KDE Project Releases KDE 3.3

The KDE Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of KDE 3.3, the fourth major release of the award-winning KDE3 desktop platform. Over the past six months, hundreds of applications and desktop components have been enhanced by a community of developers, with a particular focus on integration of components.

Stephan Kulow, KDE Release Coordinator, said: "The desktop reached a quality
hard to top in previous releases. Nevertheless, KDE 3.3 is a great
improvement and will further strengthen KDE's position as the leading Free
desktop environment."

Building upon previous releases, noticeable improvements in usability,
stability and integration have been achieved, enhancing the desktop
experience. A range of new applications and features have also been
implemented, including KolourPaint (screenshots), an easy-to-use paint program. Over 7,000
bugs have been fixed, and 2,000 wishes fulfilled, with over 60,000 lines of
code and documentation being written in the past six months. KDE is now
available
in 89 different languages, with recent additions including Farsi
(Iran) and Indic character support.

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Comments

by Norbert (not verified)

Why should this be a showstopper???

BTW: why don't YOU provide backtraces so that developer can fix the problem.
If you looked in the bug report you would have noticed that this would be what the developer are asking for and not just complaining in a forum...
YOU can do something about it... The more helpful YOU are the more chances you have your bugs get fixed early...

by Jeroenvrp (not verified)

I tried, but as you can read in the bugreport, artsd can only be killed with -9 and that does produce backtraces. I am also not the only one experiencing this bug.

And why should it not be a showstopper or a nearby-showstopper, because people are not able to play radiostreams (.pls) and that is a real problem to my opinion.

Cheers,

Jeroen

by koos (not verified)

try for KDE apps:
kill -SEGV
probably for artsd, you have to start it from gdb (as there will be no kdecrash dialog)

by ---- (not verified)

It's beyond me why anyone would still install artsd, much less try to use it. It's been crashing forever, as has anything based on it.

Just grab KPlayer, kplayer.sf.net, and enjoy your music, radios, movies, whatever. Forget about arts, you will never need it.

by lp (not verified)

I had a lot of problems with artsd in the past, but they are gone for me since 3.2.1: no more crashes or lags (kernel 2.6 helps a lot for that), and now I think artsd is priceless for:
- mixing several wave sources (system notifications, juk, ...)
- let the many games that use OSS to run seamlessly in KDE using "arstdsp" (I play neverwinter nights this way, still listening mp3 music)
- running out of the box

I personaly use KMPlayer with the xine/artsd backend

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

Yes, they shipped RC3 and called it final.

However, this bug is marked as FIXED. Are you saying that it isn't fixed?

Yes it was too early. The seriously broken Focus Stealing Prevention in KWin was in the release but the most serious issue has already been fixed the the 3.3 BRANCH on CVS. :-(

Then there is the killer bug with the desktop icons. When aligning to grid, the X distance has a default that is OK and it is configurable, but the Y distance is TWICE (actually more than TWICE) what I am using with 3.2.3 and it is NOT configurable. The cute comment in the code says it all:

int gridX = gridXValue();
int gridY = 120; // 120 pixels should be enough for everyone (tm)

Is there some reason that "gridX" is configurable and "gridY" is a constant?

yes, 120 is enough, but it is TOO MUCH for most users.

--
JRT

by Ben (not verified)

Yes, there are (fairly obvious) bugs in 3.3.0. That's inevitable - it's a huge piece of software, the developers don't have unlimited time and testing is boring.
It's a chicken-and-egg problem - not many people will install something if it's called "beta" software, so it never gets tested completely. At some point the developers have to release a 'final' version, just to increase the installed base and get some real testing done. Unless you're volunteering to form a beta-test group to do complete functionality and regression testing? :)

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

You seem to have missed the point completely.

I see no chickens or eggs. This could have been released as RC3 and enough people would use it to have it tested.

If 3.3.0 "final" was released with bugs because they hadn't been found yet, this would be understandable and your comment would make sense.

However this is really irrelevant since bug reports have been filed against 3.3Beta? and 3.3RC? and some (obvious and significant ones) have not been fixed before the "final" release of 3.3.0.

--
JRT

by Datschge (not verified)

There's a life after 3.3.0.

by Ben (not verified)

At some point they have to release. This isn't a final release, it's just a .0 release. The bug you mention is a non-bug to me, so I'd rather they released than delayed for that bug. This is Open Source development, not a commercial piece of software.

