KDE 3.5.7 Improves PIM and More

Tuesday, 22 May 2007  |  skügler

The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5.7, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. This release brings a renewed focus to KDE-PIM applications. KAddressBook, KOrganizer and KAlarm received attention with bugfixes, while KMail additionally witnessed the addition of new features and improvements with both interface work and IMAP handling: it can manage IMAP quotas, and copy and move all folders. Read on for more details.

KDE now supports 65 languages, making it available to more people than most non-Free software and can be easily extended to support more languages by communities who wish to contribute to the Open Source project.

Several other applications have seen feature improvements:

  • KPDF shows tooltips for links when hovering over them, correctly displays more complex PDF files (like this Firefox advertisement) and reacts to commands for opening the Table of Contents pane.
  • Umbrello now can generate and export C# Code and has added Java 5 generics support.
  • KDevelop gets a major version upgrade to version 3.4.1. New features include much-improved Code Completion and Navigation, a more reliable debugger interface, Qt 4 support and better Ruby and KDE 4 development support.

In addition to the new features there were many bug fixes across the board, especially in the Edutainment and Games packages and Kopete. Kopete also received a major performance improvement for its chat windows.

As KDE users have come to expect, this new release includes continued work on KHTML and KJS, KDE's HTML and Javascript engines. A new and interesting usability feature in KHTML makes the mouse pointer indicate if a link wants to open a new browser window or not.

Packages are available for Arch Linux, Debian Unstable, Kubuntu Feisty, Mandriva 2007.1, Pardus and openSUSE. You can also get the source directly or compile with Konstruct.

For a more detailed list of improvements since the KDE 3.5.6 release on the 25th January 2007, please refer to the KDE 3.5.7 Changelog.

Comments:

"KMail" links to bad page - Adhominem - 2007-05-22

The "KMail" link in the announcement links to a page that is both broken and marked deprecated. http://kontact.kde.org/kmail/ looks much better.

Re: "KMail" links to bad page - Adriaan de Groot - 2007-05-22

Thanks for pointing that out. I've removed the broken content and made stuff redirect automatically.

Blackberry - EMoShunz - 2007-05-22

Cool, but, when will I be able to sync my blackberry to the K suite?!?

Re: Blackberry - Martin - 2007-05-22

I think not: http://www.opensync.org/wiki/DeviceCompatibilityList

Re: Blackberry - Martin - 2007-05-22

OK -- your question was not "if" but "when". That's easy. As soon as you implement it. Giving a blackberry to a developer *might* also do the trick.

Re: Blackberry - EMoShunz - 2007-05-22

hmm... I may be able to gain access to a blackberry I could give to a developer, but I find it hard to believe that not a single linux hacker out there has a blackberry...

Re: Blackberry - Paul Eggleton - 2007-05-22

Well, restrict that further to "a single KDE hacker with spare time" and you might have your answer :)

Re: Blackberry - Moritz Moeller-Herrmann - 2007-05-23

I think you could do that already if you are willing to try the alpha opensync plugin that is part of barry since the latest v0.7 release. I have not tried it yet... Barry is a project to allow syncing of blackberries. See: http://sourceforge.net/projects/barry You can also use barry's bcharge to charge a blackberry (already merged into the newest kernel, not required there anymore). Greetings Moritz

Re: Blackberry - EMoShunz - 2007-05-23

That is some great information, thanks! btw...which kernel has the upgrade? I am running kubuntu 7.04 and I can not charge.

Re: Blackberry - richlv - 2007-05-28

http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_21 search for "charge" - so, the answer is, "2.6.21" :)

Highs and Lows - Matthias - 2007-05-22

Thanks for another release and kudos to all the maintainers for, well, maintaining KDE 3.5 despite the effort to get KDE 4 out of the door :-) Hopefully KDE 3.5 will receive further updates in the future as I suspect that business owners and governments will hesitate to move to KDE 4 for some time and with an almost feature-freeze the current branch is shaping up to be a rock-solid working environment. I was a little disappointed that kmail still does not support web.de email accounts via IMAP. With all the announced fixes I was hoping that this one would be among them. Ah well, one can still hope that one day I'll get rid of the behemoth that is Thunderbird ;-) Cheers !

Re: Highs and Lows - Dunedan - 2007-05-22

KMail + web.de email accounts + IMAP works fine for me since ages. Sometimes there are some timeouts, but normally it's works like a charm.

Re: Highs and Lows - mathias (one t) - 2007-05-22

The same is right for me. I also use KMail and Web.de since this year and had no problems.

Re: Highs and Lows - Matthias - 2007-05-22

Ah well, must be something wrong with my configuration then. The authentification always fails and I never really found out why. I blamed KMail since Thunderbird and M2 work like a charm.

