Announcing KDE 3.2 Beta 1 "Rudi"

With the new year fast approaching, beta testing of the upcoming KDE 3.2 release has begun. The KDE Project is excited to announce the immediate availability of "Rudi", the first beta version of KDE 3.2. Sharing its name with the Kastle conference's host coordinator, Rudi represents the culmination of the KDE Project's efforts to date.

As no further features will be added between the release of Rudi and KDE 3.2, this is an excellent opportunity to preview the most advanced and powerful KDE yet. Packages may be downloaded from download.kde.org. As of this writing there are sources and binaries for SuSE and Conectiva, but other distributions will follow. The Konstruct build toolkit was updated.

With its 25 page feature plan, nearly 10,000 bugs closed and over 2,000 user wishes processed a complete report on what one can expect from Rudi would be so long that by the time you finished reading it, there would probably be a more current KDE release to try out. The only way to truly appreciate this release is to experience it first hand, but here are a few of the highlights anyways...

Read on in the full announcement.

Dot Categories: 

Comments

by cjacker (not verified)

Yes, "commercial quality" "stable" is most important.

by Datschge (not verified)

That's a nice collection of practically useless buzz words.

by anon2 (not verified)

Mod's note: I'm deleting all these trolls with extreme prejudice, given that they are from the wiggle troll. Someone I have already warned and effectively banned. -N.

by Anonymous (not verified)

> How long before the "KDE is dying" troll arrives on Slashdot? Not long, I think.

The earlier you go there, the happier I'm.

by Dominic (not verified)

"no-one *wants* to pay the TrollTech tax to develop closed-source stuff"

And Microsoft is a poor little company because no one wants to pay the MS tax to develop closed-source stuff.

Go away.

by regeya (not verified)

The cute thing about these trolls is that they like to point out (I'm flying by the seat of my pants since I didn't see the original message) that, unlike KDE, you don't have to pay licensing fees for GNOME! Well, what the heck? The libraries are good enough to develop on, but not good enough to pay for when you want to write a closed-source for-profit app? I'm not sure I *want* software written by someone who wants to make a profit, but is completely unwilling to pay for their toolkit.

For me, the argument that GNOME is free as in beer for closed-source authors just isn't a good argument.

by Mendel Mobach (not verified)

Don't understand me wrong, I test every version of KDE but I don't have the time to report bugs or so, a big sorry first but there are other software-for-free jobs who need my effords some more than the good KDE guys, there are plenty supporters of KDE....

And now the little story:

I'm very lucky with a big-fat-workstation for my work so I tried to compile kde with konstruct, it worked somewhat but what a very bad release, It looks like alpha. After that I thougth that the problem was on my site and I tried to install the SuSE-build RPM's on my good (old?) SuSE 8.2 workstation, everything was/looks corrupted and it doesn't work very well.

Next time better I hope, but I stuck with kde3.2-alpha2. It is the best 3.2 release until now.

A little description of the problems:
- self compiled arts doesn't work (it did in alpha2) (SuSE arts works, but read more...)
- The content of kcontrol is gone. Damn what a big shame.
- [somewhat longer list, will post it when I have some time]

Maybe they should switch the alpha and beta names.......

BTW: the features are cool and wanted by me, but don't forget somewhere the word stable when releasing....

Kind regards,

Mendel - big KDE supporter :-)[1]

[1]: Yes I understand the development process and I realy hope and pray that the KDE RC is somehow better. I'll still check the CVS version from week to week, but I don't work on CVS.

by cjacker (not verified)

It is your problem or your system "SuSe"'s problem.

I compiled kde-3.2cvs from Aug Cvs to beta1 with our own release MagicLinux.
It works very well, of course, There is some bugs such as "switch noatun interface will cause noatun crash".

I never used tools like konstruct, just write spec files and apply some patch I made(Chinese support patch). and build the whole release with a bash script.

by Mendel Mobach (not verified)

I tested some more and even if I compile it by hand it has so much bugs everywhere.

I will test it today or so on SuSE 9.0

by Debian User (not verified)

Hi,

none of your problems exist here. Actually I haven't found a bug so far in the last 2 days, only occasional crashes (KDevelop and Kontact).

One thing Konstruct doesn't do for you is to make sure that the tools used actually work well enough or that all needed dev packages are there. I e.g. made the mistake to compile/install alpha2 on one machine as user and it had many more bugs than the installation as root. I slap myself for that.

You probably need to find out what you did wrong or what's wrong on your Suse system.

