'official' KDE packages. However several XFree86 font installation/management programs exist for KDE so it's really up to the distributions to include whichever they see fit.

3. Same as above, that's really an XFree86 issue. You can change your resolution whith Ctr-Alt +/-, but if you want to change your screen size you have to restart X (that's a real pain).

4. You're right there, a recurrent (and rightly so) complaint.

5. The style in the screenshots (Keramik) will be the default in 3.1 (but probably with a blue color theme).

by Martin (not verified)

i cant agree with point 1) here.

on the one hand you said compiling kde was difficult and on the other hand you used ximian red carpet to install a precompiled gnome which was easier.

why did you compile kde at all then ? i mean why didn't you simply grab the precompiled kde binary packages and installed them ?

i want to see you installing gnome 2 from sources which slightly require more shit like python+expat, (open-)jade, jadetex, docbook sgml 3.0/3.1/4.0/4.1, docbook xml (with correct XML catalog), scrollkeeper... setting up all these necessarities is more painfull.. even kde CVS compiles are far easier since you deal with the checked out sources only.

by Frank Rizzo (not verified)

>>why did you compile kde at all then<<

I didn't compile, I downloaded premade binaries for Mandrake 8.2
Where did I say that I was compiling?

by Martin (not verified)

sorry i have misread something.

by fura (not verified)

I'm using FreeBSD. Installation of KDE is as simple as typing "pkg_add -r kde".
That's all - you get the latest KDE. No need for Ximian addons.

by Martin Tsachev (not verified)

On fonts:

1) I had KDE 2.2 using my true type fonts, installed KDE 3.1.2 and it just didn't use my fonts, I also have Opera which continued running with my fonts. I had to run the Font Installer in admin mode so I can get my fonts back into KDE.

2) Why the hell the fonts choices for Konsole are limited, I am forced to use a font with wide gaps aroung every letter which looks very ugly.

Konsole:

Using the XTerm (XFree 4.x) keybord scheme I can't use my home and end keys, I can't copy with Ctrl-Ins as I used to in KDE 2.2.

It's a bigger problem if things that used to work stopped working than if things don't work, I wonder why does anybody want to change something that works for people now.

by VonDrake (not verified)

KDE3 looks to be very slick. Thank you developers.

by Carbon (not verified)

Can someone explain how this Desktop Sharing thing that I see in the screenies works, exactly? Easiest way would be to use X's remote viewing capabilities, but that would introduce permissions issues, and it wouldn't really allow one person to watch another using the app... Perhaps VNC is used instead?

by Anonymous (not verified)

Yep, it's VNC, but with real desktop sharing instead of opening an additional X server for every VNC connection.
See: http://www.tjansen.de/krfb/

by Tim Jansen (not verified)

When you use the old krfb versions, note that the user interface of the 3.1 version in completely different. The old krfb was a permanently running kicker applet, the new one is only running during a connection. This confusd many users of older versions.

by Jimmy Wennlund (not verified)

They forgot the moast important feature. Dark-Transparant kicker boarder!
I saw a patch at kde-look. Please apply!

where where ? on kde-look.org ? is there a screenshot ??
do you mean, that finally the border of Kicker has got the size "0" ?
so that a (pixmap)-background will be shown without that 'unprofessional' border-view finally ? must look smooth :))
greetz

by John (not verified)

I'm running KDE 3.0.1 (haven't had time to upgrade to 3.0.2 yet).

Can someone running 3.1alpha try out www.vnunet.com and tell me if it displays without some text areas overwriting themselves and making an unreadable mess. The Javascript menus driving the "News areas" down the left hand side bar are a good example of this. In fact, if you compare how this site looks between khtml and mozilla, you can see a lot of differences. khtml renders it wrong in a number of places.

by Jaana (not verified)

Not working :-(

by KDE3.0.2 User! (not verified)