IMAP for web.de - Stefan - 2007-05-22

In case that the "it works for me since ages" comments are not sufficiently helpful: Use server imap.web.de on on port 993 with the following security options encryption: SSL, Authentication: text

fish:// - Xanadu - 2007-05-22

Does anyone know if fish:// and sftp:// are still broke in 3.5.7? This broke just this weekend (with a Gentoo update invorporating KDE "fixes" from upstream). See: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145123 and: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-556818-highlight-.html Thanx! M.

Re: fish:// - Xanadu - 2007-05-22

(I guess I should've finished reading the Changelog(s) before posting...) There's no mention of "fish" or "ssh" in the short & pretty Changelog or the longer text one. I guess fish/sftp has not been fixed in 3.5.7?

Re: fish:// - Ritesh Raj Sarraf - 2007-05-22

I think it is a problem specific to Gentoo. I'm running KDE on Debian and fish:/ works perfect. I've attached a snapshot

Re: fish:// - Joe - 2007-05-23

Why do you specify port 22? Is this to seem cool?

Re: fish:// - whatever noticed - 2007-05-23

Whats wrong with specifying a port in a url?

Re: fish:// - Tim - 2007-05-23

It's a bit unnecessary.

Re: fish:// - cm - 2007-05-23

In other words: Nothing is wrong.

Re: fish:// - Troy Unrau - 2007-05-22

Gentoo specific problem, as it works for me on other distros. Bug your packager or check if gentoo has a KDE forum someplace. I think they have an irc channel on freenode, #gentoo-kde or somesuch, but I could be wrong.

Re: fish:// - Carlo - 2007-05-22

If you would have had a look at the bug report, you'd have noticed that it's not Gentoo specific.

Re: fish:// - Joe - 2007-05-23

I actually RTFBR and it's specific to 64-bit. That might be mentionable. Stops all the whining.

Re: fish:// - Xanadu - 2007-05-23

I have only 32-bit machines, as is also mentioned in the kde bug page and the gentoo page I linked to. The problem is there too. I hate to be a jerk, but: RTFBR. :-)

Re: fish:// - Nicholas Robbins - 2007-05-23

I'm reading the bug report now, and see nothing saying it's not 64bit specific. But it looks like a beast to track down, so it may be some time before you see a fix of any sort. And it works perfectly here, 64bit.

Re: fish:// - Mark - 2007-05-22

sftp:// works for me both in KDE 3.5.6 and 3.5.7.

Re: fish:// - hag - 2007-05-23

file:/ remote:/ etc. does not work anymore with Dolphin but I havent's rebooted yet.

Re: fish:// - Kosh - 2007-05-23

I have kubuntu feisty 64bit edition and I could not replicate this bug under 3.5.6 or 3.5.7. Just wanted to give you that as a datapoint. I wonder why some have this as a 64bit only issue but I am definitely running a 64bit compiled kde under a 64bit linux system without these issues. Got to love tracking down weird bugs. Just so you know I tested fish and sftp to another linux server that I have.

Re: fish:// - Xanadu - 2007-05-25

If you (or anyone reading) check back with the bug report(s), I updated it with this finding: If you're running kernel 2.6.21 it's broke. With .19 it's fine. I didn't have .20 on any of my machines so I can't comment on that version.

KAddressBook, KOrganizer and KAlarm received atten - Ben - 2007-05-22

KAddressBook is still an applications with many many bugzilla entries and the question is why? The applications looks very simple. Is it really well designed?

Re: KAddressBook, KOrganizer and KAlarm received atten - Joe - 2007-05-23

Why don't you go find out instead of asking nebulous questions in forums?

Composing HTML messages - Axiom - 2007-05-23

Is the philosophy against composing HTML messages changing at all with the new version? I would really like to be able to add proper hyperlinks to my messages. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=102924

Re: Composing HTML messages - Rob Fargher - 2007-05-23

I would pleased if Kmail would allow me to forward an HTML mail. Right now, the only way I can find to do so is to forward a received HTML email is to do so as an attachment. But that retains the originating senders address. I don't want that, I want to respect their privacy. We have enough #@&! spam already without needlessly exposing people's email addresses. If forwarding as an attachment stripped the headers, perhaps as a separate option, that would suffice. -- Cheers, Rob

SuSE 9.3 - someone - 2007-05-23

No SuSE 9.3 rpms available anymore :( Seems like it's time for me to upgrade my system...

Re: SuSE 9.3 - Anonymous - 2007-05-23

You better do, there is also no security fixes support anymore for it.

New window links - blacksheep - 2007-05-23

«A new and interesting usability feature in KHTML makes the mouse pointer indicate if a link wants to open a new browser window or not.» Cool, though I would be more interested in KHTML ignoring the open in a new window links and let me decide.

Re: New window links - renoX - 2007-05-23

Agreed, it's an ill-thought feature..

Re: New window links - Chani - 2007-05-24

I changed everything to open in new tabs. much nicer, imho.

Re: New window links - Jakob Petsovits - 2007-05-24

That, plus you can choose "Open in this window" in the context menu for links that would normally open in a new window or tab. Very handy, sometimes.