KDE 3.0RC3: Prepare to Fall in Love

The KDE Project has announced the release
of KDE 3.0RC3 (on this, the first day of Spring). The release comes a month after the release of KDE 3.0beta2, with
two (semi-public) release candidates, as well as a well-attended 1-week hacking session for fixing problems, appearing in the interim. KDE 3.0rc3 can be downloaded through KDE's load-balancing system (source code, RedHat packages (only partially uploaded at this time), and SuSE packages). Additional packages should become available in the coming days, both on KDE's and some distributions' servers. Other than for show-stopper fixes, this release candidate will be released
early next month as KDE 3.0. Personal impression: love at first sight,
it simply rocks!

As much as I hate to admit it, with my
busy schedule I have not been able to keep up the KDE 3 releases. But yesterday morning I installed KDE 3.0rc3 and, to be honest, it is truly magnificent!
Konqueror is fast, fast, fast!
Never seen anything like it (except maybe Lynx) in
the main browsers - even
long pages in my Most Often Visited list all but instantly popped into
place.

The rest of KDE 3 is simply spectacular, too. Everything is snappier,
from menus (despite the addition of cool menu icons) and dialogs (these pop up much faster) to applications, and the look is even more professional than KDE 2. Wowwww, I am in total awe. Superb, excellent, amazing job, guys, KDE 3 absolutely rules!

Due to the imminence of the 3.0 release, for this release candidate only, please post crashes and grave bug reports directly to [email protected] rather than using the conventional bug reporting system. Let's see who of you can make KDE 3.0 even better by finding any elusive shot-stopper bugs before the end of the week!

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Comments

by Ingo Klöcker (not verified)

Please note that the KMail icon has again been reverted to the old one. The new icon will be part of Everaldo's crystal icon theme.

by benno (not verified)

I hate it, too. And why these bubbles around the arrow icons of konqueror?
This looks quite ugly with some themes (like e.g. liquid)...

by JC (not verified)

I found those pretty cool. But if you don't like the standards icons, you can use the Slick-icons or Ikons. They are both included in KDE3.0

There are also some cool new backgrounds

by Wolf Blitzer (not verified)

What gets me is that although this new version is in release candidate mode, SuSE has jumped the gun and is now selling version 8.0 with whatever snapshot build of KDE3.0 it has its hands on. Doesn't that seem a bit premature?

by Janne (not verified)

"What gets me is that although this new version is in release candidate mode, SuSE has jumped the gun and is now selling version 8.0 with whatever snapshot build of KDE3.0 it has its hands on. Doesn't that seem a bit premature?"

Ummmm, no. SuSE ANNOUNCED that SuSE 8.0 with KDE 3 will be available in april (I forgot the exact date). By that time KDE has already been released. SuSE is NOT selling 8.0 yet!

by Harald Henkel (not verified)

Who says, they're selling it NOW ?

Go, look at their homepage. They're goin' to sell it about mid April.
Anyway, fairly fast ;-)

Regards,
Harald

by Anonymous (not verified)

They sell NOW, but deliver LATER (mid-April).

by Waldo Bastian (not verified)

SuSE Linux 8.0 will contain the final KDE 3.0 as it will be released by KDE later this month. You can order SL8.0 online at http://www.suse.com now and you will be one of the first to get your hands on this shiny new desktop.

Be carefull though, those CDs might still be hot :-)

Cheers,
Waldo

by Syllten (not verified)

No, they will deliver it on April 22nd. Plenty of time to mkae sure it's correct.

by Syllten (not verified)

No, they will deliver it on April 22nd. Plenty of time to mkae sure it's correct.

by Craig Nelson (not verified)

I really liked beta2 so I was a bit disappointed with how thr RC3 turned out; all of the packages are not to be found in the relevant directory, and to my impression it is much slower and less responsive - crashing through lack of memory when using other apps. Given others' positive response I wonder if this is specific to the SuSE RPM's. (Using SuSE 7.3, 64 MB+550mhz)

by yves (not verified)

I actually experienced the same with suse 7.2 rpms.

- It seems slower than my last compiled rc2.
- I cannot get AA work and somehow Verdana 10 looks much smaller and uglier
than before... (worked fine with rc2)
- They missed kdenetworks and kdeaddons (this is however a SuSE and no kde
problem)
- Still many crashes... (especially kicker)
- konq scrolls sluggish when a site has a large or a repeating
background image ( e.g. http://phpbuilder.com )

by Eric Laffoon (not verified)

> I wonder if this is specific to the SuSE RPM's. (Using SuSE 7.3, 64 MB+550mhz)

It might be the rpms. Another factor is RAM. As far as I remember KDE 3 is supposed to be better at conserving resources than KDE 2. One of my systems does not recognize more than 64 MB or RAM even though it has 256 MB and a 700 MHz athlon. I was adding the modification command at boot to get it to see all the memory and I went to use it and found it was running slower than a 500 MHz AMD K6 with 128 MB of RAM. (My wife had decided to reboot it) In simple terms RAM is about 1,000 faster than your hard disk so moving to 128 MB or more will really speed your system up no matter what! For a few dollars you could feel like you have a new system.

