KDE 4.2 Beta2 "Canaria" Testimony to the Bug Fixing Frenzy

Two days later than initially scheduled due to yours truly preparing for coming year's desktop summit on Gran Canaria, KDE's release team has made availabe KDE 4.1.85, a.k.a. KDE 4.2-Beta2 to testers and reviewers, codenamed "Canaria". KDE 4.1.85 is not suitable for production use but meant to invite feedback and bugreports from the community.
The KDE community is in massive bugfixing mode, showing a focus on stability and feature-completeness in the KDE 4.2 series. But behold, 4.1.85 is not a boring release. It brings many visible improvements to KDE 4.1, and will ultimately follow up the KDE 4.1 series as a stable release this coming January. So get your testing gear ready and help us squash those bugs for a 4.2.0 that makes Redmond see flying chairs all over. There's a changelog over at TechBase, and the brave and bored can go for the more detailed feature plan. As 4.1.85 is the last release before Christmas, we strongly recommend using Wade's Christmas wallpapers and the KWin compositing snow plugin while testing.

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Comments

by Max (not verified)

1st. Thank you.

by thothonegan (not verified)

I agree. Thanks KDE team!

by xian (not verified)

Please don't first up the dot. Anyway thanks KDE devs. I'm super stoked about 4.2!

by Diederik van de... (not verified)

Definitely wow! The stats say a lot, and the length of the changelog is huge! Compliments for the amazing progress and wonderful release announcement! :-)

Let's make those chairs fly ^^

by AC (not verified)

Does anyone know if (or when) kde4daily will have the beta 2 update?
It still says I have the latest update but it was almost a week since it did the last update...

by jospoortvliet (not verified)

it's there now according to a blog ;-)

by AC (not verified)

nice! (and updating)

What blog btw?

by littlenoodles (not verified)

I installed a copy of Ubuntu8.10 when I saw an article about KDE4.2 daily 'neon' builds available here:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu intrepid main

That was several weeks ago, and it installed fine. But there have been no updates available since. Also, there seems to be a virtual box 4.2 tester release too. Are these all the same thing (or at least different versions from the same folks)? Or is the 'neon' thing discontinued?

I guess I could wait till I get home tonight and check for an update, but I'm impatient...

Hi

There is a bunch of ppl using the Neon-project nightly builds of KDE;
The latest update is from the 17th Dec, so not really out-dated. I noticed it gets updated once or twice in a week.

For some reason I don't know, some parts are not included (ie. kate) but beside that it's pretty good and even includes debugging symboles pckages.

by SSJ (not verified)

It's been a pretty rough week, compilation-wise - hopefully things will be a bit smoother now.

And yes - KDE4Daily now has http://websvn.kde.org/?view=rev&revision=898444, which is < 12 hours old :)

by Matt (not verified)

There's a typo in the first sentence of the second paragraph: "Since the first beta, which was released less than 4 weeks ago, 1665 bugs new bugs have been opened, and 2243 bugs have been closed."

s/1665 bugs new bugs/1665 new bugs/

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

fixed, thanks.

by Peter Plys (not verified)

Is this proper English? (English is not my first language, but I'm not sure this sentence is grammatically correct).

For the 4.2 release, the KDE team has fixed literally thousands of bugs and has implemented dozens of features that were missing until now in KDE 4.2 fixes your issues.

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

Not quite. A better way to say it would be:
"For the 4.2 release, the KDE team has fixed literally thousands of bugs and has implemented dozens of features that were missing until now in KDE 4.2, which will fix a lot of your issues."

by asdf (not verified)

american or english english ?

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

What is English English? Is that British English with 20% more Oxford?

by Sebastian Kügler (not verified)

Fixed as well, thanks :)

by ethana2 (not verified)

Will this get onto the Kubuntu Jaunty alpha2 LiveCD?

