KDE 4.0.2 Brings New Plasma Features

The KDE community has released another update to its cutting edge KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.2 has, along with the bugfixes some new features in Plasma. The panel can now be configured to sit somewhere else than at the bottom and UI options for changing its size have been added. Do not let yourself be distracted by those new things, there are also plenty of bugfixes, performance improvements and translation updates in there, among which support for two new languages: Persian and Icelandic. KDE 4.0.2 is thus available in 49 whopping languages, and more are soon to come. More highlights include rendering improvements in KHTML and lots of bugfixes in Okular and Kopete. The KDE community hopes you enjoy this release which should be hitting your favourite packaging system soon. See the changelog for more updates and info page for download options.

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Comments

by ramses (not verified)

the problem is not only with the font but with the plasmoid itself or could you explain me why if I choose to have the date in addition to the hour, the date appeared at the bottom of the screen (if the panel is at the bottom) and why the lower part of the K menu is at the top of the screen too. It's nothing due to the font in both case.

I solved the problems. I put the panel at the bottom so now it's a little bit bigger than at the bottom (probably because of the icone for the K menu) and I remove the clock.

by Moltonel (not verified)

> is possible to disable that ugly frame which surrounds
> all icons and wigdets as soon as you approach them?

Right-click on the desktop -> select "lock widgets". Here you go, no more frames.

by Sebastian Kuegler (not verified)

> - Is it or when will it be possible to configure the size of icons and fonts in the taskbar, the menu and on the desktop again?

You can change the font used in the taskbar in systemsettings | Appearance | Fonts | Taskbar

> - is possible to disable that ugly frame which surrounds all icons and wigdets as soon as you approach them?

Just lock the desktop via the RMB menu, they are only there when the desktop is unlocked.

by tom (not verified)

systemsettings | Appearance | Fonts | Taskbar

is this logical?
wouldn't you search for "taskbar" first, then for the font setting of the taskbar?

also nice to have would be: you could right-click on the taskbar and choose to open the relevant systemsettings dialog.

Just an idea.

by Sebastian Kuegler (not verified)

Actually, I would look for font settings exactly where I put it.

There has been a design decision sometime, somewhere that we should try to not provide twenty different ways of setting something up because that leads to clutter in the UI and is actually harder to find in the end.

To me, the System Settings way we chose for is pretty clear and also scales well.

by whatever noticed (not verified)

Hmm, doesn't work overhere.
Changed the font for the task bar to '4' (it was 11), logged out and in to get it activated, and while the buttons in the taskbar are now unreadable small, the clock digits are still larger than the panel

I also noticed something new: the lower part of the panel apeares to be drawn on the top of the screen. I noticed some glitches over there, and when i clicked the glitch in the top richt corner, k-menu opened..

Pretty odd :o)

by Sebastian Kuegler (not verified)

The date field respects the Small setting, the clock itself will take the rest of the space. Can you please be more specific, i.e. supplying the following information in a bugreport:

- Taskbar, Small font settings (face, size)
- Panel size
- screenshot showing the problem

Thanks.

by simon (not verified)

I think that both http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=157537 and http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158762 seem to be this issue. The latter seems to suggest it's fixed in trunk.

by JackieBrown (not verified)

Yes, as it says in the summary.

Anything interesting in trunk? I quit following it when they switched to qt 4.4.

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

I installed trunk only today again after the change to qt4.4
I didnt have the time to realy play around. I think not very much has changed, but it seems more stable, things seemed to work the way i expeted. I dont know, nothing revolutionary from since 2 weeks (that i have found on the desktop and 1-2 apps), but the overall impression is better.

by NabLa (not verified)

Oh yes, you can; right click on a free area of the panel and you will have an extra option to set the position and size of the panel.

There are issues though. The clock: on "tiny" and "small" panel the clock doesn't fit properly. I haven't found a config option to set the font size for the clock (only the font itself). The panel on the left or on the right just looks wrong due to the taskbar not rotating the different window buttons - they still appear horizontal. Sometimes the "tiny" size when the panel is at the bottom causes the panel to overflow the screen... towards the top!!

by Bobby (not verified)

The clock uses the system font size like Sebastian pointed out. If you make the system font size smaller then the clock will fit (a bit inconvenient) but then your system font might be too small.

by ramses (not verified)

perhaps (I didn't try) but what can I do for the Kmenu? The problem is a little bit more than a config of the font and other people are experiencing the same thing than me.

Nothing major but details which need some attention. That's it. Bu tlike I told before. This version is, for me, the first one I can think to use.

I still have some issue like the logout stuff. It's complex and, at least on ubuntu gutsy, you cannot put in hibernation or sleep the computer with the options (very difficult to find) in the logout menu (At least the kpowersave stuff from kde3 is working so now I fond a workaround).

But everything is improving fast so I'm not complaining I just report bugs :)

by Sebastian Kuegler (not verified)

You can help by submitting bugreports, preferably with Taskbar, Small font settings (face, size), panel size and position and screenshots showing the problems. See, developers don't necessarily run into those problems, without you telling us (and doing so in a detailed way so we can keep the bug triaging overhead low) is a very good way to help improving Plasma.

