KDE 4.2 Beta1 Out for Testing

Today, the KDE team invites interested testers and reviewers to give KDE 4.2.0-Beta1 a go. The release announcement lists some significant improvements. The purpose of this release is to get feedback from the community, preferably in the form of bugreports on the new bugs.kde.org bugtracker.
Beta1 offers critical features like the Eyes applet (an XEyes clone), but also a more streamlined user experience all over the workspace and applications.
With the KDE team being in bug fixing frenzy after the recent hard feature freeze, now is the time to help us smoothing the release for your pleasure starting in January.

So install KDE 4.2-Beta1 and help us make it rock.

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Comments

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

and writting in the wiki if it changes something. So people with the new driver will know about the new tweaks :-)

by Fredde (not verified)

Well, it still happens, whatever used, as i use the beta at this time, no tweaks are used as those are on by default. Everything else flies, but as soon as shadows are enabled it's really noticeable when moving windows around.

by Antonio (not verified)

4.0.x was a good start.
4.1 has proved to be a very stable release.
I've been using 4.2 for some weeks and it's starting to get better and better.

So...
Congrats to all developers. You're doing a very good joob release after release.

Keep up your great work!

by Pedro M. S. Oliveira (not verified)

Yep you are right i'm also using suse 11 factory with 4.2b and i love it. there are a few issues but they are manageable. thanks kde team!

by klebezettel (not verified)

I've _never_ seen such a nice panel! I mean it. The colors and gradients are decent and pleasant. It's absolutely clear which window is active, the small numbers indicating the window-count are beautiful, too. I think KDE4 will be my first KDE that I will not customize concerning the appearance. Thank you for this.

Dont' forget:

All this polishing, all these small details are really important.
All this polishing, all these small details are really important.
All this polishing, all these small details are really important.

Keep up the good work :)

Two litte things:
1. IMHO the border of the panel is just a little bit to thick
2. The second icon from the left, the one for the device list: What's pictured there? I see a display, displaying the usb logo. And behind? Hmm, asking this question maybe points out, that maybe there is a better logo for this.

Thank you, KDE.

by pinheiro (not verified)

thanks, thanks, thanks, and yeah my bad :) its dosent realy work that icon I need to do somthing else for device notification :)

by Larx (not verified)

Yeah, the device notification icon is somewhat strange ;).

by Yilmaz (not verified)

No don't change it. I think it looks great :)

by Leonidas (not verified)

Hmmm not sure if that helps but I would suggest a generic (if such metaphor exists) external device with an green arrow (about 1/4 the size). If you can't find such a generic device then use the most common removable media which would be usb flash drive of an external HD.

Thanks for everything guys. You make using my computer beautiful!

by Ahmad Yasser (not verified)

Great release as always :) Loving the changes so far.
There's just one thing I'm wondering about: How far is the work on the NetworkManager plasmoid going? Is one of the goals for the 4.2 release having that plasmoid or not?
And can we expect to see it next beta or sometime soon? :)

Thanks!

by Zayed (not verified)

NetworkManger plasmoid can not make it in kde4.2. But do not worry, most distributions will provide it.

by els (not verified)

i read that opensuse 11.1 will ship it....

by James Spencer (not verified)

Anybody else notice that those screen shots don't have the cashew? Is that 'for true'? If so Merry Christmas... (Yes, I know there'll be a containment selector. Actually shipping a containment without the cashew would make a fair number of people happy.)

by Zayed (not verified)

Plasma is about choices ! In kde 4.2 you can disable it and also you can move it!

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

it's a distributon customization.

not giving people guaranteed access to things like the appearance settings (which lets you switch containments among other things) is a little crazy. (remember that a containment may decide to provide a useless, or even no, context menu!).

but as the other person said, plasma is about choice. you can choose to be as crazy as you wanna be.

by Karl Günter Wünsch (not verified)

> not giving people guaranteed access to things like the appearance settings
Which should not be the case as there should be a central place where all the settings are accessible: The settings program!
I still can't get this to work (plasma crashes endlessly although I recompiled everything from scratch), so I don't know if the appearance setting is where it belongs, but if it isn't...
And if you need a reason why people are disabling the cashew (which will be my first action if I ever get plasma to work at all): I use my computer for image editing, unfortunately the new wide colour gamut monitor I now have has garisch colours if you show things in sRGB (it's tuned to AdobeRGB in which it delivers 98% of the defined colour space), so anything on the desktop that is not colour managed to the AdobeRGB colourspace is an eyesore and might even trick the dynamic contrast engine of the monitor to kick in and modify one area of the backlight into behaving differently and messing with the appearance of things in that area!

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

this sounds more like a qt problem than a cashew problem...

by Karl Günter Wünsch (not verified)

So, I now have plasma only crashing every 10-15 minutes. Unfortunately the settings don't survive logging out and in again - some reset to their defaults... What is gone though (lo and behold) ist the abomination that is called the cashew. It was there at the beginning but somehow didn't survive the first switch to different settings and hasn't resurrected itself like those other settings did.
The screen settings are there in three disjunct and functionally incomplete (each one of them has differnt omissions against the others) configuration screens. One can be reached through the context menu (no cashew neede here), the other two are buried under similar headings in the system settings program. I'll file a bug report to join those three because things like this not only annoy me, they are inconsistencies which I hoped would not find their way into a new KDE...