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

Yes. It was uploaded the day before yesterda/yesterday just in time for the alpha 2 CDs.

by Michael (not verified)

Btw. I'm thinking about updateing my Kubuntu. Will there be KDE 4.2 final packages for Intrepid, or perhaps even Hardy (would rock even more, as I'd love to have a stable base)? I'd hate to wait for Jaunty ;)

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

KDE 4.2.0 is planned to be placed in intrepid-backports once it is released. Hardy will not be seeing any KDE 4.2 releases.

by Gentoo User #239421 (not verified)

Downloading and compiling right now. With the debug flag set. ;-)

by asdf (not verified)

lets get the bug count up my fellow users , and report as many bugs as we can!

by Anon (not verified)

*ahem* Let's find as many bugs as possible, and check super-duper thoroughly to make sure we don't report duplicates.

by Bobby (not verified)

No Administrator Button in System Settings. It's over 1 year old now and WE would be very happy if some kind coder out there would give it a little attention.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

"No Administrator Button in System Settings."

and there won't be. running the whole GUI as root is not only slow and resource intensive, it's also not exactly great for security.

instead, as has been done already for things like the time and date control panel, helper apps, preferably with policyKit integration, should perform the actual final settings applications. and those little, non-gui apps should run with elevated priveleges only.

by Bobby (not verified)

I am not talking about running the whole system as root. As a matter of fact if there is no administrator button in the system settings then I WILL HAVE TO RUN THE SYSTEM AS ROOT in order to make certain changeses like changing the KDM theme which is not possible as a normal user in KDE 4. In KDE 3.5 present version using KDM 3 all I have to do is press the administration button in the system settings which promps me to give my root password and then I can make the changes - no security risks to my system. In KDE 4 I have to log in as root in order to make those changes, which of course I personally hate because then my system is vulnerable.

by Kit (not verified)

You missed what Aaron said. You shouldn't have to be running any windows as root much less an entire session, what should be happening is PolicyKit will let you make certain changes (assuming you have the appopriate permissions from PolicyKit), or you'd supply the root password when applying the settings which'd spawn a process as root to do the actual changes, the application with the x11 session wouldn't have any actual special permissions at any point in time.

>In KDE 3.5 present version using KDM 3 all I have to do is press the
>administration button in the system settings which promps me to give my root
>password and then I can make the changes - no security risks to my system.
This has a number of issues:
1.) Speed: Pretty much an entire session must be started for the root user, making it *much* slower to open
2.) Memory usage: Because all the services have to be started for root, more memory is being used.
3.) Security: Different X clients can assert a *lot* of control over each other, it's generally not considered safe at all to be running X11 apps as root in a normal user's session (running X as root isn't considered a very good idea either, unfortunately there isn't too much choice with that at the moment).

by Bobby (not verified)

So why can't I or a lot of other users make the afore mentioned changes on KDE 4? Why does this bug still exist as valid if the solution is already there?

by sebas (not verified)

PolicyKit is very new (in fact we made an exception for it being merged after the freeze). Apps like System Settings need to pick it up now.

by Bobby (not verified)

Thanks for the info Sebas. So about when can we start enjoying it? Will I be able to change my login theme as a user by the release of KDE 4.2?

by Anon (not verified)

I guess this depends if such changes are seen as bug fixes or as new features. The former would appear in KDE 4.2 sometime, the latter would have to appear in 4.3 earliest.

by Bobby (not verified)

As far as I understand PolicyKit is quite young and might not be fully functional or be officially implemented in 4.2 although openSuse seems to provide the packages. I am however not sure as to how usable this new implementation is.

by Anon (not verified)

plasma-workspace-4.1.85/plasma/applets/system-monitor/net.h:22:27: error: ui_cpu-config.h: No such file or directory

maybe...

net.h:22 #include "ui_cpu-config.h"

should be

#include "ui_net-config.h"

?