Yours, Kay

by PaulSeamons (not verified)

Can any body help me with this error? It happened on mandrake 9.1 building meta/kde from
konstruct-20031104.tar.bz2:

Making install in libltdl
make[4]: Entering directory `/home/pauls/konstruct/kde/kdelibs/work/kdelibs-3.1.93/libltdl'
/bin/sh ../libtool --silent --mode=compile cc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I../dcop -I../kio/kssl -DQT_THREAD_SUPPORT -I/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -I/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -D_REENTRANT -ansi -W -Wall -Wchar-subscripts -Wshadow -Wpointer-arith -Wmissing-prototypes -Wwrite-strings -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=500 -D_BSD_SOURCE -O2 -I/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -L/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib -O2 -pipe -I/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -L/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib -O2 -pipe -I/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/include -I/usr/X11R6/include -L/home/pauls/kde3.2-beta1/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib -O2 -pipe -Wformat-security -Wmissing-format-attribute -c -o ltdl.lo `test -f 'ltdl.c' || echo './'`ltdl.c
ltdl.c:183: `LTDL_OBJDIR' undeclared here (not in a function)
ltdl.c:269: `malloc' undeclared here (not in a function)
ltdl.c:271: `free' undeclared here (not in a function)
ltdl.c: In function `rpl_strdup':
ltdl.c:368: warning: implicit declaration of function `strlen'
ltdl.c:371: warning: implicit declaration of function `strcpy'
ltdl.c: In function `rpl_realloc':
ltdl.c:516: warning: implicit declaration of function `realloc'
ltdl.c: In function `presym_init':
ltdl.c:1108: warning: unused parameter `loader_data'
ltdl.c: In function `presym_exit':
ltdl.c:1149: warning: unused parameter `loader_data'
ltdl.c: In function `presym_open':
ltdl.c:1195: warning: unused parameter `loader_data'
ltdl.c: In function `presym_close':
ltdl.c:1241: warning: unused parameter `loader_data'
ltdl.c: In function `presym_sym':
ltdl.c:1251: warning: unused parameter `loader_data'
ltdl.c: In function `lt_dlpreload':
ltdl.c:1352: warning: unused variable `errormsg'
ltdl.c: In function `lt_dlexit':
ltdl.c:1382: warning: unused variable `errormsg'
ltdl.c: In function `find_module':
ltdl.c:1569: warning: implicit declaration of function `sprintf'
ltdl.c:1599: warning: implicit declaration of function `strcat'
ltdl.c: In function `find_file':
ltdl.c:1698: warning: assignment discards qualifiers from pointer target type
ltdl.c:1732: warning: implicit declaration of function `strncpy'
ltdl.c:1748: `FILE' undeclared (first use in this function)
ltdl.c:1748: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
ltdl.c:1748: for each function it appears in.)
ltdl.c:1748: `file' undeclared (first use in this function)
ltdl.c:1748: warning: implicit declaration of function `fopen'
ltdl.c: In function `load_deplibs':
ltdl.c:1783: warning: unused parameter `deplibs'
ltdl.c: In function `lt_dlopen':
ltdl.c:2043: warning: implicit declaration of function `memset'
ltdl.c:2072: warning: assignment discards qualifiers from pointer target type
ltdl.c:2097: `FILE' undeclared (first use in this function)
ltdl.c:2097: `file' undeclared (first use in this function)
ltdl.c:2122: warning: implicit declaration of function `isalnum'
ltdl.c:2140: parse error before ')' token
ltdl.c:2143: parse error before ')' token
ltdl.c:2180: warning: implicit declaration of function `fclose'
ltdl.c:2187: warning: implicit declaration of function `feof'
ltdl.c:2189: warning: implicit declaration of function `fgets'
ltdl.c:2214: warning: implicit declaration of function `strncmp'
ltdl.c:2257: warning: assignment discards qualifiers from pointer target type
ltdl.c:2257: `NULL' undeclared (first use in this function)
ltdl.c:2342: warning: implicit declaration of function `getenv'
ltdl.c: At top level:
ltdl.c:473: warning: `rpl_memcpy' defined but not used
make[4]: *** [ltdl.lo] Error 1
make[4]: Leaving directory `/home/pauls/konstruct/kde/kdelibs/work/kdelibs-3.1.93/libltdl'
make[3]: *** [install-recursive] Error 1
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/pauls/konstruct/kde/kdelibs/work/kdelibs-3.1.93'
make[2]: *** [install-work/kdelibs-3.1.93/Makefile] Error 2
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/pauls/konstruct/kde/kdelibs'
make[1]: *** [dep-../../kde/kdelibs] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/pauls/konstruct/kde/kdebase'
make: *** [dep-../../kde/kdebase] Error 2

by Anonymous (not verified)
by Johan Veenstra (not verified)

