KDE 3.5.5 Hits the Streets

The KDE developers are pleased to announce the release of KDE 3.5.5. This release includes plenty of bug fixes and updated translations for 65 languages but also features improvements such as version 0.12.3 of Kopete, sudo in kdesu, CUPS 1.2 support and speed improvements in KHTML. See the changelog for everything new. Grab the source from the info page, compile with Konstruct or get the packages for Archlinux, Debian Sid, Kubuntu, Pardus or openSUSE.

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Comments

by JC (not verified)

I'm currently building them. The packages will be available soon.
Sorry for that delay.

by SaCuL (not verified)

thanks!

by JC (not verified)

Having 2 babies at home, change the priorities.
I hope to show them soon how to run the build scripts :))

by Jan (not verified)

Congratulations! Two babies? Are they twins?

by JC (not verified)

one is 17 months so still a baby, and the new one is 2 months old. Lots of fun and joy but it's not easy to touch a computer during the night :)

Btw the packages are ready. I want to test them and updload them before the week-end.

by Blablablub (not verified)

Thanks for uploading the packages, but do you plan to upload kde for slackware 11 too?

by JC (not verified)

yes I do.

Pat will not build them for now in -current so I will upload them tomorrow.

by JC (not verified)

The slackware 11.0 are there :)

by Blablablub (not verified)

I cannot find the kdebindings for slack 11.0... please help

by JC (not verified)

yes it doesn't compile. I'm checking what is the problem

by JC (not verified)

Something related to python (pyqt) is not compiling. I don't know why.

I will not be able to fix this until next week.

by Anonymous Coward (not verified)

You have to change all 'python configure.py -c' to 'python configure.py -i' in order to compile it with slack 11.0

by _fred (not verified)

Two days ago I did apt-get upgrade my debian box and noticed that KDE 3.5.5 was already there. Nice to get fresh new release of KDE 3.5.5 ... Btw, just wondering, before KDE 4 release there will be KDE 3.5.6, 3.5.7 and so on?

by Petteri (not verified)

I'm also running new KDE on Sid, nice :) New Kopete is really wellcome since it ads some support to jabber mucs (multiuser chats). Shame that there is not much talk on mucs on kdetalk.net server.

by bluGill (not verified)

Maybe. This depends on how fast KDE4 gets out the door. If it turns out that there is only a tiny amount of work left to get KDE4 out, then there will be few KDE 3 releases. If (more likely) there is still significant work left before KDE4 is ready, then there will be more 3.5 releases as bugs are fixed and features are added (New features are discouraged, but they happen).

There may even be 3.5 releases after KDE4 is out. There is speculation that some distributions or companies will hold off on upgrading to KDE4 for a couple years to let the bugs settle out. In this case there may be enough people working on KDE3 (and enough changes) to justify new releases for a couple years after KDE4. KDE4 is a large change, and many open source projects have split because some people disagreed with the change, in that case you would see releases for years. (This is a good thing about open source, but it would be bad for KDE in general)

However KDE4 is now getting to the point where more people can work with it. Libraries are close to stable, and so things are likely to soon reach the point where all developers are encouraged to port their applications to KDE4 (many developers are already doing this). While things will change in the Libraries, many of the future changes will be things that experience with the new APIs shows a need to do things better. This will cut into KDE 3.5 development.

In short: Most likely there will be a couple more releases, but they will become smaller and smaller. I won't predict when the last one will happen.

by bert (not verified)

Is there an option to take a VMware or bochs or whatever image of KDE pre-4 as a development plattform?

by mart (not verified)

Bochs would be way too slow for a development platform.

Just compile "KDE pre-4" as another user, as per the instructions on the wiki.
http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE3To4

by Robert Knight (not verified)

> If (more likely) there is still significant work left before KDE4 is ready

There is still a lot to do, hence the lack of a release schedule.

by AC (not verified)

>>There is speculation that some distributions or companies will hold off on upgrading to KDE4 for a couple years..

Couple of years??!?
I can understand that distributions will skip kde 4.0, but i don't think they will be waiting years before upgrading to kde4.

by Mark Hannessen (not verified)

distributions might not wait that long, but things like kubuntu LT (long term) release and people who are actually deploying kde on the desktop, might want to stay away from kde4 for a while.

and thus support for these people would still be very nice and probably needed.

by Gonzalo (not verified)

Thank you for showing good common sense.

Please understand that when you set up school, government or non-profit desktops, people expect to get at leasts five years out of their investment.

Incremental bug-fix releases are much more appreciated by most users of computers than whiz-bang features that appeal to computer enthusiasts. People do not enjoy disruptive changes. This is true for home users as well.

One thing which every distribution that targets consumers should do is put /home on a separate partition during the installation process. This would make upgrades easier as most people are very concerned about losing their personal email and documents. If they could be assured that an installation wouldn't touch those, you may have more people be willing to try new software.

One last thing, I have not been much of an Ubuntu/Kubuntu fan until recently. In fact, I still the distribution still needs to improve a lot. But having a supported and free long-term release is the smartest thing that they could have ever done. This was equally the silliest thing that Mandriva, Fedora and Suse have done (18-24 months of support is not sufficient for most people).