Hi folks,
i lately updated to KDE 3.0.2, and, i am really happy with that great stuff!
KDE 3.0.2 rocks da house !!!
but, of course, i also wanna try the new "KDE 3.1 alpha1" ;)
when i tried to install the rpm's into a new directory with the option "--prefix /opt/kde3.1alpha1"..
i got the ERROR: "package is not relocateable"..
i downloaded the packages from "ftp.kde.org".
Does anybody know how to manage that easily ?
(i already tried this: "http://developer.kde.org/build/build2ver.html" )

thanks very much.. :)

..a kde lover

The option --bad-reloc of RPM should help, try it.

by KDE3.0.2 User! (not verified)

thanks, but, that didn't help,
now i tried this:
rpm -ihv --relocate /opt/kde3=/opt/kde3.1_alpha1 --badreloc --nodeps *.rpm
but then the console-window was scrolling much conflict-messages like this:

"/usr/share/doc/KDE3-API/libkmid/notearray_h.html from install of kdelibs3-devel-doc-3.0.6-0 conflicts with file from package kdelibs3-devel-doc-3.0.2-4"

i wish i can keep the stable "3.0.2" installation but also can test the new
"alpha1". is it possible that both "co-exists", how ??

greetz
:)

by KDE3.0.2 User! (not verified)

hi,
i managed now to install, but, i really cannot start the alpha1-version..
i already created a new user 'alpha1' and changed many variables like
$WINDOWMANAGER or $KDEDIR,... and also i set them inside the files ".bashrc",
".xinitrc" or ".profile".
i also linked the file "/usr/X11R6/bin/kde" from "/opt/kde3/bin/startkde" to
"/opt/kde3.1_alpha1/bin/startkde" and at last i moved kde3 to kde3_ and linked
kde3 to the folder of kde3.1_alpha1. (then kde or X crashed) i tried and tried..
now, that both version co-exists, HOW DO I START ? ;)
anybody may help ??

thanks

check out the startkde file .. i guess there are some things hard coded to /opt/kde3 ..

rgds
marc'O

by bc (not verified)

Could someone try the QuickBrowser on the 3.1alpha and tell me if you can open a Konqueror window by clicking on a QuickBrowser folder? I will frequently work in a common folder and the QuickBrowser can be a good way to get there but I'd have to traverse that tree ever time for each file I'm working with. Operating like OS/2's SmartCenters Drive Folders would be a great feature. I could create bookmakes in Konqueror (and do) but this feature in QuickBrowser would be better. IMHO.

The other thing I found "interesting" is the window Shade operation. I just don't want it to unfold and foldup when I move my mouse off/on the window. How about the old way of just double-clicking the title bar or unfolding when selected from the taskbar?

KDE is looking awesome these days and with word of Konquerors speed increases, it might be my new "home" for a while. Great work people.

in Konqueror is the following:

* drag an URL from the Location Toolbar to the Bookmark Toolbar: it should be added as a new bookmark

* right-click on an item in the Bookmark Toolbar: instead of a Toolbar Menu, I would like to see options to rename/remove the bookmark, or to change its icon.

* I would like to be able to add a menu to Kicker which contains all items in the Bookmark toolbar. The reasoning is simple: My Bookmark Toolbar contains all my most visited websites. I also want to be able to access them quickly (meaning no more than two mouse clicks) if no Konqueror window is open!

Just some suggestions... I think KDE is a great piece of work and I couldn't live without it!

Kavau

You can already add a "bookmarks" menu to Kicker. I think you need to use Add... Special in KDE 3.0

dave

by me (not verified)

KGet is a killer app. that is what I needed. Thanks!

by re (not verified)

uhuh

by bryan hunt (not verified)

Has anyone got a sucess story with compiling kde on Redhat 7.3
I have tried compiling it with redhats gcc 2.96 and with gcc 3.1 (built from source). Compiling it with gcc2.96 does not work as it fails to build, building it
with 3.1 works but kde crashes at startup with dcop related errors ( stuff about it thinking that another dcop is running ). Anyhows my question is has anyone been in this situation and found their way outa it yet ? I've been using gnome for the last week but I want the new kde wm so bad !

Thanks in advance
Bryan

by wooopy (not verified)

dcop errors give me a hard time here..
still can't find the way to fix it.