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

What font are they using in those screenshots? My AA never comes out look that sharp!

by Jaana (not verified)

>What font are they using in those screenshots? My AA never comes out look that sharp!

I think it's fresh version of freetype2 (+bytecode support). No other magic.
(Some distributions have many version of libfreetype and even you install newer libfreetype there could be an older one which came with XFree 4.x).

by Rayiner Hashem (not verified)

Actually, I recompiled FT2 with the bytecode interpreter long ago. Still doesn't look that sharp. It must be the fonts.

by Christian (not verified)

Sincerly, do you find those fonts pretty ?

No doubt, I hate AA, even on their screenshots.
Will always disable it, it reminds me too much
fuzzy PDFs in Acrobat...

by Craig (not verified)

I've managed now to resolve most of the problems by reinstalling the rpms....

An enduring problem is using mozilla with rc3 (works well on other desktops); konqueror is fine but with mozilla it crashes the desktop.

by Jos (not verified)

Very strange!

I'm overwhelmed, really. I'm also using SuSE 7.3, but on a 400 MHz with 198 Mb. It's awesome here, much faster than KDE2. No complaint at all. And I love the edutainment packages, especially ktouch.

by Robert Penz (not verified)

i installed the suse7.2 packages. where can I get that lib, I want my kmail!!! ;-(

robert@notebook:~ > kmail
kmail: error while loading shared libraries: libkab.so.4: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory

notebook:/opt/kde3/lib # l libkab*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1106 Mär 19 13:04 libkabc.la*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Jan 7 15:40 libkabc.so -> libkabc.so.1.0.0*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16 Jan 7 15:40 libkabc.so.1 -> libkabc.so.1.0.0*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 238897 Mär 19 13:16 libkabc.so.1.0.0*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1469 Mär 19 13:28 libkaboodlepart.la*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 138214 Mär 19 13:41 libkaboodlepart.so*

by Robert Penz (not verified)

found the problem ... the kde network rpms are missing for suse!!!

by AC (not verified)

Same problem with RedHat. I downloaded the packages that were on the kde site when this beta was first released. I guess they weren't done posting them. I downloaded what I was missing from redhat. All seems well now.

KDE3 looks pretty cool!

by adm (not verified)

Is there a way to start an application with a shortcut? Where is it configurable?
I want to open a new xterm with ALT+T, mutt with alt+m.

I found lots of things for which I can configure the shortcut, but I didn't find a way to create a new action for a new shorcut....

by Inorog (not verified)

Try the menu editor (^K/Configure Panel/Menu Editor... ) and look for the entry of your preferred app. The last entry on the config page for any item is "Current key".

by me again (not verified)

Isn't it possible to create a shortcut to start an application not in the menu?
If not, I 'll live with it. If yes, it would be great :-)

by Matt Gumbley (not verified)

Yes, it's possible to do this.
As root, create a file under /etc/X11/applnk
For example, I created /etc/X11/applnk/Utilities/xtermc.desktop
containing:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Colour XTerm
Comment=Colour XTerm
Exec=/home/matt/utils/bin/xtermc.sh
Terminal=0
Type=Application

(Which runs a colour xterm with my peculiar preferences)

I then used the K/Configure Panel/Menu Editor as described above to set the Current Key for this shortcut.

HTH,
Matt

by Jasper Boot (not verified)

Hi folks!

I think KDE 3 is really lovely and you're all doing a great job! But I also think it's a bit strange there is no splash screen for KDE3 (yet). I mean the one for KDE 2 was really cool and it's an important part of the eye candy, especially to convince new users. It will be the first (graphical) thing they see when booting a pre-installed KDE3-machine (After KDM of course ;-).
The KDE-community has so many artists who do wonderfull things with images, so can anybody explain me why there isn't any splashscreen yet?
It's as far as I know one of the real showstoppers by now.
Another question, are there any links to the splashscreen made by Qwertz, which is mentioned in the KDE-feature list?

Regards,

Jasper

by Tackat (not verified)

Fixed.

by SlipperJim (not verified)

Hi.
I want to compile KDE3.0 on a machine that does not have an internet connection.
Currently I'm using SUSE 7.2.
Where can I go to find out
a)what files I need
b)how to install them from a zip disk.

by Carbon (not verified)

Well, you need either SuSE 7.2 RPMs or source files. If you can stand
compilng from source (takes a while, especially on slow comps, but
can often result in a faster KDE) then go and download the source
tarballs, and put those on the disc. If you want to use RPMs, you
can get those too, probably from SuSE's site (though I hear they have
some problems).

