KDE 4.0-alpha1 Released: "Knut"

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first alpha release of the
KDE Desktop Environment, version 4.0. This release is a basis for the integration of powerful new
technologies that will be included in KDE 4. Read on for more details.

Highlights of KDE 4.0 Alpha 1 are:

  • A new visual appearance through Oxygen
  • New frameworks to build applications with, providing vastly improved
    hardware and multimedia integration (through Solid and Phonon), spelling and grammar checking, to name just a few
  • New applications that focus on a smooth user experience, such as Dolphin, the file manager, and Okular, the document viewer

KDE 4.0 Alpha 1 marks the end of the addition of large features to the KDE base libraries and shifts the focus onto integrating these new technologies into applications and the base desktop. The
next few months will be spent on bringing the desktop into shape after two years of frenzied development leaving very little untouched.

The final release of KDE 4.0 is expected in late October 2007.

The work on the framework makes application development easier and more satisfying. This will result in a crop of new features and applications over the next few years, underlining the position KDE holds as the leading Free Desktop and bringing Free Software to new users worldwide. A detailed release schedule can be found at techbase.kde.org, the new technical resource accompanying the platform, that provides extensive and high-quality documentation about KDE.

More information such as screenshots and installation instructions can be found in the KDE 4.0-alpha1 Visual Guide.

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Comments

by Adriaan de Groot (not verified)

First post! Everyone should post suggested KDE 4 alpha T-shirt designs here.

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

A T-Shirt with Konqi on it, wearing a T-Shirt with the words "I Knut" in it :)

by Godji (not verified)

How about a T-shirt of Konqui wearing a T-shirt of Konqui wearing a T-shirt of Konqui wearing... until you run out of resolution ;)

by zonk (not verified)

How about simply "i Knut" ? :P

by Adriaan de Groot (not verified)

No, no. See, now I have to hurt you. Like the attached T-shirt.

by Wade Olson (not verified)

I got an advanced preview of this visionary artwork and had a tough time keeping my mouth shut until Ade unveiled it.

It's like staring into the face of God. If God were 8-bit anyway.

by lukilak@we (not verified)

Yeah this Tshirt is so cool, and the text on it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

by Yuri Romanov (not verified)

Sorry folks I don't agree with this picture.!!
I think we must keep our image away of nasty sex behaviours.
That tool looks like a german sex toy by Beate Uhse.

by Sutoka (not verified)

The tool is looks like something generally used to scrub toilets. Maybe thats where your mind is? ;P

Though some scrubbers used to clean dishes also look similar to that, but are generally much smaller than the toilet version and have more of the thingies (give me a break, I just woke up like 5 minutes ago!)

by Ian (not verified)

Cute but does it give the correct image? It doesn't give credit to the professionalism or quality of the work done by the KDE team, it gives the opposite impression that KDE is immature. I cringe at things like "firsty fawn" etc at it sounds so childish - in-jokes always do when launched on the unsuspecting public. Unfortunately most of the people with buying power in the internatinal bank i work in dismiss products with labels like "Fiesty Fawn" etc as not serious and therefore don't deserve any attention.
I may have missed some hounour in this thread about this shirt (i still haven't had my first tea of the day yet), apologies if I have.

But thanks to all the KDE development team for the fantastic product, it is still the best out of all the desktop enviromonents.

by outolumo (not verified)

Well, The Knut release IS immature, is it not? Furthermore, as such it is not meant for wider public (at least I thought there was some mention of Alpha there...)

Summa summarum, I see no problem giving it an impression of being immature :)

by G Child (not verified)

I Want a T-Shirt with Konqi eating a dolphin on a skewer.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

LOL! Nobody forces you to use Dolphin. Konqueror is still out there, and Krusader is going to start their KDE 4 port soon too.

And you do know that that would be promoting illegal behavior (eating an animal of a protected species), right? ;-)

by Anon (not verified)

Damn, that's a typo just waiting to happen! :)

by Gregor (not verified)

you mean knuth, like donald knuth?

or, omfg, no you can't! you do mean Kant!?

;)

by Name (not verified)

Especially in polish language. The first two words that I thought about were:
"knur" - meaning "boar", or (colloquially and somewhat offensive) "swine".
"knot" - meaning "something fscked up" ;).
Not too nice associations, I think :P.

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

It's probably closest to "knot" then.

Knut is an adorable little polarbear that made the news a couple of weeks ago, and since that bugger's got its own wikipedia page, we're tapping into his popularity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_(polar_bear)

by Name (not verified)

Well, my bad. It's the first time I heard about that bear. But the article you pointed mentioned that the zoo has trademarked "Knut". Won't there be any problems for KDE stemming from this? ;)

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

I'm looking forward to reading articles like "Zoo sues Free Software Project" or "Sue zoos ..."

It must be Friday.

by Wade Olson (not verified)

"Polarizing Knut: Illegal Use of Imagery Unbearable and Seals Fate"

Triple Pun FTW.

by eol (not verified)

best comment ever. thumbs up wade.

by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

How the heck can one trademark a name? Knut was the name of a king of Denmark and England (anglicized as Canute). It didn't appear with this bear. To what does the trademark apply? Pairings of the name with the image of a bear? I suppose it's like restricting usages of the name McDonald that have to do with food. It would suck to be a resterateur named McDonald or a computer software guy named Mike Rowe ;) (I know)

by gizz (not verified)
by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

Excellent :) And from following links: laffo @ knutwurst, knutella and bärate uhse

by Alexa (not verified)

Knut is so cute ~ he will always be in my heart. I think it's great they have named this alpha after him... He is incredible cute - And the polarbear lives on the other side of the world than the penguin... But: Does this mean - that KDE is working completely into the other direction of the usual linux-world-philosophy? i am confused.