Personally, I've found the Slackware packaged version of KDE3.3.0 to be a great improvement over the 3.2.2 I had before. I did report some bugs, but they seem to be SuSE specific, so I switched distro and now things seem much more stable.

If it's too buggy for you, don't upgrade. You can see the bugs outstanding - if they're going to be a problem, don't upgrade. Personally, I'm glad they did it now. The official release tag means distro packagers get working, more testing and a sooner release for 3.3.1 with even fewer bugs. If they held on until there were no bugs, you lose the advantage of having parallel development and testing, as most of the code sits in the repository while the few developers whose code still has bugs filed work.

by Ben (not verified)

Hmm, looking at the "most severe" bug list maybe some of those shouldn't really be in a release version. Dammit, no edit button. Maybe they should slow down the feature additions to go back to bugfixing.

by Jeroenvrp (not verified)

OK, I compiled the final and the bug is indeed solved. Sorry to make people panic :-)

J

by Anonymous (not verified)

kdcop works fine, just find the broken application and close it which blocks dcop (e.g. OpenOffice.org/KDE).

by chris (not verified)

i have no time right now, but i hope i can contribute sometime in the feature.
keep up the good work !

by JC (not verified)

If you don´t have time to help, you can send money or hardware to developers.
It takes only a few minutes and it´s very helpful.

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

I have a very "user" question; I'd like feedback from actual users. When disconnected IMAP first appeared, I used it. This was when it had all sorts of warnings. It nuked my mailbox. Has it become stable enough for business use? It would be one heck of a useful feature, as plowing through my mailboxes on my laptop during lunch or otherwise away from the office would be a really nice feature.

by coolo (not verified)

I use it myself since quite a while

by affenschlaffe (not verified)

I haven't experienced data loss with 3_3_BRANCH but I did loose all my emails once with 3.2x and dIMAP. To quote David Faure (from a bug report):

"Since you can compile from sources, I strongly recommend using CVS HEAD of kdepim. The disconnected-imap support is much much better there."

HTH

by CAPSLOCK2000 (not verified)

I've started using it yesterday. I tried do to so for as long as kmail supported it, but never got it working (somehow my folders didn't show up, even though I can see them in the (un)subscribe windows). With the upgrade to 3.3 it suddenly started working. Syncing takes rather long (~10 minutes) even when most of the folders don't have any changes to sync, but as my mailbox contains over 10.000 messages, and synchronizing can be done asynchronous I don't consider that a problem.
Loading a message is noticably faster with dimap on my P4 2.4 / 1GB / 100 mbit system. (The imap server is a P3 450 with 192MB).

All in all I'm very happy with disconnected imap, but I've not used it enough to assess it's stability.

by suki (not verified)

I've had many troubles with it, maybe has something to do with my mail server or local setup. These two bugs make it unusable for me:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66469 and
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85896.

by Hooded One (not verified)

Disabling "Allow moving and resizing of maximized windows" doesn't seem to work properly anymore.

KDCOP is still busted for me as well. The Process Table in ksysguard works again, but it always shows up on my second Xinerama screen. :/

by Ben (not verified)

It does 'work', it's just that the developer changed what it does, except that the string freeze meant he couldn't change the name of the option. Apparently, it now means "don't draw a border around maximized windows", not "prevent moving maximized windows".
Why anyone would want a border around a maximized window I don't know - another option that could be replaced with a sensible default. There are several votes and complaints on bugs.kde.org asking for it to be changed back to the old behaviour.

by Hooded One (not verified)

I must say, that does sound pretty stupid. Not only to essentially remove a pref that many people use, but to do so in a way that the new pref's description is completely irrelevant.

A quick search for "allow moving resizing maximized" finds me one UNCONFIRMED bug and one WORKSFORME. Is there another, more popular bug that I'm missing?

by Ben (not verified)

This one:

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86847

it has 40 votes already.

by MamiyaOtaru (not verified)

40 votes.. which basically means that two people have voted for it :( (I was one)

I really don't like the new behaviour. The old one was actually useful.. I went ahead and rolled back some changes in the source and made my own kwin .deb that uses the old behaviour. One of the good things about open source :)

by DeckerEgo (not verified)

Ditto for me. Seems that there are lots of Xinerama related problems.

