KDE 3.5.2 Released

Today, the KDE Project announces the release of the K Desktop Environment 3.5.2. This second update release in the KDE 3.5 series brings an improved user experience and stability by focusing exclusively on translations and bug fixes. See the Changelog for the major changes while the info page lists the ways to download with packages currently available for Arch Linux, Kubuntu, Pardus, Red Hat and SuSE. Kubuntu have made a live CD featuring KDE 3.5.2.

Some highlights of the fixes and improvements:

  • Numerous updates to the KHTML engine used by KDE and Konqueror. Javascript handling is improved and now works with phpBB and certain wikis. Konqueror no longer shows scrollbars in the Acid2 test, making it the second browser to pass.
  • Improvements in clipboard handling through the use of the XFixes extension
  • Lots of changes to the website editor Quanta Plus

The translation teams have managed to make this release the best translated KDE release ever. KDE 3.5.2 is available in more than 60 languages and dialects, outperforming all other desktops, including several commercial offerings.

For ongoing work on future versions of KDE 3.5, the feature freeze has recently been weakened, allowing minor and well-tested new features to go into the 3.5 branch and thus be released with the next KDE 3.5 update.

The next major release will be KDE 4. A tech-preview for KDE 4 is preliminarily scheduled for the 10th anniversary of KDE in October this year.

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Comments

by cl (not verified)

Sorry, no.

The relaxed feature-freeze means that only well tested, stable and already available features might become part of KDE 3.5.3.

by Anonymous (not verified)

You don't need KDE changes, it works the same with compiz and gnome-window-decorator.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Well, yes, you will need KDE changes if you want things to work properly . While it does basically work, currently there are display problems, artifacts, and quirks that make it unusable when using that decorator and KDE applications like kicker (system tray icons disappear, taskbar doesn't work with virtual desktops) and the like.

Needing the entire GNOME core system and all its dependencies just to run gnome-window-decorator - as well as losing all kwin settings like application specific settings, shortcuts, etc - is also very unappealing.

by superstoned (not verified)

gnome didn't do this anyway, its mostly desktop-agnostic and the gnome-window-decorator solution sucks (throw away a full windowmanager, and write a new one, just because you created ONE new feature - XGL). they will probably integrate this in gnome, but that'll take at least one version, most likely 2. by then, KDE 4 is coming, and it'll support it too i guess.

by LB (not verified)

Thanks a lot!! khtml is getting better and better and ...

by Mark Dickie (not verified)

Is it just me or is 5.3.2 many times quicker than 3.5.1 was on Gentoo. Now this may just be me having updated my libs or using a newer compiler or something but everything seems about a quarter quicker than before. Thats even if I ignore the KHTML enhancements. I talking about pure desktop respose times.

Well done to all involved.

by Andre Somers (not verified)

I have the same feeling on my Gentoo box here. I'm glad I invested the time to emerge it (well, started up emerge and left for work, in fact)!

by mark (not verified)

yep2! i've noticed it too.. . the response time seems a bit quicker.

by ac (not verified)

Very nice decision!

I am impressed by a simple change that turns out to make konqueror much nicer:
The removal of the inner frame in the html view :-)

Good work kde devs ! :-)

(Now if we could get rid of the flickering scrollbars when you switch between tabs I could dump firefox)

by nome (not verified)

Yeah... There are still the extensions though... Bugmenot/filtersetupdater/adblock/noscript makes for pretty nice browsing.

by pinky (not verified)

Numerous updates to the KHTML engine used by KDE and Konqueror. Javascript handling is improved and now works with phpBB and certain wikis. Konqueror no longer shows scrollbars in the Acid2 test, making it the second browser to pass.

that's right, but with the mouse i can still scroll the browser like before with the scrollbars. So i think it's still not 100% right...

by cm (not verified)

> that's right, but with the mouse i can still scroll the browser like before with the scrollbars. So i think it's still not 100% right...

From http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/guide/ :
"If the Acid2 page is scrolled, the scalp will stay fixed in place, becoming unstuck from the rest of the face, which will scroll."

