KDE 4.0.4 Out Now, Codenamed File-Not-Found

Another month, another update to the KDE 4.0 series. This time, we are presenting KDE 4.0.4, dubbed File-Not-Found to the audience. KDE 4.0.4 brings improvements to KHTML, Okular and various other components. We recommend that people who are already running KDE 4.0 releases update to 4.0.4. The emphasis of this release lies, as usual in stabilising, bugfixing, performance improvements and updated translations -- no new features. The developers have again squashed quite some bugs which you can find some of in the changelog. With this release, the KDE community continues to support the KDE 4.0 series that has been released for brave users earlier this year. KDE 4.1, to be released this summer (in the northern-hemisphere) will bring new features and applications. KDE 4.1 is based on the recently released Qt 4.4 while KDE 4.0.4 is still based on Qt 4.3 as is the case with the whole KDE 4.0 series. So put on your update shoes and install 4.0.4 today.

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Comments

I use KDE4.0.x constantly and I haven't got much to complain about, apart from a few limitations on plasma (eg, to be able to delete files from the desktop containment, not just hide them) and a few annoying bugs that aren't stoppers I'm quite happy with it.

My major pain is not having more apps that use phonon (like amarok1, smplayer etc), as I've got two soundcards and phonon makes it so easy to manage. But that ain't a KDE fault either.

My last install of kubuntu (7.04, which upgraded to 7.10) with kde3 started getting buggy, so I searched all over trying to look for a stable and fast kde based OS ... then I saw 4.0.

I tried Arch, but they've got something broken with 64bit version and then I tried OpenSUSE, but something about the install taking 6 hours to run (downloading the net version) made me suspicious... then just trying to search for packages took over a minute to open.

So back to *buntu land because I don't have time to learn a new OS and the others had too steep of a learning curve (and if paying $59 for OpenSUSE, I expect better than 100kb/sec downloads from update servers).

I installed ubuntu 8.04 alternate then used aptitude to install kde4-desktop. I'm *very* happy with what I have. I'm tolerant of plasma being new and temporarily annoying (as well as the "hard coding" here and there), but I am looking forward to really learning this environment and growing with it.

FWIW, I learned more about aptitude with this recent exploration into KDE4 ... imho, aptitude is THE way to install packages ... apt-get and/or the update manager would allow an upgrade right now even though kdelibs5 v 4.0.4 is not in the repositories. Aptitude has something like 100 packages marked as being held back and are waiting on that dependency to run the update.

Now to learn more about how the containers work, how plasma works, and sizing... I need to figure out my issue of the plasma container being laptop screen size while the full desktop is the screen size of the attached monitor. (not trying dual head mode). I'll hack/tweak around it, but this seems to be a bad bug in the interim. I would also appreciate a private e-mail with some tutorial on how to create a "bug entry", too!

I envision creating my own "container" or widget that I can drop other widgets into (but without borders) as a taskbar replacement. Instead I want a task "blob" in a corner. I may even work out playing with the plasma container some more. I've got a lot to learn about KDE before I can decide how to go about that...

:)

In short: I've used KDE3 for over a year and I'm now going to use KDE4 full time.

Thanks
Chris

by KDE 4.0 user (not verified)

I use KDE 4.0 and I like it. :)

by Wondering about... (not verified)

I realise this is probably the worst place to ask but I don't know where else :-) Does anyone have a (complete) list of all the slaves which were ported/are useable under 4.x, or is there a way to query my own installation to find which ones I have?

by toga98 (not verified)

run

kcmshell4 ioslaveinfo

by ad (not verified)

Ah, I didn't know that one :)
Cool!

by chris (not verified)

AND they fixed the ftp issue! Previously, the ftp kio would "shotgun" my webhost using many connections in a series (rather than one long session) which would trip their intruder detection and get my IP denied for 10 minutes. So I was unable to use ftp:// in konqueror or for file editing in quanta, kate, etc. The first thing I did this morning was to try and "break" it ... and I couldn't. :D

A side benefit was using sshfs to mount remote directories locally, so finding out about that is a definite "plus" to the former ftp "bug".

:) Chris

by mimoune djouallah (not verified)

still the proxy bug not resolved,

by Damn that proxy (not verified)

The annoying thing is, if you look at the bug on bugs.kde.org (http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=155707), a patch has been submitted and shown to work.

by Zech (not verified)

If you trust it, you can always apply it. ;)

Otherwise, there's probably a good reason it wasn't applied.

by Dmitriy Kropivn... (not verified)

Code name "No proxy support found" :)

by Erunno (not verified)

I agree, this issue is really a bad one as many campuses and workplaces require the usage of proxies.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Talking about that, can someone please give me a good proxy for use with telnet?

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

I think it's more a reference to the famous HTTP 404 error.

by Anon (not verified)

How did I miss that - :-s. Thanks. When the light came on it was blinding...

by Bráulio Barros ... (not verified)

I've published KDE 4.0.4 packages for ArchLinux on AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org) as binaries one with repositories for i686 and x86_64 at http://66.249.9.34/brauliobo/archlinux/kde4
Testing is welcome.

by Another Archer (not verified)

Thanks a lot brother !!