Also noticed that System Tray, Pager and Taskbar stop updating their contents after a while. Plus all of my screensavers are now toast - I can't test or configure them. KWeather loses its network connection intermittantly.

One of the least stable KDE releases I've had in a while... not sure if it's SuSE or KDE. I'm guessing SuSE.

by Hooded One (not verified)

Ooh, I'd forgotten about the screensaver problem (I just use blank screen, which works fine) but yeah, I get it too.

I've had the taskbar stop updating only once since I installed RC2, but that may be the same thing you're seeing.

I worked around the Process Table showing up in the wrong place by going into the window-specific KWin settings (right-click titlebar -> Advanced -> Special Window settings, and I chose to match the exact window) and in Workarounds setting Ignore Requested Position to Force Yes. (Why does this need two checkboxes plus a selectbox to be enabled? It should be a simple boolean pref.) It's already This made it always appear on my first screen, but in the corner, so in Geometry I enabled Force Centered for Placement.

by DeckerEgo (not verified)

Ick. It shouldn't need to be that hackified. Methinks this release is completely messed.

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

It seems faster on my laptop. The Quick Launcher now supports more than two columns of icons, which is an incredibly useful thing for anybody who uses it. Thanks appear to go to Dan Bullok for the work (according to the About dialog).

The first obvious thing is that my fonts are *huge* in Konqueror and I've lost all my toolbar settings for Konqueror. I had tweaked it out so I had one toolbar (location) with back, up, forward and refresh, plus a drop down for Profiles. This was all removed by the install.

Kontact looks much nicer. The appearance has had a delightful cleanup. My mail did not appear at first (everything else including News and Notes did), but merely opening the KMail config dialog and hitting 'OK' made it reappear. Scary, if I didn't know my mail was on the server. Oooo... a search bar on the mail.

There appears to be quite a few functional and useful updates for 3.3. Normally, in past releases, I've followed development. I've not had the time for most of 2004, so all these nifty things are surprises - quite pleasant ones. I need to figure out why my fonts in Konqueror are huge (likely a simple setting - yep, set the medium font size in Konq's settings), and retweak a few settings in the toolbars, and I'm happy.

Well worth an upgrade. Thanks, guys!

by Benjamin Stocker (not verified)

First of all, thanks to the KDE developers: You did a fantastic work!

I installed the rpm's on a SuSE 9.0 without flaws, except that i needed the --force option when freshening kdebase and kdelibs. Maybe there is a problem with kdeartwork3-xscreensaver. After installing, All screensaver except clock won't work, the screen just turns black. The problem can be solved by installing a older version of this rpm. Just removing kdeartwork3-xscreensaver will also work, but the list of available screensavers is much smaller.

by homernt (not verified)

Did you see kdemultimedia 9.1 rpm's because I couldn't find them? Found the tar ball so it must be there. Further more starting yast2 modules form KDE Control Center doesn't work anymore. Also had some probelms with Konqueror but is working now after a reboot. And I needed to install jack-0.94.0-71.i586.rpm to be able to install arts-1.3.0-7.i586.rpm which wasn't needed before.

by anonymous (not verified)

SuSE offers 4 packages for kdemultimedia 3.3
I checked yast in kcontrol, works fine over here.
All suse-specific kdestuff, like krpm, yast in kcontrol, power control, hardware control, etc still work in kde 3.3.
Only SuSE-hack that is gone is the easy way to change users in kde-sessions. KDE 3.3 has the 'old' way of changing users, you can start a new session in k-menu.

If you experience problems with suse rpm's, check if your ftp mirror is up to date. suSE is offering kde 3.3 since 11-08, and until 18-08, those packages were not free of packaging bugs.

by homernt (not verified)

Found the kdemultimedia 3.3 rpm's on the suse site they are from the 11-08 but I installed them anyway. Did some further testing on starting yast2 modules from KDE Control Center and it seems that it only occures when I do this under root. With other users it asks for root the password and then it starts up. With logged in as root it never passes the starting up fase.

by jaykayess (not verified)

With SuSE 9.1, when I log in the systray and taskbar applets don't work. The systray shows only Gaim, nothing else, while the taskbar has one blank entry. If I remove these from the panel and then add them again, they work fine.