Doesn't that mean that being able to scroll is not an error and that it's normal that the image breaks if scrolled?

by superstoned (not verified)

yep, you're right. konqi does the right thing.

by pinky (not verified)

but if it should be scrolled why konqueror should show the scrollbars?

>"If the Acid2 page is scrolled, the scalp will stay fixed in place, becoming unstuck from the rest of the face, which will scroll."

here i see another confusion, not only the scalp stays if i scroll but only a part from the middle.

by pinky (not verified)

sorry this
"but if it should be scrolled why konqueror should show the scrollbars?"

should obviously mean:

but if it should be scrolled why konqueror doesn't show the scrollbars?

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

My thanks to who ever fixed this.

Now I can upgrade to KDE-3.5

i don't know if this is only specifig to my distro, mine is suse 9.3. i recently upgraded to kde 3.5.2. while everything went well on the transtition, i've noticed that modules in kcontrol that require root privileges will fail to ask you for a root password. meaning that the dialog will no long show up. it will instead give you that index page that shows the list of modules under a group after hitting the administrator mode button. the modules under System Administration, like Login Manager is one example. and all modules under Yast2 w/c will require you root password. :O

the error it seems to give is this:

QLayout "unnamed" added to QVBox "m_body", which already has a layout
kdesu: Unknown option '--n'.
kdesu: Use --help to get a list of available command line options.

here's something i did to resolve the situation above. after i backed-up the necessary binary files, i extracted & copied older binaries of KDESU & KDESUD, particularly from KDE version 3.4.0-28 (from my SUSE 9.3 installer), to /opt/kde3/bin.

ran KCONTROL and now i am able to use that 'administrator button' again! :D happy me!

by Roger L Harford (not verified)

This worked fine on my setup, identical to yours.
Hope someone from SuSE is monitoring these posts.

I tried to fill out a bug report on Novells mess of a site ( SuSE support) that used to be so easy to navigate, but couldn't figure out how to do it. Everything you click seems to be an endless loop.

by peter grilli (not verified)

this work for me also :) thanks. (i extracted & copied older binaries of KDESU & KDESUD from kde 3.5.1)

by tekwyzrd (not verified)

Thanks for the tip. I hope the KDE devs caught this. Replacement of KDESU & KDESUD from KDE v3.5.2 with the ones from KDE v3.5.1 worked here as well. Admin functions in KDE Control Center are again asking for the password as they should.

where I could find KDESU & KDESUD. I have the DVD package of opensuse 10.0 but I can't find those packages.
Thanks for support

Hjogi

I have find them here:

SuSE 10.X ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.5.2/SuSE/x86_64/10.0/kdebase3-3.5.2-2.x86_64.rpm
SuSE 10.X ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.5.2/SuSE/ix86/10.0/kdebase3-3.5.2-2.i586.rpm
SuSE 10.X ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/Attic/3.5-rc1/SuSE/x86_64/10.0/kdebase3-3.5.0-1.x86_64.rpm
SuSE 10.X ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/Attic/3.5-rc1/SuSE/ix86/10.0/kdebase3-3.5.0-1.i586.rpm
SuSE 10.X ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/Attic/3.5-beta2/SuSE/x86_64/10.0/kdebase3-3.4.92-1.x86_64.rpm
SuSE 10.X ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/Attic/3.5-beta2/SuSE/ix86/10.0/kdebase3-3.4.92-1.i586.rpm
OpenSuSE ftp.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-stable/inst-source/suse/x86_64/kdebase3-3.4.2-26.x86_64.rpm
OpenSuSE ftp.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-stable/inst-source/suse/i586/kdebase3-3.4.2-26.i586.rpm

by Anonymous (not verified)

SUSE has put up a new kdebase3.rpm in supplementary/ to fix this problem.

by NuclearPeon (not verified)

I think I have found a solution to this issue.

First off, I'm convinced that the issue is created when a user runs
"sudo kcontrol" in the terminal, as it is meant to be run via the user.

I got this fixed by reinstalling kcontrol.

sudo apt-get clean
(You want to remove old traces of kcontrol)
sudo apt-get install --reinstall kcontrol
(will reinstall from repos)

Afterwards, administrator mode should work.
Cheers!