Thanks!

by NabLa (not verified)

What's the relationship between the system font size and the clock font size? Because my default font is 9pt and the clock font is like 20pt...

by Bobby (not verified)

The panel size can be changed in hight but not in length unfortunately. Something that i would prefer btw. I always use kicker at 60% length but this isn't possible with the plasma panel as yet.

The other thing is dragging and dropping widgets directly from the desktop to the panel. I read somewhere that it was possible even in 4.0.1 but I never got that working. The widgets end up behind and not in the panel.
The drag and drop function only works directly from the widget dialogue box.

by Will Stephenson (not verified)

It's scheduled for implementation Real Soon Now, a little birdie told me. I tried it by hacking plasma-appletsrc, but the bird twittered that the code does not support it just yet.

by abc (not verified)

Sorry, but panel resizing should be as in XP.
You can resize it comfortably as you want with the mouse.
Very good usability.

Open a dialog for this is annoying.

It's strange that KDE 4 permitts mouse in several tasks.
You can't even drop a file on the trash can.

by Anon (not verified)

"Sorry, but panel resizing should be as in XP. You can resize it comfortably as you want with the mouse. Very good usability.

Open a dialog for this is annoying."

Aaron Seigo seems to be very keen on "passive configuration", where dialogs are not used but where the item one wishes to configure is directly manipulated by the user: the car analogy would be grabbing your seat and physically adjusting it to suit your height directly rather than typing in commands on your in-dashboard carputer ;) This being so, I would not be at all surprised to see this implemented.

"You can't even drop a file on the trash can."

Considering how new the trash can (and, indeed, the whole of Plasma) is, this does not surprise me in the slightest. I imagine it will be fixed, in time.

by Zayed (not verified)

Really I impressed with the fixing rate. By the way, it seem that KHTML is in heavy fixing mode. I will try the gmail chat and digg.

by Frank (not verified)

Does anybody made the ACID3-Test?
http://acid3.acidtests.org/

by stormwind (not verified)

62 on Kubuntu.

by adrian (not verified)

FireFox 2.0 50/100
FireFox 3 anyone?

by stormwind (not verified)

Firefox/3.0b3 58

by Zayed (not verified)

FireFox 3 beta 4 (not released yet ) 67

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

IE 8 Beta (standards mode is supposed to be default) I scored 17/100 and it looks horrible.

by Phil (not verified)

Awesome work. Much kudos to the KDE devs for getting this turned around and out of the door so quickly. You guys really show commercial developers how it should be done ;-)

by Sebastian (not verified)

Hi there,

may somebody help me? I installed the new simple-glow plasma theme from kde-look. With 4.0.2 the plasma panel background does not look right. It seems that the background texture as truncated such that the panel borders are 100% transparent. This effect appears only if I turn the KWin effects on, if not, everything works fine. I tried changing back to the default plasma theme, but got the same effect. Did anyone else experience this problem?

I just want to ask, if that may be a packaging problem on opensuse or if I messed up configuration files.

Btw: When I start plasma in konsole, it says:
X Error: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes) 8
Extension: 155 (RENDER)
Minor opcode: 4 (RenderCreatePicture)
Resource id: 0x13a
Object::connect: No such signal Plasma::Icon::doubleClicked()
Object::connect: No such signal Plasma::Icon::doubleClicked()
Object::connect: No such slot Tasks::launchActivated()

This message is probably related (At least this is the reason why the panel icons are not functional at all for me)

regards, Sebastian

by Breco Pol (not verified)

Same over here on Kubuntu: the borders of the panel show strange effects or are even transparent. So this seems to be a regression or feature in 4.0.2.

by vicko (not verified)

same here

by Juan Ignacio Pu... (not verified)
by Antony (not verified)

Same here, after upgrade to 4.0.2, can't change background anymore, if I click apply, only white screen, should logout and log in again to see new background, anyone having the same issue?

by Sebastian (not verified)

Definitely a nw feature - "deskop effects" :) I wonder what they mean by "Wait for 4.1!"

by Thomas (not verified)

This is a bug in qt svg rendering. It is fixed in 4.4 though.

by NabLa (not verified)

It didn't happen to me on 4.0.1 & 4.0.0... so something's changed that "triggered" this bug?

by anon (not verified)

I actually have no probs with it running opensuse 10.3

by Redneard (not verified)

Confirmed, look weird to me too... running kubuntu hardy

by PlasmaLover (not verified)

With all due respect to plasma and its devs, it does not make sense to highlight it in the title when all we got was ability to resize and reposition the panel. Am I missing something here? Wasn't that possible with kicker since a few years? Why do I get a feeling that someone is trying to push plasma in my face whenever I look at anything on the dot nowadays? Its not like its the only thing new in KDE4 but looks like its getting most hyp^H^H^Hpush from the marketing department.

Thanks for listening.

by Anon (not verified)

And some of these features are bugged also... Applets not adapting to the size of the panel or rendering bugs when the panel is on top of the screen for example...