Ps. no bugzilla account, so here, sorry. :-)

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

plasma-devel at kde dot org is a better place for such reports; but in this case, it's correct. apparently it's not generating the ui_cpu-config.h from cpu-config.ui?

by Anon (not verified)

It is, but just like for the hdd_config.ui or temperatur_config.ui, it's generated for their use only, so all of them need their own .ui file.

the CMakeLists.txt even has

kde4_add_ui_files(net_SRCS net-config.ui)

so it's generated, but just not included (copy'n'paste bug of cpu.h obviously :-) ).

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

aah, it's in net.h .. yes, that would only work depending on what cmake decided to do. probably worked for us doing make -jN due to that ... anyways, fixed in svn. =)

by Anon (not verified)

you are The Man.

sure it's not that per se, but by you comment hint using -j1 did get the compilation go thru with that "broken" include.

I bet it's all about me having an "-j -l4" as my make conf. maybe I'm too used to have cmake do it's own configs in parallel (if that what happens with -lN).

by zvonsu (not verified)

i'm very sad that debian is not packaging beta2 not even in experimental

by zvonsu (not verified)

debian packagers RULE!! they put the latest SVN on this server !!! go KDE. Let's debug it!

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

A lot of bugs disappeared. There are still some plasma and krunner crashes, but the impression is that until final, all bugs will be easily crushed if developers keep the speed of fixes.

Congrats.

by Jad (not verified)

I need a stable system to work. And yet KDE 4.2 Beta 2 does the trick for me :) If I stick to the main plasmoids (panel and folderview) everything works great.

Some small tips:

- I had to remove the plasma config file for things to work properly. This should be removed when plasma is not running. File is .kde4/share/config/plasma-appletsrc

- When trying plasmoids some would crash on exit. This means you cannot exit plasms properly so they always appear on startup. Again deal with config file.

- MSN is not working in my kopete. Apparently a problem with libmsn which has been fixed in later versions.

Using openSUSE 10.3 by the way

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

> I had to remove the plasma config file for things to work properly.

please report problems you have at bugs.kde.org

> When trying plasmoids some would crash on exit.

backtraces -> bugs.kde.org =)

> This means you cannot exit plasms properly so they always appear on startup

fixed with r898746

by Jad (not verified)

Sure, Aaron will do all that :)

This was not meant as a report, just as small hints to users who might run into the same, to save them some time.

Keep up the good work!

by walter (not verified)

Thank you very much for this. Please ignore the "it's not like KDE3.5"-morons, but keep on innovating. It's very much appreciated.

by vf (not verified)

Yeah, few more years of "innovation" and we'll have a buggy version of gnome.

by Aaron Seigo (not verified)

you evidently haven't tried 4.2 then, as your complaint is pretty stupid in light of the achievements in that release. you might even call 4.2 the "parity release" in which we have climbed over the "must have the features of 3.5" wall.

there are very, very few things there were available in 3.5 that aren't in 4, most of those things were very, very questionable to begin with, and there's a huge, huge amount of features that never existed in 3.5.

i'm sorry if that ruins your "clever quip". though i personally feel displays of sillyness such as yours deserve everything they have coming to them.

by CF (not verified)

Awww, did the backlash to being called a "moron" hurt your little feelings?

It's one thing to say that you don't get any constructive criticism from your detractors, but it's another thing entirely to call them "morons" and "stupid" just because they have the audacity to think that [Software X] version 4 should be "feature parity with [Software X] version 3.5 plus extras."

That's the way it's been through most of history; to call them names because they expect it to work the same in KDE is... disingenuous at best.

They're not morons. They're not stupid. It's okay for them to be a bit miffed because of their confusion at the misnumbering of KDE 4. It's quite natural.

Be nice to them, and they WILL eventually become productive bug-reporters and evangelists again. Keep calling them "morons" and "stupid" and they are likely to keep heaping on you the same abuse you keep whining about.

You have an opportunity to be the bigger man. What you do with such an opportunity speaks more about you than about them. I look forward to seeing a positive response in the future, rather than additional fuel on the flamewar fire.

by Anon (not verified)

walter != Aaron Seigo - they spell and pronounce their names differently.