KDE 3.1 Beta 1: Hot off the Servers

The KDE Project is pleased to announce the availability of KDE
3.1 Beta 1 for your testing enjoyment. This release, which marks
the second testing release of the KDE 3.1 branch, offers many
improvements and bug fixes over KDE 3.0.x. New features include
improved OpenPGP handling in KMail, handy tooltips that provide
details of files in Konqueror quickly, and even new ways to be
less productive thanks to four new games.

KDE 3.1 also officially introduces the much acclaimed Keramik
style as the new default widget style. On the PIM front, this
beta adds LDAP support to KAddressBook and also an AvantGo
conduit to KPilot. In all, this release sports hundreds of new
features, bug fixes, and improvements, many of which you can read
about here.

To get KDE 3.1 Beta 1, you can download source code tarballs at your favorite
mirror site, or right here. Binaries for several distributions are also available, see the full announcement for details and download locations. Hats off to Dirk
Mueller
for coordinating this release and preparing the release announcement. In addition, congratulations to
all of the hard working developers for putting together such a
large set of improvements!

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Comments

by labrum (not verified)

Your girlfriend is damn right ;-)
You should install an automounter and make her write Macromedia and Adobe about supporting Linux...

by antialias (not verified)

when she start to think that computer or software is sexy ;-)

Manual mounting: give her supermounting.

Absence of Adobe and Macromedia software: vmware.

by gor (not verified)

VMware sucks. Get win4lin (www.netraverse.com). Faster, cheaper.

by Jeff Stuart (not verified)

AMEN... I tried vmware and win4lin.... Went out and bought win4lin. IT's a GREAT program... even plays wmp streams WITHOUT any problmes!!!!

by Alain (not verified)

I agree. I too tried vmware and win4lin, and win4lin is better (for my use), it is a great program and the better way to use windows programs inside Linux.

Full ACK.

I've been using Win4lin for the last two years and now they support the preempt-patches in 2.4.18 and up, win4lin is _really_ slick and fast.

Install (scripted) Windows 98 in about 12 minutes. If you want to mess with your Windows installation, make a backup of ~/win and ~/.merge and you're set. Restoring a broken Windows installation has never been faster (about 30 seconds here).

Every user account has "his own" windows, where (optionally) only the differences to a generic install is saved. So if you want to experiment, create a "test" account, copy your ~/win and ~/.merge directories there, then mess with *that* installation. Good for trying out unknown software.

Reboot Windows in about 6-10 seconds, depending on your hardware. But even if you only have a K6-350 (which is what I started with): Win4LIN runs at just about original speed! Not like VMware (which admittedly does much more than just Windows 98), which isn't useable below a GHz.

So: go get it if you still need Windows apps and don't want/have time to experiment with Wine.

It's worth it (and cheaper than VMware).

Jens

bad thing ive heard is that win4lin doesnt support directx! and the main purpose is to run some windows apps but not games.

Yes. So? It's not supposed to.
It's a business application, not a games emulator. If you want to run games, you can experiment with Wine. If you want to reliably (as far as Windows goes) run MS Office, Lotus Notes, or whatever, go get Win4lin.

There are three things that don't work with Win4lin currently: sound recording (playback works perfectly), MIDI, and 3d hardware acceleration. No business user needs these features. If many people ask them to implement it, they'll probably do it.

btw: last Time I checked VMware didn't do 3d hardware accel either.

-- Jens

by OSbusters (not verified)

I've been using (and promoting to my customers) VMware since Mandrake 7.2,
about 2 years now, I guess.
There are two great failings of VMware as I see it. The first is the fact that idling normally...it chews up about 25%-30% of my 1GHz Athlon. That's pretty hefty!
Secondly is the minimal sound support. I mean MINIMAL!
My great love is sound recording, so you can imagine what pleasure it gave me to hear Win4Lin start up without the broken ruccus of VMWare doing it's inimitable rendering of the Windows98 theme song.
And I am looking at my wmcpuload readout and it's hovering between 2%-5%... and that's mostly because I'm running DCGui at the same time.
The really noticable thing though is how lightening-fast win98 is. Oh, I may already have axed a few superfluous dll's, but it occurs to me that Win98 isn't such a bad OS after all, running like this anyhow.

