The KDE Team today announced the release of KDE 2.1-beta1. KDE 2.1 constitutes the second major release of the KDE 2 series.
The full announcement is available here.
KDE 2.1-beta1 offers a number of additions, enhancements and fixes over KDE 2.0.1, the last stable KDE release which shipped on December 5, 2000. The major additions are:
- A new and much-anticipated theme manager has been added, and many icons have been improved. In addition, semi-transparency (alpha-blending) has been implemented on small images and icons.
- Pixie, an image viewer/editor, has been added to the Graphics package.
- KDevelop, a C/C++ integrated development environment, has been added to the core KDE distribution. The version being shipped, 1.4beta, is the first version of KDevelop to make use of the KDE 2 libraries and integrate completely with the KDE 2 desktop.
- Konqueror, the KDE 2 file manager, can now be configured to provide thumbnail previews for text and HTML files. In addition, the standards-compliant Konqueror now stores bookmarks using the standard XBEL bookmark format; a new bookmark editor complements the new standard. Finally, auto-proxy configuration has been implemented.
- KHTML, the HTML widget, now has a special 'transitional mode' which greatly improves its handling of malformed HTML pages. In additon, KHTML now has greatly improved Java support and has added support for Java security (JDK 1.2 or compatible is now required).
- The panel (Kicker) has enjoyed significant improvements. An external taskbar has been included (familiar to KDE 1 users), support for sub-panels has been added (which can be separately sized and positioned), an improved external pager (Kasbar) has been added, and support for applets has been improved (including support for WindowMaker dock applets).
- ARts, the KDE 2 multimedia architecture, now offers a control module to configure sampling rate and output devices, increased performance, improved user interfaces and a number of additional effects and filters.
- For developers, a number of classes have been added to the core libraries, including a class for undo/redo support (KCommand) and a class for editing list boxes (KEditListBox).