@_@

Greets from "Knut"-Germany,
Alexa

by Knut Mork (not verified)

Thank you! But why do you mention polarbears ?
:-)

by Jean-Alex Silvy (not verified)

Reminds me of my recents german week-end in Rheinland :

1°) Knut everywhere, and clearly too much for me...
2°) Sporgel everywhere, it's a pity there were so much of it & I ate so few, I'm a wreck !
3°) Grönemeyers 12, just catch it & leave the country :)

I think KDE will remain quite German-Styled in meeting locations as in cultural references and I can't see why it should not be good !!

by Not Knut (not verified)

Could it be a tribute to Trolltech's "community manager" Knut Yrvin? I mean, Trolltech produces Qt, which is essential to KDE ...

Here's some short info about Knut:
- http://www.linuxdagen.no/?p=8#yrvin
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Yrvin

by Knut Ness (not verified)

Knut is a nordic name, and my name =p
Seeing Knut as the codename for a KDE alpha put a smile on my face on a rather miserable day =)

by Un-knut (not verified)

Were they thinking "Knut", as the male name, or the more KDE-mandatory K-as-frontal-letter-ification of "nut", "Knut" (K-nut).

They're all (K)nuts!!

by basse (not verified)

konqi t-shirt.. i'm happy to render out version of him wearing (or not wearing) anything, so just let me know! I already have some quite strange poses of him in KDE4 fashion... but no place really to put them.

.b

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

Can you send them to me? I'm always happy to collect artwork, and would be delighted to be able to nag you about new stuff. :-)

by André (not verified)

How about a Konqi wearing an Oxygen mask, playing with a Dolphin...

by Kris Kerwin (not verified)

The projected final release date, according to the above release schedule:

"2.4.12 October 23, 2007: Targeted Release Date"

And the chemist in me celebrates! Yay for Mole Day!

I sure hope that they release at 6:02 in the morning! ;-)

by Adriaan de Groot (not verified)

That's a T-shirt waiting to happen, too. KDE logo is a trademark of KDE e.V. and the Mole logo is a trademark of the FLOSSMole project (yay Megan!).

by Flavio (not verified)

First of all congratulations to all the devs! You all rock!

I have to say I'm a little surprised to see in the screenshot the same old "kicker" UI. When KDE4 planning was starting it seemed like the whole desktop/taskbar/program launcher/systray area would undergo a revolution. What are the plans in this area? I read on the release schedule that Beta is less than 2 months away. Is the kicker UI as we know it going to stay in KDE4?

(Please don't take this as flame bait, I just like to know where my beloved KDE is heading!)

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

Development is being shifted to this kind of things now, it's unclear how it will look like, but it's likely to being changed shortly.

Work on plasma has mainly happened under the hood until now, but the parts are shaping up nicely. There's kross which enables scripting interfaces, graphicsview extended with the necessary features for shiny graphics, libplasma, porting in superkaramba to kde4 / qgv and of course krunner as the most visible thing right now.

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

the KDE4 panel and desktop will Plasma that users talked about it very much.please read the last few news about that.its development started a few weeks ago and will came into KDE in its time.

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

How stable is the API? Could a KDE4 app developer develop againist this alpha without having to worry about someone fixing their app to build againist a newer SVN version?

Basically, should Amarok advise new developers to just get the alpha packages or should they still go ahead and build it.

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

kdelibs' API is supposed to be frozen.

by dario (not verified)

I'm interested in developing some toy plasmoids: are the APIs for those also frozen? I tried looking around in Techbase, but couldn't find much info.

The APIs pretty much don't exist, yet :)

See e.g.

http://dot.kde.org/1178556406/1178570722/

by rockmen1 (not verified)

Appreciate you KDE!
Can't wait to try it!

by EMP3ROR (not verified)

Why don't you use more hardware-acceleration? e.g. Marble, Krita, Kalzium

by Jakob Petsovits (not verified)

Krita and Kalzium actually do use OpenGL, and all the hardware acceleration that comes with it.

Marble's objective is not to create an alternative for Google Earth, but to create a reusable geo-location widget for any application that might want to use it, minimize the disk space it needs, and make it as widely available as possible. Because of that, Marble uses a rendering algorithm that is totally different to "real 3D" like offered by OpenGL, so it can't take advantage of OpenGL by design. On the other hand, it doesn't have a pressing need for it either.

by EMP3ROR (not verified)

ah, ok
I asked because I read this (but it's not really up to date): http://cniehaus.livejournal.com/24404.html

by Carsten Niehaus (not verified)

I guess you mean this sentence?

"PS: The rendering was done without hardware acceleration but is very fast"

That is simply because back then I had no 3D-card in my PC --> no hw-acceleration :) I simply wanted to say that it is really fast even without it!

Currently you get 30--50fps without 3d-acceleration and _much_ more with.

by EMP3ROR (not verified)

Great! :)

by Torsten Rahn (not verified)

> On the other hand, it doesn't have a pressing need for it either.

Right. However I have a development path that also includes hardware acceleration in mind already. Due to more important Marble tasks I estimate that I won't start to work on this before III/2007.

by Brandybuck (not verified)

Hardware acceleration is great. But just remember that most of it comes at the expense of having to use a proprietary video driver.