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

If plasma crashes so often for your, and you don't run beta or alpha plasmoids from the playground, you really need to thoroughly check your hardware. If you're using Gentoo, you need to check the compile flags you are using. The problems you mention are not common at all: I see people using KDE4 at work, I use it at home (opensuse factory packages no less) and my wife uses it, on all kinds of hardware and I never see a crash in plasma.

by Cyril (not verified)

So for me on two very different machines. I think I didn't have any plasma crashes since the update to 4.1, although my OpenSuse has many backports (autohiding rocks!) from svn.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

>Which should not be the case as there should be a central place where all the settings are accessible:

Also you can just right click the desktop!
I do not know why Aaron is so in love with that thing, maybe to expose the Plasma icons to users?

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

> Also you can just right click the desktop!

unless you're using some other custom Activity type .. you know .. like a folderview.

> I do not know why Aaron is so in love with that thing,

i've explained it, including to you, a few times. you may not understand or agree with my reasons, but i've shared them.

> maybe to expose the Plasma icons to users?

and that isn't it. c'mon, Iuri, why do you have to be like that?

by Clifford (not verified)

I know there has been loads of work done to plasma. I'm using KDE 4.1.3 right now. But as a user I see no need for the cashew. After I have all the widgets set where I want them then I have no need for it to be in the corner there. At the very least give us an option to move it or remove it. I've read that plasma is about choice...except with the cashew.

its kind of like a pimple that can't be popped. //no offense to the devs. I'm just personally not into it.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

> Which should not be the case as there should be a central place where all the
> settings are accessible

so Add Widgets should be in the settings program? not even kicker did that. why? because it doesn't actually make sense.

> which will be my first action if I ever get plasma to work at all

reading the comments, it looks like you have a very messed up installation. =/

> that is not colour managed to the AdobeRGB colourspace is an eyesore

can you provide a screenshot of this so i can see the problem?

by Karl Günter Wünsch (not verified)

> reading the comments, it looks like you have a very messed up installation. =/
I don't think so, I do a fresh install from source every 2-3 days now and update to current every day... Since I removed the desktop view I have far fewer crashes. There still are some when I try to log out or access settings in plasma - but the latter I have stopped trying since I have finally managed to get the desktop to be as empty as possible - i.e. completely empty by pointing the folderview to an empty folder. The cashew has gone (it was getting visible at times when the panel did it's autohide).
The argument that the context menu of the folderview doesn't allow access to the appearance settings is moot, it does...
Oh and someone should do something about the splash screen background, it is awful in terms of posterisation of the colour gradients...

by Morty (not verified)

A fresh install from source does not necessary not help if you have messed up install, like something wrong with the building blocks you base your KDE install on. Or even how you do your build, repeating the error each 2-3 days will not fix the problem.

If it's common, the amount of problems you describe, it's very unlikely Aaron and the other Plasma developers would not have seen it them selves or at least had a large quantity of reports saying the same thing. As this seem not to be the case, it leaves your installation as the most likely suspect.

by dkite (not verified)

I'm using builds from svn.

Akonadi migration worked flawlessly on two user accounts. I can now easily and reliably use gmail from kmail. Nice.

Panel has resizing in all directions, placing widgets where you want, hiding. Works like we all want it to. Still has a cashew.

The desktop cashew is gone. Noticed it last week or so. I'm waiting patiently for the ability to put non plasma windows into activities. Then it will be very useful. Now, just potential.

Notifications are nice, unobtrusive and where they should be. Well done.

The menu window and other plasma stuff seems to do double redraws. And the first time you use the menu, it pops up a window with noise, then draws.

I use dragon player for watching dvd's and avi's. The sound works periodically. This was a problem, then it seemed to be fixed, but is back again the last week or so. DVD's work all the time. avi's are where the problem shows up. I can fix it by running mplayer from the command line, quitting then opening dragon player again, and it works.

All in all, very nice. The whole thing seems to be hitting the sweet spot where all the new ideas work, and you can hear the gears grinding out neat ideas based on the new infrastructure.

Derek

by cirehawk (not verified)

A couple questions/comments.

1) Where can I find some good information on how Akonadi is supposed to work, what apps it depends on, and how to configure it. After the last update, when I start my desktop, what seems to be the akonadi migration tool tries to start. However, I get a lot of errors. I didn't want to post the errors here, but I could if necessary.