I 'll give your packages a try. Though I currently have SVN packages (3 days old...).

by metellius (not verified)

Seeing as there are no updated to plasma, does this mean that 4.0.4, just like 4.0.3 still doesnt save widgets on the desktop between sessions?
If this is the case, hasn't anyone considered backporting this fix from svn?

Personally, this is the simple bug that is keeping me from using the kde 4.0.x releases.

by sebas (not verified)

There are updates to Plasma, though I don't know if your bug has been corrected. It could well be that the bug is not in plasma, but somewhere else, so it's worth checking in any event.

In the changelog, there's a link to all changes in SVN, there are a couple of things changed in plasma, just have a look at the file for kdebase.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

Plasma does save widgets in between; the problem is that on your system it's evidently crashing on log out. To find the problem, try running command from a console in a session: kquitapp plasma. You can start Plasma up again quite easily with `plasma` so don't freak out when your desktop goes all white (or whatever). You should then see the crash; and you should also get a crash dialog that will let you get to the backtrace.

Most likely scenarios: you are using composite with the taskbar tooltips which is crashing somewhere in the X11 code; you have stale plasmoids sitting around somewhere and bringing your system down.

by Morty (not verified)

> Plasma does save widgets in between;

Then this is the actual problem, that Plasma only saves configuration changes between sessions. This sounds like the same flaw that Kicker had, any crashes could mess up your configuration. This is specially a problem on systems where the users stays logged in for long periodes of time, basicly a very common usage pattern on *nix systems.

And on modern computers with suspend to ram/disk logouts should not be necessary at all. And since the suspend features generally seem somewhat unrealible over the range of different hardware, this increases the problem by vanishing configurations, making it even worse.

Simply making Plasma/plasmoids save it's configuration when changed, rather than waiting for logout would remove the problems. By nature the configurations will be fairly static, and any changes will only happen at one item at the time making the resource usage small.

by Ian Monroe (not verified)

The correct place to fix this would be the KConfig backend, not plasma. Like a sqlite kconfig backend wouldn't have this issue, it's good at crash-recovery.

by Morty (not verified)

No, it does not seem like the problem is about crash-recovery. A crash on logout should never make configuration changes dissappear, since any changes should have been saved long before you log out. Plasma and plasmoids should behave like regular applications. Take Konqueror, it does not lose changes made to it's settings if it crashes before you exit.

If you save when configurations are changed instead of waiting for exit, any crashes on exit or before will not loose settings.

by John (not verified)

I realize that this comes a couple of months after the original post; however, hopefully someone may find it useful. Anyway, Plasma would crash every time I logged out, and none of my settings (widgets and widget settings) saved. I saw the crash handler, and selected debugging. In the trace, I saw that there was a crash in the Am3rok plasmoid. So, when I logged back in, I set up my widgets and settings with the exception of Am3rok (i.e., I did not add the Am3rok widget). When I logged out, plasma did not crash, and all of my settings did in fact save on log out (and restored when logging in).

So, if anyone else is having trouble with Plasma crashing on logout, try looking at the backtrace since it may perhaps be a specific widget that is causing Plasma to crash. I hope this helps.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Plasma crashes on logout and looses all configurations I made.
This is why I came back to good and old KDE3

by ad (not verified)

"loses"

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

I did now know dot.kde had a automatic spell checking system!!

Just kidding, thanks for the fix ;)

by Bobby (not verified)

Not only on logout. It crashes when one tries to close those widgets that aren't working for weeks now. All I get are black boxes instead of widgets on the desktop that crash plasma when one closes them. My KDE 4.1 desktop (4.0.71) is simple a mess. The recent alpha is even more fragile than the snapshots before :(

by Oscar (not verified)

The killer feature for me is suspend, which doesn't work on kubuntu. Can't say why it won't work, just that it won't. I'm stuck with 3.X until this is fixed. I don't want to restart my computer every time I need to move.

by Paul Eggleton (not verified)

This bothers me too, but FYI you can work around it by using KPowersave from KDE 3 when you want to suspend to RAM / Disk.

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Suspend has been fixed in 4.0.4, see the changelog. (Than Ngo fixed it, I committed his patch upstream.)

by Student (not verified)

Hello fellow kde-fans :-)

1: I have opensuse10.3, and I'm using the kde4:unstable. What version is that? 4.1.x? or 4.0.x?

2: Is it any EASY way possible for me to have 4.1 unstable? (one-click)

3: Why do they use 4.0.x when it's old? The "stable" version will be 4.1, and the changes will be very different. Is it only for the apps? I think they should have weekly releases of the 4.1.x tree..

by anon (not verified)

OPensuse are using 4.0 because 4.1 will not be released for at least a month after Opensuse 11 is released. So they are working on having 4.0 in 11, then when 4.1 is released people can upgrade to it.

Unstable with Opensuse is I think 4.1.

by binner (not verified)

1. A development snapshot of what will become KDE 4.1
2. Sure, http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/KDE4:/UNSTABLE:/Desktop/o...
3. It's the latest stable release? And we do have weekly updated packages of trunk (maybe are only more [often] broken than the 4.0.x packages :-)

by Student (not verified)

ok. Cool.
No I only need to fix the dependencies error, but I'm happy with updates a few times a week.

Thanks for the answer, and thanks to the Opensuse KDE4-people :-)