> ltdl.c:183: `LTDL_OBJDIR' undeclared here (not in a function)
> ltdl.c:269: `malloc' undeclared here (not in a function)
> ltdl.c:271: `free' undeclared here (not in a function)
> ltdl.c:368: warning: implicit declaration of function `strlen'
> ltdl.c:371: warning: implicit declaration of function `strcpy'
> ltdl.c:516: warning: implicit declaration of function `realloc'
> ltdl.c:1569: warning: implicit declaration of function `sprintf'
> ltdl.c:1599: warning: implicit declaration of function `strcat'
> ltdl.c:1732: warning: implicit declaration of function `strncpy'
> ltdl.c:1748: `FILE' undeclared (first use in this function)
> ltdl.c:1748: `file' undeclared (first use in this function)

Looks like you need to install some development packages. When the compiler cannot find basic things like 'malloc', 'free', 'strlen' etc, it's a lot more likely your fault or konstructs fault (unlikely, but maybe konstruct should detect missing devel-packages).

by Daniel Garcia (not verified)

hi, i need help for install Apollon (gift enhanced) when i try to configure i receive this error message...
'note: that i have libltdl, libtool and libguile installed, but the installer dont have found the file.'

checking for lt_dlopen in -lltdl... no
checking ltdl.h usability... no
checking ltdl.h presence... no
checking for ltdl.h... no
* configure: error:
* libltdl support is temporarily required. Please install the appropriate
* library and header files (which includes the -dev package). See config.log
* for more details.

Thanx

Daniel

by Michael Mueller (not verified)

Paul, Ever sort this out it I am having hte same problem on mandrake 9.1 with the just released kde 3.2

by Anonymous (not verified)

Install autoconf-2.5.

by MadPenguin (not verified)

I have the same problem. I'm currently looking for the package to satisfy the function call. I've found this thread a couple other places saying to install autoconf, but my version is at 2.53.

Very curious. I'm using konstruct as well. If anyone gets a hint as to what package is needed, I'd appreciate the answer as well.

by MadPenguin (not verified)

Shame on me. Went and read the bug tracker. Should have it resolved shortly. Sorry for the useless posts. Thanks to previous poster with bug track info.

by tclark (not verified)

bump

by edfardos (not verified)

I searched the bugtracker, for this, but kcontrol comes up empty, no module tree.

I used konstruct to build from source on this RH9 box. prefix/share/applnk/Settings only has a couple of dirs in it, all the desktop modules are missing. crazy.. can't mess with themes and stuff! dang - looks great otherwise!!

edfardos

by Amir Michail (not verified)

I have the same problem, also on RH9.

Amir

by Robert Schouwenburg (not verified)

It seems you are not alone. I have the same problem. There is a bug filed in Bugzilla:

See http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67192

by Robert Schouwenburg (not verified)

Thanks! Your workaround works like a charm.

by Vittorio (not verified)

And the bugs.kde.org is down! can anyone post the work around here please ?

by Anonymous (not verified)

Try again, patience is not one of your strengths?

by Vittorio (not verified)

;-)

by Georg (not verified)

Hi,

I have this problem too und I dont have any solution for it.
The workarounds posted above expect the directory /usr/kde/3.2 which is not available by me. Where can I find the directory?

thanks

by xdelta (not verified)

How to use xdelta?

by Anonymous (not verified)

man xdelta

by xdelta (not verified)

how to use man?

by Slv (not verified)

man man

by howto-waste you... (not verified)

bash-2.05b$ xdelta
bash: xdelta: command not found
...

bash-2.05b$ xdelta3 --help
VERSION=3_PRERFC_0
usage: xdelta3 [command/options] [input [output]]
commands are:
encode encodes the input
decode decodes the input
config prints xdelta3 configuration
test run the builtin tests
special commands for VCDIFF inputs:
printhdr print information about the first window
printhdrs print information about all windows
printdelta print information about the entire delta
options are:
-c use stdout instead of default
-d same as decode command
-e same as encode command
-f force overwrite
-n disable checksum (encode/decode)
-D disable external decompression (encode/decode)
-R disable external recompression (decode)
-N disable small string-matching compression
-S [djw|fgk] disable/enable secondary compression
-A [apphead] disable/provide application header
-s source source file to copy from (if any)
-B blksize source file block size
-W winsize input window buffer size
-v be verbose (max 2)
-q be quiet
-h show help
-V show version
-P repeat count (for profiling)