I look forward to sound recording and midi support. I won't be doing my music post production in Windows-proper any longer, as CoolEdit and SoundForge seem to totally rock in Win4Lin!

by SHiFT (not verified)

Well -- lately, i played a lot with wine (especially WineX) -- it already runs a number of apps even without WINDOWS installed -- i hope i will be able to run that stuff in it too -- the biggest problem is to install those things in it -- it seems like some windows-special things that installer requier are still missing.

As for supermount -- i used it when there was Mandrake 7.1, and i even liked it. Can someone tell me a place where i can find it now? Does it run in SuSE 8.0 well?

by dave (not verified)

Manual mounting: give her supermounting.

none of that filthy talk here please.

by Mononoke (not verified)

I ALSO TRY TO CONVINCE MY GIRLFRIEND TO INSTALL LINUX AND KDE3 !!! ;)
maybe she will buy a linux distribution soon, because, you might know about the Valid/Invalid XP-version on the net, that makes it impossible to reinstall XP after 05/2002 hahahahaha :)
hope, many people will switch to linux and the community will grow..
^-^

by montz (not verified)

My girlfriend loves kde/linux too, esp the 3.1 releases.
She is the geeks dream :)

by Tau (not verified)

I managed to convert my mate and his girlfriend to Linux/KDE (well, her partially. She's still too into that damn Windows box.)

by English Troll (not verified)

What you forget to mention is, that your girlfriend is 400 pounds; has a moustache and was once a man.

Come on, don't give me your load of crap stories about how your mannish significant other runs GNU/Linux or some weak window manager; please!

by Danish Troll (not verified)

MUHUHAHAHAHA... Someone needs a geekgirl pretty bad huh?

by montz (not verified)

you wish :)

by Prabhanjan (not verified)

This is gud dear, u must encourage her to continue use keep up the sprit.

by antialias (not verified)

= great usability improvement.

I am still missing Sort by type action in Konqueror to be remembered. Is it possible to fix it before KDE 3.1 is released? In some of my folders I have a lot of different file types and it is very handy to have them sorted by type everytime I open that folder. Now I have to sort them every time I enter that folder/directory 'couse Konqi can not remember it when using Save view profile.

by jmk (not verified)

I noticed that there should be a browsing session crash recovery included in the release. Well, konqi just crashed, but that session recovery didn't seem to work (at all) - only thing i got was KCrash pop-up. Whassup with this ?

by chris (not verified)

hi this is a simple question :

is konqueror capable of caching thumbnails in a view ?

because if i enter camera:/my digicam/ , i get my digital camera view but it
always make the thumbnails from new , that take time !!!

thx for answers

greets chris

by Spencer (not verified)

I know it caches thumbs in regular directories. If it can't write (Or doesn't want to for safety reasons) to your camera then it probably won't cache. Right now thumbnails are cached in the same dir as the pictures, so you wouldn't want that in this case.

I have to say this feature looks pretty sweet. These types of things are the little touches that make me love kde.

it sounds good, if by that they mean something similar to the thumbnail folder icons in Windows XP. I'm going through withdrawal without that feature; being able to pick our Ogg albums out by the cover art is a major benefit to us "regular home users"!

by Muyfeo (not verified)

Hi,

I installed Kde 3.1 on my Mandrake 8.2 box. So far, it looks very good, but I have noticed the followig problems so far.

1) Kcontrol does not appears in K-menu.
2) in Kcontrol -> LookNFeel only the following options appear: colors, Fonts, Icons, Launch feedback, Screen saver, Style, System notifications, and Theme Manager. NO window decoration nor Windows behavior.

up for the good work!.

muyfeo

by gogo (not verified)

That's not a problem, Window Management is a separate entry, the settings are not in LookAndFeel,)

by dr_lha (not verified)

>That's not a problem, Window Management is a separate entry, the settings are not in LookAndFeel,)

Was this done under the auspices of "Usability"? If so it's pretty dumb. "Window Management" is meaningless to most people - and certainly something that changes the "Look and Feel" of windows (i.e. the theme) should appear under "look and Feel"! Moving options such as focus policy out of "look and feel" makes some sense.

