KDE 4.1 Beta 1 Released

The KDE Project is happy to set the first beta of KDE 4.1, codenamed Caramel, free today. KDE 4.1 is intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users and we therefore respectfully request you to get testing Beta 1. Beta 1 is not ready for production use but is in wide use by KDE developers and is suitable for testing by Linux enthusiasts and KDE fans.

Highlights of 4.1 are a much more mature Plasma desktop shell that returns much of the configurability that was missing in KDE 4.0, many more applets and look and feel improvements, the return of Kontact and the rest of the KDE PIM applications, and many improvements and newly ported applications. The feature set is now frozen, so the developers look forward to using June and July to metamorphosing your bug reports into rock solid code, completing documentation and translating everything into your language. A series of Bug Days where users can contribute quality assurance to the release will continue towards 4.1's final release on the 29th of July, so watch the Dot for details.

For more details, see the release announcement and info page or if you are at LinuxTag, see KDE 4.1 being presented in Berlin this Friday.

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Comments

Now user has to be determine character encoding by oneself when opening a external txt file.If he wants to change encoding after erroneous judgement,he must reopen it,and re-determine the file encoding in drop listbox until everything is OK.

IMHO,it's less convenience than before.More dialog,more click,more waiting.

You can add "encoding" to the toolbar - thats the fastest way to change it anyway...

But you're right - i don't understand it either why it was removed.

Changing the encoding after opening a file used to reload said file anyway. What I rather like to see is KWrite not corrupting text files with wrong encoding applied. Autodetection of encoding would also be nice to have (isn't a framework doing that was being worked on, also for use in conjunction with the new spell checking framework?).

I would love auto-detection of encoding.
Ubuntu, for example, uses by default utf-8, but the last time I've upgraded it I forgot to change to iso 8859-1. So, now some files are utf-8 and some 8859-1, I have to often change the encoding in kate when opening a file :-(

by Unga (not verified)

KDE 4.1 Beta packages are available for even MS Windows and Mac OSX!, for those who do not need KDE. Where are the packages for FreeBSD, the ones who really need it?

Does this mean KDE developers do not use FreeBSD or any other BSD?

Or maybe KDE developers only create OS-specific packages, rather than distribution-specific packages?

by samwyse (not verified)

I think this is a QT4 thing, but is the long delay in displaying submenus going to be fixed? It makes using apps seem heavy compared to KDE3 where submenus are displayed nearly instantly.

by christoph (not verified)

This is a Qt bug, yes. What is worse isn't the delay per se, but the fact that you have to really STOP moving the pointer for the configured amount of time to make the submenu appear. This is annoying if you use a pen, because it is artistic to hold it still. The odd is that this bug is there since Qt 4.0.0, but nobody seems to care.

by markc (not verified)

It may be of interest to some users to know that ArchLinux has had daily binary packages from SVN available every day for the last 2 months and will continue to do so for at least the rest of this year, and maybe always. Even if you don't primarily run ArchLinux it is easy to install into a separate 5Gb to 10Gb partition and dual boot, or run in a VM. More details here...

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=44507&action=new

by KejPi (not verified)

I am periodically testing KDE4 SVN under Gentoo. I have never seen flash working in Konqueror so far :-( Some users told me that it is working but all of them are using nspluginwrapper. I have 32bit system so I don't have it and flash is not working.

Next is session management. In KDE3.5 I want some application to be started automatically (e.g. kopete, kmail). I'm using "restore session saved by user" (or how is it called in english) option in KDE3.5. This option is also present in KDE4, but I haven't found how to save the session. What is working fine is "restore previous session" option. What it the trick there?

I have read somewhere that tasklist in panel should support more then one row of applications. It should decide when to use more then 1 row and when not. I opened about 15 windows and still I had just one row of very small application "buttons". They are in fact bigger in height then in width and it was not nice. Is there any option to enable more rows?

And the last point is that Phonon doesn't see my sound card in list of devices. I can se there just "arts" and sound is not working. My sound cars is SB Live 1024, quite old but well supported by ALSA.

But nevertheless KDE4 is a huge step forward and I hope that in the end it will be better than 3.5.X.

...How do I move widgets inside the panel? I tried the 4.1-beta LiveCD, and couldn't figure this one out.

Suppose that I want to move the taskbar or the clock around to a new location in the taskbar, how do I do it? Dragging didn't work. IS this merely a bug, or am I missing something?

Good question. The ability to move widgets in the panel was in 4.0.4 (at least, and earlier ones I think) but I can't find it at all in the 4.1 beta

by Anonymous Coward (not verified)

Does anyone know if Plasma supports plasmoids written in HTML and JavaScript yet? From what I've read, this is a feature scheduled for 4.1, but I can't find any documentation on Techbase nor any examples in SVN. :(

by Yves (not verified)

Hello,

is it now possible to use Dashboard Widgets on Plasma?

If yes, is there an example on how to download and install them?

by Yves (not verified)

Will it be included in KDE 4.1?

It's the last piece of KDE which I currently need

by Yves (not verified)

s/KDE/KDE3

by Umesh Sirsiwal (not verified)

I tried using KDE 4.1 for one day at my work. I have summarized my impressions at http://kashi.webhop.net/blog/Technology/index.php/archives/29