....

bash-2.05b$ xdelta3 -d kdelibs-3.3.1-3.3.2.tar.xdelta
xdelta3: not a VCDIFF input: Invalid argument

....
bash-2.05b$ xdelta3 -d -s kdelibs-3.3.1-3.3.2.tar.xdelta
[silence]
^C
...
bash-2.05b$ xdelta3 -d

by Anonymous (not verified)

> bash: xdelta: command not found

How about installing it then? :-)

> bash-2.05b$ xdelta3 --help

xdelta3 is incompatible to xdelta2 is incompatible to xdelta.

> bash-2.05b$ rm kdelibs-3.3.1-3.3.2.tar.xdelta

Thanks for proving your dumbness.

by Joshua Rodman (not verified)

In all fairness, xdelta is a bit tricky to use. I've been wrestling with it for the last few hours trying to figure out exactly what sorts of things 'encode' and 'decode' are supposed to work well on. The only case where it beats the size of gzip is when I cat a file A to file B eight times, and inflate the input window to 100times the normal size.

In this case clearly it was a diff meant to be applied to the tar file, but bafflingly, that's not the default mode for xdelta3.

Further the incompatabilities bewteen xdelta 1 2 and 3 are kind of confusing, since one is self contained, one is a library, and one is a front end, and the docs are thin on the ground.

by Josh MacDonald (not verified)

I promise xdelta3 will support xdelta1 inputs, one day soon. I tried to make the command-line syntax of xdelta3 as close to gzip/bzip2 as I could, which meant breaking compatibility with previous versions. xdelta2 was never finished, and it was a storage system, not an application or a library—as you say.

by Aaron Peterson (not verified)

So.. how do I use it?

aaron@Speck /cygdrive/c/ZZ_ISO
$ ./xdelta3.0t.x86-32.exe -d KDE-Four-Live.i686-1.0.1-1.0.2.iso.xdelta KDE-Four
-Live.i686-1.0.1.iso
xdelta3: not a VCDIFF input: XD3_INVALID_INPUT

by Anonymous (not verified)

As said earlier, xdelta3 is incompatible to xdelta1 diffs.

by sponix2ipfw (not verified)

Here goes nothing.. I don't have my box right in front of me to check against, but I am going to do my best to give a working example of what I did to upgrade from kde-3.4.0 to kde-3.4.1 with xdelta files

The tricky part (what took me forever to figure out) was it was looking to apply the *.xdelta patches against the tarBalls (.tar files) not the source dir's, or the tar.bz2 files... (found this out by actually doing a vim (edit) on the xdelta file itself and it shows the name of the file it expects to patch against)

So, something like this...
for i in *.tar.bz2;do bunzip2 -v $i;done
will take the bz2 off and leave you with a bunch of tarBalls
doing an ls on the dir should give you filenames like:
kdebase-3.4.0.tar
kdelibs-3.4.0.tar
and so on

and then for i in *.xdelta;do xdelta patch $i;done
will apply all the xdelta files

one by one it would be:
xdelta patch kdebase-3.4.0-3.4.1.xdelta
and it should patch against your kdebase-3.4.0.tar file
and the file it will spit out should be named kdebase-3.4.1.tar

One more thing.. I've you've played with the sources already (built them and then repacked them) the odds are its checksum will fail (mine did). So try to work with tarBalls you haven't tinkered with yet.

I've never seen such crazy stuff before, so I ended up logging a couple hours a day, for close to a week tinkering before I stumbled on it. When the man page says it patches from one file to another you just never expect it to be a plain .tar file with no compression *Grin*.

If this helps you, or you still need help, feel free to spam me at [email protected] I get plenty of viagra mail there anyway, a little Linux question might brighten my day...

by Nicolas Goutte (not verified)

The answer why not .tar.bz2 is simple: try to xdelta a bzi2-ed file. You will see that the xdelta file is huge. (The problem, which is not xdelta specific) is that already for a (uncompressed) changed bit, you can have very different compression streams.)

So you can use xdelta only on uncompressed tar files.