I dont want to sound too negative or rude, but i consider this as broken stuff regardless if its a new (and certainly nice) feature. Maybe this should have been included in the announcement also... I, as an example, appreciate it when things are described clearly and straightforward, and not like "marketing stuff"... Something like "we are not quite there", because not everyone knows this...

by Sebastian (not verified)

I wonder how much effort it would have been if one would have provided plasmalib for desktop and developers and kicker for the panels as an intermediate state for 4.0.x series to make the desktop more usable. Maybe it is to some third-party-developer to port kicker to kde4/oxygen and provide it as separate rpm?

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Well, I don't want to discourage interested developers, but frankly: good luck! Whoever ports Kicker to KDE 4 will end up with no third-party applets at all unless they port them themselves, KDE 3 Kicker applets won't work without porting, KDE 4 Plasmoids won't work at all. And I think even porting the basics (menu, taskbar, clock) will be a significant amount of work.

by Sebastian (not verified)

Is that really so - I mean, aren't there compatibility libs for kde3/qt3? What are they supposed to be for?

by kollum (not verified)

An other option, since I don't expect KDE4.0.x to be the only desktop in any widely used distrib, is to use kicker from KDE3 on top of KDE4 ( or the gnome panel, or the xfce one, or ... ) That depends on KDE3, but I think most of kde4 users keep using KDE3 in KDE4 sessions.

I test kde4 snapshot when I can, but I think I'll wait for kde4 to be the mandriva whatever-release _default_ desktop for me to switch.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

There is no Kicker in Fedora 9.

by Sebastian Kuegler (not verified)

Not sure where this feeling is coming from. Searching through the articles reveals that Plasma has been mentioned two times in the commit-digest lately, the last time it was mentioned in an article was back in November (I can actually hardly believe this, given how visual the component and how quickly it is evolving).

In this particular case, Plasma is the only component with new features (and apparently very popular ones), that is something one should put into an announcement, if you ask me.

by jos poortvliet (not verified)

Indeed. Normally, I'm not for boasting features which should've been there in the first place, or features which the competition had for years - but in this case, with everyone complaining about the issues with for example no resizing in the panel, it makes sense to mention it.

They'll ride it to death. Maybe we'll get more developers that way?

Well panel is resizeable ... NOT

Can you set it to be just 70% of the total screensize? No? Well, then it is not.

Where have other 3 panels gone? I was always using 3 panels: left, top and bottom.

Top was with option to auto-hide on. Well still missing this option :(

What about the Desktop? I used to have 4 - 6 desktops with different wallpaper on each of them. That is not just a cosmetic issue, it is usability issue. When I switch to another desktop it takes a few seconds before I actually register which one is it (yes I know we have pager for this but that is not the point). It was also possible to enable the names for each desktop. If I am not mistaken this is still not possible. If it is can someone point me into the right direction please?

Where is the TRUE multi-desktop KDE? One desktop with one panel settings, one dekstop icons and one wallpaper

2nd desktop with different settings/wallpaper/set of icons?

Can we expect this in the foreseeable future? This would be more than just a cosmetic fix. It would considerably improve usability. And another win for Linux desktop.

It looks like drag and drop from the desktop to e.g. Dolphin still doesn't work :( Any progress on this? Is this doable?

And also right click on a desktop is as usable as in Gnome before tweaking. How to get options like Create new Txt file? Dunno just missing something or it is not implemented yet?

Does anyone know how to bring wordclock as a walpaper on desktop. Really miss this one on my desktop.

And what happened with the coolest clock ever? You still cannot set more than one timezone to it. I always used to have 4+ for NY, London, Taipei, Buenos Aires ...

And switch user is still not working. It brings the Krunner window. Well I don't want to run anything :) ... I just want to run another session as different user

Ah, last but not the least. Where is the 'Showed removed tiles option' in Kmahjongg? Really useful feature.

I guess will need to leave without it for a while.

Otherwise guys/girls, great release and thank you!

Much of that stuff is there, but missing a GUI for configuring. Eg. multiple panels are easy to add if you edit ~/.kde4.0/share/config/plasma-appletsrc, kwinrc has number of desktops and their names right near the top. Each clock can be set with its own timezone too.

WorldClock as background should be pretty easy (make a new desktop containment) Marble and WoC can take care of that. May already be done in trunk.

Personally, I hate Icons on desktop, so I just don't care about having file creation in the context menu. And I can tell what desktop I'm on by the apps that are open.

"~/.kde4.0/share/config/plasma-appletsrc, kwinrc has number of desktops and their names right near the top."

Thanks Soap for the panel tip :D
What about displaying names instead of numbers in pager or while switching from one desktop to other?

"Each clock can be set with its own timezone too."
The only problem is that you end up with many clocks. In kde 3.5 you could set the main one and on mouse hover as many you wanted. But with 2 panels I guess I can display 2 the most used ones.

"WorldClock as background should be pretty easy (make a new desktop containment) Marble and WoC can take care of that."

I should be more specific. The coolest thing was shadow, showing zones with daylight/night. It was dead easy to do this in 3.5 and even added your customized ones. It doesn't look so in 4.0.

"Personally, I hate Icons on desktop, so I just don't care about having file creation in the context menu."

Yes, Indeed it is a luck that we are different. :)

Once again Soap. Many thanks!

Cheers