2) Regarding notifications, a ton of them seem to pop up when I log into my desktop. Many times I don't close konqueror when I log out, so a lot of the notifications seem to be related to web pages being transferred. Is this normal? How can I turn those off?

by Steve (not verified)

Hi,

Akonadi is a desktop-agnostic cache for Personal information data. For most users akonadi is invisible, but it allows developers to write less code to integrate personal data into your user experience. The personal data I refer to is your emails, contacts, appointments and notes. You might have contacts stored in several resources, such as several vcard files, some kind of groupware server, and your gmail account. If you want 'All my contacts' for example in a plasmoid, in kmail, or in kopete, previously the developer of each application would have to write code to support each resource. Now, because Akonadi knows how to access each of those resources, all contacts simply and easily available to applications which support Akonadi.

http://pim.kde.org/akonadi/

Please send the migration errors to [email protected].

Cheers,

Steve.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

> The desktop cashew is gone.

that would be a distribution customization.

by Will Stephenson (not verified)

"I'm using builds from svn".

Maybe someone ate it. I love cashews, especially roasted with salt, sugar and a drop of lime juice.

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

perhaps the bug that was fixed now that placed the cashew at strange places. So perhaps the cashew is still here, but not where it should be

by dkite (not verified)

or more likely a flakey configuration. Occupational hazard when using svn builds.

Deleted the plasma config files, and it's back.

Derek

by Vide (not verified)

"The menu window and other plasma stuff seems to do double redraws. And the first time you use the menu, it pops up a window with noise, then draws."

Yes this is the most irritating thing... maybe it's a QT problem, maybe a driver/xorg/qt combination problem, but definitely shouldn't happen.

by John Doe (not verified)

Yes, this is a really ugly regression since 4.1, that doesn't have this problem. Hope this will be fixed for 4.2 final

by Cedric (not verified)

Same bug in kubuntu with default nvidia drivers....

No bug with beta 180 drivers ;) So it's a nvidia bug.

by John Doe (not verified)

It is not an nvidia bug, since I'm on intel hardware and with the same hardware/driver i don't get this behaviour in 4.0/4.1

by Dread Knight (not verified)

Erm, seems openSuse did it again....

eagerly awaiting my Kubuntu binaries.... wondering which distro will be releasing packages up next.. :D

by Anon_Coward (not verified)

Will the device notification plasmoid be placed into the system tray in KDE 4.3? I understand that putting plasmoids into the tray in 4.2 is a little funky right now.

With that said, KDE 4.2 looks amazing!

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

"Will the device notification plasmoid be placed into the system tray in KDE 4.3?"

we haven't decided on that yet. we have a round of "defining the system tray and its uses, circa 2009" to do for 4.3 before we can answer that question.

by Bobby (not verified)

There is one little thing that I am personally missing Aaron and that's a little programme that asks me which application should be used to open an inserted disk. Yes I am referring to that nice little application in KDE 3.5x that pops up when I insert a particular disk for the first time and gives me the possibility to choose. I think that it even works with digital cameras. BTW, will Digikam be ready for 4.2 (I am too lazy to check the Feature Plan)?

The device notification is fine but it's only allows me to open devices in Dolphin and it dosn't respond to digital cameras.

by Bobby (not verified)

Sorry about Digikam, it wasn't installed with the desktop but I found it in the repo. I was using the KDE 3 version all the time.

by Jakob Petsovits (not verified)

Digikam is not in the core KDE packages (which are shipped with this release) but in extragear, so it certainly won't be found in the feature list - regardless of whether it's ready in time or not :P

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

yes, we will be providing a customization UI for that at some point.

and currently, if there is more than one action installed you get to pick between them.

by Janne (not verified)

"we haven't decided on that yet. we have a round of "defining the system tray and its uses, circa 2009" to do for 4.3 before we can answer that question."

Instead of that, how about "should we kill the systray, yes or hell yes?" instead ;)?

I think that systray could be easily replaced by notifications and plasmoids. For example, software-updates. Instead of having an icon in the systray that tells me about updates to my distro, how about using the KDE's built-in notification-system instead? That's just one example.

There are "legacy apps" out there that use systray, and some functionality could be provided to them, but KDE4-apps could use new and better things, as opposed to using the systray as a landfill of semi-useless icons.

by Vide (not verified)

1000000% agree.
And if someone states "hey but the play/stop/etc" functionalities of Amarok's tray icon are a must then you have two options:
- Amarok shipping and installing a control plasmoid
- Implement the systray right click features in the amarok window context menu (yes, this sounds like osx, and indeed it is)
- provide a legacy systray for other not-controlled environments (gnome, windows)

by Draconiak (not verified)

I like it, the sound icon remains me the "windows 95", why not replace it with a real volume bar plasmoid (like kde 3 a sound applet with 2 channels , pcm and wave) more beauty and useful. yes i will tried to do it myself , but i don`t grantee successful. tnks for this beautiful release, kudos developers

by James Smith (not verified)

Actually, eliminating the systray would be a huge improvement. Simply because if this tray were eliminated one could also replace the taskbar with interactive plasma icons with scrollwheel support for a mixer interface or application window switching grouped by application. Normal taskbar menus could be 'emulate 3 buttons' or mousewheel-click hidden. Kmail icon could be overlaid by an unread-messages count, and Xsytray(tasktray?) could be piped through KDE notifications with a notification history for KDE notifications in a kickoff tab.