Have a nice day!

by Josh MacDonald (not verified)

Actually, xdelta3 implements specific "external compression" routines, so that it recognizes compressed inputs and decompresses them to temporary files. This appears somewhere in the code:

{ "xdelta3", "-cfq", "xdelta3", "-dcfq", "X", "\xd6\xc3\xc4", 3, RD_NONEXTERNAL },
{ XDELTA1PATH,"delta", XDELTA1PATH, "patch", "1", "%XD", 3, 0 },
{ "bzip2", "-cf", "bzip2", "-dcf", "B", "BZh", 3, 0 },
{ "gzip", "-cf", "gzip", "-dcf", "G", "\037\213", 2, 0 },
{ "compress", "-cf", "uncompress", "-cf", "Z", "\037\235", 2, 0 },

by Josh MacDonald (not verified)

Like gzip with the additional -s SOURCE. Like gzip, -d means to decompress, and the default is to compress. For output, -c and -f flags behave likewise. Unlike gzip, xdelta3 defaults to stdout (instead of having an automatic extension). Without -s SOURCE, xdelta3 behaves like gzip for stdin/stdout purposes.

Compress examples:

xdelta3 -s SOURCE TARGET > OUT
xdelta3 -s SOURCE TARGET OUT
xdelta3 -s SOURCE < TARGET > OUT

Decompress examples:

xdelta3 -d -s SOURCE OUT > TARGET
xdelta3 -d -s SOURCE OUT TARGET
xdelta3 -d -s SOURCE < OUT > TARGET

by Chiv (not verified)

Can someone point out what i could be doing wrong here... or why my checksums are not matching? I'm assuming it has to do with the fact that I'm dealing with gzip's... but i'm really not sure.

Example (for demo purposes):

[newinstall /tmp]# ls -l *.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2116253 Oct 12 17:06 sb-11.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4230637 Oct 13 12:53 sb-12.tgz

xdelta3 -s sb-11.tgz sb-12.tgz sb.xd

Now i will rename sb-12.tgz to sb-12.tgz.orig.... and restore it with
xdelta3 -d sb.xd

Now i have:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2116253 Oct 12 17:06 sb-11.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4230637 Oct 13 13:16 sb-12.tgz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4230637 Oct 13 12:53 sb-12.tgz.orig
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2083135 Oct 13 13:15 sb.xd

sb-12.tgz and sb-12.tgz.orig are the same number of bytes.. butttttt:

[newinstall /tmp]# md5sum sb-12.tgz sb-12.tgz.orig
d6fd1878fe4a941169d0f4b9e0d67909 sb-12.tgz
310b8c0a6bc6d8d5879ea9fea907eb12 sb-12.tgz.orig

Ultimately the delta will be transfered via xml-rpc for largescale remote backup purposes so matching checksums on either end are important... what am I doing wrong.

If it helps here's the output from xdelta3 config:

VERSION=3_PRERFC_0
VCDIFF_TOOLS=1
REGRESSION_TEST=1
SECONDARY_FGK=0
SECONDARY_DJW=1
GENERIC_ENCODE_TABLES=1
GENERIC_ENCODE_TABLES_COMPUTE=0
EXTERNAL_COMPRESSION=1
XD3_POSIX=1
XD3_DEBUG=2
XD3_USE_LARGEFILE64=1
XD3_ENCODER=1
XD3_DEFAULT_WINSIZE=262144
XD3_DEFAULT_SRCBLKSZ=262144
XD3_DEFAULT_SRCWINSZ=8388608
XD3_DEFAULT_MEMSIZE=262144
XD3_ALLOCSIZE=8192
XD3_HARDMAXWINSIZE=8388608
XD3_NODECOMPRESSSIZE=16777216
XD3_DEFAULT_IOPT_SIZE=

by Martin (not verified)

xdelta 3 is very confusing compared to xdelta(1)

All I want to do is create a binary diff of 2 files???

by alce (not verified)

Please.

How compress archives at xdelta3?
Commandos and options?
Compress in 7z and arc at xdelta3?
Please explanation.

Please. Thanks for answer.

by TomL (not verified)

For some reason, my konqueror can't seem to use http web pages.

I built using konstruct on RH9.

Any ideas?

by TomL (not verified)

Apparently no mime types were installed. Does that make sense?

I don't know why it would say that now.

by Vic (not verified)

I get image placeholders instead of SVG images when browsing pages with svg images in them. Is this supposed to be working in CVS/Beta now, or should I just hold my horses a little more?

by Jilks (not verified)

Are you sure the images are being sent with the proper svg mime type?

by Vic (not verified)

No, I'm not sure. But I would expect at least some websites with svg would do this correctly, and yet none work that I've tried.