Anyone else have this problem?

by Hiryu (not verified)

With KDE 3.3.0 for SuSe 9.1, my icons are being cut off at the top
and bottoms of the screen.

Does anyone know a way to fix the icon problem?

Here is picture of the problem on my desktop.
http://audioseek.net/~hiryu/icons.png

Also, it seems the option has either been
removed or moved again for MacOS type bar at the top.
I have it because KDE3.3.0 is retaining my settings from
3.2

Aside from these problems, seems like a nice and solid release
and I'm enjoying it. The icon thing is just really annyoing.

Thanks.

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

MacOS style menubar carried over for me (SUSE 9.1 Pro).

And about half an hour after I installed it, I found a really nifty page about how to add a clock (and other applets) to the menubar (basically turn it into a child panel):

http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=MacOS-like+Menu+Bar

I note that the MacOS menubar and child menus are now much more strict about not allowing windows over them. I used to put XMMS into a mini-bar and float it over the menu. Can't do that now, but I suppose that's a "fix", since you could lose windows under the menu and bars.

I also noticed a icon quirk on my desktop - the align to grid now uses a huge grid even though my icons plus text are small. The grid size used to depend on how large the largest icon+description was. Now it seems fixed at a fairly large size. It's just different.

by koos (not verified)

> http://wiki.kdenews.org/tiki-index.php?page=MacOS-like+Menu+Bar
Nice feature, allthough you probable want to add something first to the child panel before adding the 'menu' applet (now way to do it afterwards) .. bit buggy in my setup, if the 'Help' menu of konqueror doesn't fit then there is no scroll button (like there is if more menu items get hidden) .. oh well for 3.3.1 or so .. and a good reason to clean up my panel :-)

by JC (not verified)

I had the same problem with 3.2.x but happens sometimes. Never be able to reproduce this problem.

Btw, what´s the fonts are you using on your desktop ? :) I like it.

by Jostein Chr. An... (not verified)

Kommander in kdewebdev? Please, move this fantastic tool to kdebase!
This program is so versatile that every human should have a copy when it's brought into life!

Jostein

by Dik Takken (not verified)

My idea exactly. Development is *so* much faster with Kommander. The only downside of Kommander is that not everyone has it installed.

But I think Kommander will really go off like a rocket once it has some good documentation with examples and tutorials.

by Some Dude (not verified)

Just like everything else in Linux.

by the future is K++ (not verified)

Yah except there is no documentation for it. Liked the idea, tried it, hated it, went back to good old C++. KDevelop rocks!

by Andras Mantia (not verified)

There is already some documentation, just try Help->Kommander Handbook since Kommander Editor 1.0Alpha6 (including the one in KDE 3.3.0). It's not complete, but it is constantly updated. You can get the up to date versions from CVS and you might want to look at the examples shipped with Kommander as well. There is also a function browser in the latest version.

Andras

by Kai F. Lahmann (not verified)

eigher I have found a funny regression or a funny debian-Bug: try to select a file icon (icon-view, not the first in your folder) with the mouse (drag around it), press F2 and wonder, which one is still selected!

by Jochen P. (not verified)

Yepp, confirmed under colinux/debian. Go ahead: bugs.kde.org

by Hugo Costelha (not verified)

Hi, I just installed and everthing works fine (and looks really great). The only problem I found is that I can no longer use Distribution Lists in the BC field in KMail. No matter what I do it ignores all Distributions Lists that I put in the BCC field.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Hugo

by Nicolas Blanco (not verified)

Just installed KDE 3.3, KGet still not runs :

nicolas@pcfixe nicolas $ kget
*** KGet got signal 11
ERROR: Communication problem with kget, it probably crashed.

by ralph (not verified)

Same problem here. The strange thing is that this is marked as fixed on bugs.kde.org.

However, this is probably not the right place to discuss this. Let's try to get some usefull output and head over to bugs.kde.org.

by Rex Dieter (not verified)

FYI, here's the bug report, and a patch:
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84450

by veton (not verified)

The interface is definitively cleaner, even if some changes are not always clear to me (why do we have bigger font in Konqueror?).

Great work overall. You start taking into account the remarks from the Gnome camp .-)

I'm sure that what Trolltech has started with QT4, is the result of a long experience, and that it will have a good impact on KDE.