KDE 4.0-alpha1 Released: "Knut"

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first alpha release of the
KDE Desktop Environment, version 4.0. This release is a basis for the integration of powerful new
technologies that will be included in KDE 4. Read on for more details.

Highlights of KDE 4.0 Alpha 1 are:

  • A new visual appearance through Oxygen
  • New frameworks to build applications with, providing vastly improved
    hardware and multimedia integration (through Solid and Phonon), spelling and grammar checking, to name just a few
  • New applications that focus on a smooth user experience, such as Dolphin, the file manager, and Okular, the document viewer

KDE 4.0 Alpha 1 marks the end of the addition of large features to the KDE base libraries and shifts the focus onto integrating these new technologies into applications and the base desktop. The
next few months will be spent on bringing the desktop into shape after two years of frenzied development leaving very little untouched.

The final release of KDE 4.0 is expected in late October 2007.

The work on the framework makes application development easier and more satisfying. This will result in a crop of new features and applications over the next few years, underlining the position KDE holds as the leading Free Desktop and bringing Free Software to new users worldwide. A detailed release schedule can be found at techbase.kde.org, the new technical resource accompanying the platform, that provides extensive and high-quality documentation about KDE.

More information such as screenshots and installation instructions can be found in the KDE 4.0-alpha1 Visual Guide.

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Comments

by joesomeone (not verified)

i still can't get x to start in minix, oops, wrong thread

by 06labs (not verified)

thanks for all!!!

Kunt ? ;-)

Eew ;-) By the way, the german word for bear (bär) is often used as a synonym to the word in question...

bah....you stole my joke :(

by Luizg (not verified)

Any timeframe on a windows build?

by Christian Ehrlicher (not verified)

No, there are not plans to release a binary for this alpha. A lot of other work has to be done before...

by Andreas (not verified)

For English speakers, it's pronounced "cnoot" with a short "oo".

by Andreas (not verified)

Erm, sorry. The "oo" is not short, it's just not long like the usual "oo".

by Torsten Rahn (not verified)

Yes, it's somewhere in between "Linoox" and "cnoot" ;-)

by Carewolf (not verified)

Give up. It is supposed to be pronounced the same way a kn in knight was originally, so let it suffer the fate..

Go 'nut!

by Morty (not verified)

Had a American teacher some years ago, she pronounced it "Key nut". But she was from California and she was not very bright either, so that may explain it.

by Jakob Petsovits (not verified)

Reminds me of a folk-pop band called "I am Knoot".
Ah wait, not quite ;)

by zero1 (not verified)

WTF blazes.. .?! they took out konqueror? my beloved konqui?! WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.................!!!!!!!!!!!

give her back!give her back!give her back!give her back!give her back!

dolphin is like nautilus. i just hate it.. .

by Kevin Kofler (not verified)

Calm down, Konqueror is still in kdebase and AFAIK there are no plans to remove it from there. It's still the KDE web browser and it still supports file management too, it's just not the default file manager anymore.

by Sutoka (not verified)

Try dolphin more before you claim you hate it, or that its like nautilus.

Also we already had this same exact discussion on the Dot for the last quite a while.

by Kåre Särs (not verified)

It sprinkles .dolphin files everywhere (fixable) and the 'new' (Vista ripoff) location bar is not an improvement. Why must the user learn two location bars? One for web and one for local browsing.

by Jucato (not verified)

You don't have to. The traditional location bar still exists in Dolphin and can be set as the default if you don't want the breadcrumb toolbar.

Also, I don't think it's quite fair to say that it's a Vista ripoff. The breadcrumb toolbar has existed for quite sometime now, on GNOME, on OS X (Pathfinder, I think), and on websites. They just differ in their implementations.

by Jucato (not verified)

Hehe! Like what everyone else said, Konqueror is still the default web browser for KDE 4.

Oh, btw, Konqi is a guy. His girlfriend is Katie (Wonder why they didn't name her Kate, for the text editor...)

c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konqi

by Florian (not verified)

Hello,
the build script gives an error here:

Updating kdesupport
svn: Unrecognized URL scheme for 'https://svn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/KDE/3.5/kde-common/admin'
Update failed, trying a cleanup.
Executing svn cleanup
Cleanup complete.
svn: Unrecognized URL scheme for 'https://svn.kde.org/home/kde/branches/KDE/3.5/kde-common/admin'
Error updating kdesupport, removing from list of packages to build.

What's wrong?

Thanks,

Florian

by Thiago Macieira (not verified)

Your svn doesn't have https support. Rebuild it.

by Florian (not verified)

Mhh.. I'm using Gentoo and it seems that it doesn't offer an ssl use flag for subversion:

[ebuild R ] dev-util/subversion-1.3.2-r3 USE="berkdb nls nowebdav python zlib -apache2 -bash-completion -emacs -java -perl -ruby" 0 kB

Any suggestions?

Florian

by Seth W. Klein (not verified)

USE=-nowebdav emerge -va subversion

by rittmey (not verified)

In early discussions about KDE4 there was a lot of talk about Plasma. It is even still linked from within the oxygen site. But reading this announcement it is no more mentioned. Has it been merged into s.th. else? Has it completely vanished? Has it been postponed? What's up with Plasma? Since I am only an average KDE user, I admittedly visit dot.kde.org only every once in a while - so please excuse me, if I missed some discussions about Plasma.