Installing from a zip disk is exactly the same
as installing from anywhere else on SuSE, just install the RPMs
using the rpm command.

by Magnus Jonsson (not verified)

GREAT AWESOME JOB KDE-DEVELOPERS!!!!

You have created a spectacular Linux Desktop Environment!!!

Thank you very much.. for an awesome linux desktop...

Cheerz,
Magnus

by Denis (not verified)

I am really, REALLY impressed how smooth the new RC is running! Actually, this has been the first time multimedia stuff, sound etc. worked "out of the box" .. at least for me. Great Stuff!

One thing: I can't find the Network package for SuSE 7.3 .. am I blind, stupid, or is it really missing ?

nope.
There was a compilation error on monday when the rc3 tarballs were ready. The tarball from tuesday is ok but Suse didn't update (add) the network package since.

But, who is using Kmail anyway ??? ;-)))

I do. KMail is simple and excelent mailer, especialy for us, users of non-latin1 charsets.

by Dieter Nützel (not verified)

Have a look at: ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/kde-3.0rc3/SuSE/7.3-i386+kde

But kdegraphics is still missing. So I compiled it for myself.

Works nicely.

Regards,
Dieter

by Anonymous (not verified)

I tried installing the kdelibs package on RH 7.2 (only kdelibs because I wanted to see where the files were going to be placed), and I got the following failed dependencies:

qt >= 3.0.3 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
arts >= 7:0.9.9 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
cups-libs >= 1.1.12 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
libartsflow.so.1 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
libartsflow_idl.so.1 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
libkmedia2_idl.so.1 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
libmcop.so.1 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
libqt-mt.so.3 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
libqtmcop.so.1 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1
libsoundserver_idl.so.1 is needed by kdelibs-3.0-0.rc3.1

None of those really worries me except for the one about QT. I don't see a package for QT in the RedHat directories. Are the libraries in another package?

I hope I'm not going to have to compile QT from source... it takes forever on a 300mhz machine.

by themetaguy (not verified)

I used Bero's http://www.linux-easy.com

I loaded the bin RPM:
http://www.linux-easy.com/daily/RPMS/qt-3.0.3-0.cvs20020319.1.i386.rpm

works great. If you want to compile it yourself, try the src one:
http://www.linux-easy.com/daily/SRPMS/qt-3.0.3-0.cvs20020319.1.src.rpm

Good luck!

by Jason (not verified)

Too bad Bero doesn't provide an RPM for kde-edu...hopefully he will once KDE3 is released for real.

by zep (not verified)

go to redhat.com, then click on the download link, at the bottom of the page they'll be a link for redhat mirrors, find a mirror that has rawhide, this is redhats most upto date release thats being worked on before they release it as beta. theres upto date rpms there. also search google for the missing files and usually you can find the package they come from.

by zep (not verified)

try redhat's rawhide. get on ftp.redhat.com and go to the rawhide rpms, these are the most up to date rpms for redhat that aren't supported. this is where i got qt.

by NotSpeedyBox (not verified)

got a room full of those :-(

Have you checked RAM prices lately?

by cosmicflo (not verified)

For enterprise, it's not easy to upgrade all the machines.
A good and optimized system must run on a little machine (PentiumMMX / 64Mo).

by Neondiet (not verified)

Then you'd better stick to fvwm or similar, because none of the modern GUI's are going to run fast with that little memory. You need to grow your hardware to match the growth of the software. That's life.

by NameSuggesterEngine (not verified)

It's not just a RAM issue ... Running X with KDE you are going to hit swap just sitting idle if you have only 64megs! Win95 maybe 98 will run ok on those kind of machines so why switch. Maybe using them as "X terminal" type systems would be better?

Linux as a server is cool and efficient on older hardware. Linux as a desktop demands lots of horse power (like SGI, Sun etc etc).

AS A WORKSTATION LINUX (and BSD) DOES NOT WORK ON OLDER HARDWARE ... use that older hardware for tiny little servers or rip out the RAM from half of them and sticky it in the other half ;-)

Or half a room full of P2-233s with 128 MB RAM...

Not using anti-alising for fonts makes a lot of difference with this kind of configuration. Try switching the anti-aliasing off.

by /me (not verified)

/me thinks Opera has no right to claim to have the fastest browser on earth anymore :) The new Konqi simply rocks. How are they doing that? It seems they read minds and preload all pages I want to look at :)

by j0rd1 (not verified)

hahahaha
That was a funny one, I admit it, i was laughing for about 5 minutes...

KDE RoX!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

p.d. Im the only mexican who uses kde (you know... miguel de icaza... GNOME.... awk)

j0rd1

by Ingo Klöcker (not verified)

What's wrong with awk? ;-)