by Perra (not verified)

I usually just use the search tab to find what to configure... It is really fast and convinient... You should try it instead!

by dr_lha (not verified)

Yes - I agree it's a nice feature. But it doesn't change the fact that this move doesn't help. For a power user like myself (10 years Unix/Linux - so I'm used to byzantine GUIs) it just confuses me because they moved an option, and for a beginner who doesn't have any clue what a "Window Manager" is because they've come from the Windows/Mac guide - it doesn't help to hide useful configuration options behind what is basically Unix/X11 jargon. "Look and Feel->Window Decoration" seemed somewhat obvious so is surely better for the newer user.

by (not verified)

I like this move. Don't always talk about this legancy stuff.
Or do you want all menus and icons and ... of KDE1 in KDEcurrent?
If everything stays as it is, development will stop!

New users will like it or do you like to have all L&F and WM items
in one L&F-tree? The tabs are removed, great usability enhancement :-)

by daniel (not verified)

Its a pity that RedHat Limbo (next RedHat 8.0) is fucking up KDE. In the task bar, they have deleted Kmail and Konqueror icons in stead of Mozilla and Evolution icons!. And the standar look&Feel is horrible (they want that KDE has the same L&F as Gnome). Ugly. And lot of things ...

by Bojan (not verified)

I liked Redhat distribution, but because of their ignorant behaviour towards KDE, I switched to Mandrake. And I never regretted it.

by Alex (not verified)

I came from mandrake and SUSE is much better. BEtter configuration tools and ebtter isntaller, it evem includes more programs. THough I really miss supermount and Iw ish they woud integrate Kvim 6.1 into Kdevelop, that would rock,a s wella s samba isntalled automatically like in Lycoris.

by kidcat (not verified)

RedHat has some old GNOME hackers making the big desitions.. and it apears that they dont like the no-mersy-kick-ass competition that the old C written hag is meating from the C++ written lace lady ;-P

One could even argue that it is a "political" suicide they have made.. Just because they are one of the old and renoved distroes does not make them imortal. And the way KDE is regarded even by ppl how *doesnt* use Linux/BSD votes pretty strongly for a 100% KDE workstation situation.

Perhaps they just cant grasp the concept of C++? I know old C hackers who still after 5 years just writes C wrapped in C++... so maybe its because they cant figure out how to port their tools to Qt/KDE *giggle-giggle-giggle*

/kidcat

by Davy (not verified)

RH is going to be interesting to watch as it is commercial evolution in action; any company that refuses to adapt to changing conditions in the market will be left behind and hence die out.

It is fairly obvious that Linux on the desktop is a long way from dead and certainly gaining market share; it would be wise for RH to try to tap this emerging market. However, due to what can only be described as religious beliefs or an unwillingness to lose face, they still refuse to give reasonable support to the leading desktop environment.

Their support of Gnome is understandable as nobody likes to spend a large amount of time & money yet still manage to end up as second best, however, supporting gnome is one thing but ignoring KDE's existence & popularity is both childish and very bad business.

The stupidity in this is almost beyond words and reminds me of what James Randi calls the Henriette Syndrome — the overpowering need by some people to accept and believe something preposterous, and the ability to ignore and dismiss the contrary evidence, no matter what its quantity, nor how strong it is.

Fortunately, RH's arrogance will be their undoing as they will learn the hard way that if you don't give your customers what they want, they will go else where.

by Jason (not verified)

Gah, this sucks. This is much worse than RH only letting one guy work on the packages, and in his spare time to boot. Speaking of which, what does Bero have to say about all this?

Given that RH is going to distribute a horribly trashed version of KDE with RH8, we now *really* need some KDE-friendly person(s) to make proper KDE-3.1 RPMs for Redhat.