Anyway: Looking at http://plasma.kde.org/ and following the link "Plasma APIs" the page states: "The APIs for working with and improving Plasma will appear here as they become available. They will undoubtedly be available sooner than that in KDE's subversion code repository where you are welcome to track Plasma development as it happens." Doesn't sound too good to me.

by Luca Beltrame (not verified)

Plasma is being worked on. I suggest you look up the past discussions on the dot (recent commit digests).

by reihal (not verified)

So it's not on schedule. Big deal.

by Grósz Dániel (not verified)

Follow the link at the end of the article:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/visualguide-4.0-alpha1.php

by hag (not verified)

what is the difference between new alt-f2 run and katapult? wasn't katapult to take over the place of that function?

by Lans (not verified)

No. AFAIK they will share "runners", for example for Bookmarks, Application etc.

by Jucato (not verified)

c.f. http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2007/03/in-other-monday-news.html

They will be hopefully sharing backends (called runners in KRunner and catalogs in Katapult) in KDE 4.

The two currently have very big differences:
Katapult is in extragear and KRunner is in kdebase, which makes the latter an essential part of KDE (the replacement for the Run Command dialog box).
Katapult is basically a launcher, with some catalogs for calculation and spell checking. I believe KRunner is going to be more than that.
Krunner can display multiple hits. Katapult currently can't.

We'll hopefully see more development and clarifications in the future. Keeping my fingers crossed.

by Odysseus (not verified)

That reminds me, I must complain to my painter that he hasn't finished painting the walls on my new house yet. I know the builders have only just finished putting up the framing and are only now starting to put on the wallboard, but that's no excuse for the painter to only be talking about the top coat instead of already having it done, it just doesn't sound good to me...

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

Very good metaphor!

Unfortunately this is a general problem in the software industry. Customers assume that because software isn't built with "real" matter, engineers would be free to choose an arbitrary building order.

by Selene (not verified)

Hi, I was wondering if there is any work done on better support for Beryl. I'm thinking about such things as:

* being able to handle viewports (aka side of a cube) just like virtual desktops, which means:
* taskbar that has the option to only show windows from current viewport
* pager that can handle it (but this has already improved in KDE3)
* more exotic things like different wallpapers on each viewport and give them different names that show in the pager, like you can for virtual desktops now

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

Hi
search for kwin_composite.Kwin4 is supporting Compositing extensions.there are a few videos in youtube.
You will not need Beryl in KDE4.

by Selene (not verified)

Oh yes, I could have known that :-) I didn't make that link with kwin_composite since it didn't have the "cube"... Glad to see the great work going on there in any case.

But the questions could be asked again, but this time for kwin_composite then :-) As it's still the taskbar and kdesktop that needs to support the viewports.

by reihal (not verified)

Strange, I have missed this. Have it been presented here on the dot?

by Selene (not verified)

It was on planetkde.org IIRC

by Morty (not verified)

It has been mentioned in discussions a few times, and perhaps a line or two in some article. But newer as a big part of any article.

One reason being that is has been developed in a branch, but now it has moved to trunk. But I guess we will see a "Road to KDE 4" article about it at some point now, since Troy only covers the stuff in trunk.

by reihal (not verified)

This seems to be the source for info on Kwin composite:

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/280

by reihal (not verified)

He, that did the trick, there's more than a 1000 guests there now.

The Grid rules the Cube!

by Vide (not verified)

I've just to say.... wow!

I was very pessimistic reading that there's lack of manpower in kdepim, that there will be problem etc. So when I launched KMail in Alpha1 I was expeting to find a bunch of horrible semi-ported widgets and little more but...
- there is (finally) a first time wizard that guide you through the creation of a mail account.
- improved toolbars (especially while composing), that with the power of QT4 really rock (I *love* the effect you have when clicking on >> to show the toolbar's element not shown, simply amazing, the best implementation of this function ever seen)
- options panel: again WOW! Finally HIG is used and respected! There are still lot of options but they are organized way way better than KDE3.x

So, maybe we'll have to wait 4.1 to have full Akonadi support, but I'm quite happy anyway.

Great work!!

by Iñaki Baz (not verified)

Yes, but you won't still send encrypted mails if you have not a key (that is necesary just to sign in mails). See this bug of Kmail of 2004-11-17:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=93436

by Allen (not verified)

It's nice to hear some positive feedback. For a change.

Encouragement, patches, "how can I help" messages are so much more effective than bug nags and bitches.

by Vide (not verified)

Yeah I know there is a lot of "bad karma" around Kmail in bko, but I think you're doing a great job. Sure, Kmail it's not perfect but the work you, the kdepim guys, had put in it it's worth a big THANKS from your users.

by Dan Leinir Turt... (not verified)

i am a firm believer that the reason you don't hear much in the way of positive feedback is that it works as well as it does... There's no need for hype around KMail, because for the vast majority it simply works... Great job :)

by mutlu (not verified)

I also would like to thank for all the work done on KMail. I simply love this email client. So many powerful features! And Vide is right, it is coming along much better that it seemed from a relative lack of documentation of the ongoing work on the dot and the planet. Thanks for all your work! There are so many of us who appreciate it. :)

by superstoned (not verified)

true, it's a pity there aren't that many ppl working on it, but it still is a very good app - which speaks about it's quallity...