Maybe I'll do it, if no one else steps forward...I don't have much experience making RPMs, though. Is there some software out that helps you make the build file correctly?

by Daniel (not verified)

You are wrong ... in RedHat Labs they modify the sources ... for example, KDE team, when they release a new version of KDE, they give rpms for Debian, Mandrake and RH with their own features. Then, theorically, the new KDE 3.1 binaries for RedHat 8.0 should be the one we see in the screenshoots, isnt it?

by Jason (not verified)

Uh, are you sure I'm wrong? Maybe I didn't understand what you were trying to say, but it's the stated position of KDE that they don't supply binary packages for *any* distribution; it's up to the distros to package KDE themselves. Any binary packages listed by KDE have been provided externally. RH has traditionally shunted this job off onto a single interested employee (Bero), who has done a heroic job of it up to this point, but he's only one guy doing it in his spare time.

The concern is that the version of KDE 3.1 that ships with Redhat 8.0 is going to be crippled (by RH) in the following ways:

1. re-skinned to look like GNOME.
2. KMail icon replaced with Evolution (presumably configured as default mailer)
3. Konqueror icon replaced with Mozilla (presumably configured as default browser)

Can you tell me which part of this I have wrong? I'd really love to hear that it's all wrong! :)

by Gaute Lindkvist (not verified)

What is so bloody wrong about 1?

It means GNOME-users will be able to use KDE-apps without them looking totally alien.
There are literally HUNDREDS of KDE-centric distributions out there, and ONE big GNOME-centric one. What is wrong with that? Shouldn't GNOME-users have their distribution?

Besides.. the new GNOME2-desktop in Red Hat Limbo is incredibly slick.

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

Does having an "About KDE" entry in an app make it look alien?

by Jason (not verified)

I don't know, man. IMO, they should leave the default Look-and-Feel settings. Look, I have no problem at all with Redhat choosing to make GNOME their default desktop, that's fine as wine.

But why do they have to try to make KDE look like GNOME? If a redhat user would prefer to use KDE, why try to undermine that choice? They could simply provide (non-default) GNOME-ish look-and-feel settings for users who might want that.

Plus, new users will see the hacked KDE and conclude that it's some cheap GNOME knock-off (oh the irony...) that doesn't even have its own email tool or web browser, and was apparently not created by anyone (since the about box is gone).

I admit, I'm jumping to conclusions a bit. We still don't really have solid information about what's happening (however, see the screenshots I posted in the KC-KDE thread).

by aigiskos (not verified)

I'm guessing that the answer is that it's easier for them to support a GUI that looks more or less the same whether it's GNOME or KDE.

Don't forget that Redhat is changing the default GNOME look quite a bit as well to make this change.

Cheers.

by Jason (not verified)

Yes, and I have also learned since my last post that when the user runs KDE for the first time, the Redhat theme is simply one of the look-and-feel options. So hopefully, they have left the default settings alone.

So, at this point, my only problem is the removal of the KDE about box. I really can't see what purpose it serves, other than snubbing KDE developers...is the user meant to conclude that redhat themselves created the wonderful GUI and apps that they're using? Developer credit is the currency of the Free software culture, so removing the credits is tantamount to stealing, IMO.

by Rob Kaper (not verified)

Stealing is taking away property from the owner. Our code is still all in CVS, so stop using MPAA/RIAA phrases when they do not make any sense. Furthermore, our license allows these changes as long as they are redsitributed under the same terms, so no harm done there either.

Stop bitching about Red Hat. If you don't like it, just don't use it and recommend something else when a friend or CTO asks you.

by ac (not verified)

And just by coincidence GNOME is being improved and KDE is being destroyed. How convenient.

by ac (not verified)

This is exactly the idea. You hit the nail on the head. The only thing we can do is file bugs and complain LOUD AND CLEAR to RedHat. It is not enough to complain here.

The 3 things you lsited are not that bad. Especially since Evolution 1.0.8 and Mozilla 1.1 are better than their KDE counterparts adn the re-skinning is just to keep it consistent. Users cana lways change back to Keramik. Or acess Kmail from the KDE menu.

Is till suggest people wait for SuSE 8.1 isntead of jumping Redhat's boat. It should rock.

by abemud (not verified)

How come cvs is not tagged? I checked from webcvs. Am I missing something?

by Anonymous (not verified)

Current release management sucks: No CVS tagging of releases, snapshots are not regularly updated, failed release dates without updates what or when something happens, releases without announcement (KOffice), no provided, incomplete and untested packages from packagers (not enough time given to them?).

by (not verified)

Stop crying an help them!