All of these distributions have corporate releases with long-term support, but the pricing is prohibitive for most home users.

by Name (not verified)

YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

by zvonsully (not verified)

I can 'feel' the updates that were made to KDE. Good job!

by david (not verified)

will you build packages for mandriva 2007?

by distri (not verified)

Binary packages are built by the distributions, KDE only ships source code. This means that Mandriva 2007 packages will be available as soon as Mandriva provides them.

by Robert Knight (not verified)

Thanks for the speed boost :)

In particular Google Maps and Google Mail feel much faster under KDE 3.5.5 compared with KDE 3.5.4

by pascal (not verified)

BTW, what has happened to maps.google.com? When I go to it with konqueror it says my browser is unsupported and just redirects me... what an insult!

by cm (not verified)

Works for me.

On one of my systems it seems I was sending a forged user agent string (Safari). *There* I got the "unsupported" warning until I set it back to the standard one.

So, I suggest you check the user agent string you use.

by kde4ever (not verified)

it seems like KDE 3.5.5 got some performance improvement. Gkrellm is showing mostly 0% CPU usage, before upgrade from 3.5.4 it wasn't showing 0% for 4 secs.
kwalletmanager icon in system-tray is showing up again, if an application is using it and it is configured to show.
many other anoying bugs fixed, see superkaramba "download new stuff".

by pascal (not verified)

SuperKaramba also had "Download new stuff" in kde 3.5.4. Am I missing something?

I like that my computer now has a hibernate button in the shutdown menu :-)

by Tim (not verified)

Oh yeah! That's cool.

Shame neither hibernate nor suspend actually works!

by redeeman (not verified)

it will work if you have it set up. did you really believe kde would include kernel stuff and configurations for these things to suspend?

by ac (not verified)

It seems to be missing from the article, but kde, especially kicker now behave
quite well with compiz. Running compiz --replace in my debian sid with xorg
7.1/i810/aiglx just works. :-)

by NabLa (not verified)

Yeah, it seems that pager is now aware of all 4 beryl desktops, and able to change to any of them. However, if I change to another desktop using beryl shortcuts (mouse or keyboard), the pager still shows the previous selected desktop. Will report to bugs.kde now :)

by Olaf Schmidt (not verified)

It seems the Kubuntu packages are missing "blinken" (needed for an update of kdeedu) and have an outdated version of Kopete (needed to upgrade kdenetwork).

by Olaf Schmidt (not verified)

An even bigger problem is that the reason for the failure is not reported by Adept. You need to use the command line or Gtk equivalents to find out.

by gth (not verified)

Hi,
i got the same problem. It really seems to me that the repositry is not complete. Couldn't find kopete-0.12.3 anywhere.

by Rick (not verified)

U/X/Kubuntu aren't really that great of a product. It is a pain getting new apps for them. The Ubuntu distros need a "rolling release" version. That way you can most always get newest versions of software.

by Olaf Schmidt (not verified)

It works perfectly fine now.

Olaf

http://www.kde.org/info/requirements/3.5.php says "Qt >= 3.3.2 & < 4.0" while http://www.kde.org/info/requirements/3.4.php says "Qt >= 3.3.4".

Why is kde-3.5 working with qt-3.3.2 while kde-3.4 is not? Or is the information provided wrong?

It is possible that something that depended on 3.3.4 code was removed, or changed to work with 3.3.2. Another possibility is that saying 3.4 depended on 3.3.4 was actually in error, and it really only depended on 3.3.2.

Most likely the 3.4 page has a typo.

by Richard Jones (not verified)

I just upgraded using kubuntu and fonts weren't anti-aliased in a lot of places.

I went into the control panel and saw that AA was turned on. I fiddled it so it'd let me save the config and did so, then restarted the apps affected and now I'm AA again.

by David (not verified)

I, tried to change the default settings for fonts in Kubuntu Dapper, but the only thing that happend was that the fonts started to look really ugly and this is still a problem.... I've tried everything I could but still looks ugly when surfing on the web with Konqueror or Firefox. In Firefox I removed the possibility for the sites to decide the fonts themself as that made the fonts look really ugly ... I think that before we have a good way of using Antialiasing and TT fonts in X11 I cannot get my girlfriend to switch :( She says it looks too ugly...

I know I'm not the only one...

by Ash (not verified)

Install fonts from a windows box, then setup firefox fonts like this... http://www.asa.org.uk/NR/rdonlyres/C6E4FAD8-303D-4A4C-AC1E-8F99AD72FC71/...

by redeeman (not verified)

ehmm.. antialiasing is no problem in linux, gtk2 applications do antialiasing, and so does qt/kde applications. you just either dont have any fonts you like, or didnt configure it like you want.

by David (not verified)

Ok, then maybe you can explain to me why antialising looks 10 times better in Windows? I'm even using the very same fonts from my old Windows box but still it's a nightmare in my favorite dist. Kubuntu... Maybe the rendering of the fonts in X11 isn't yet 100% I am well aware that both QT & GTK applications do antialiasing but no way near that of Windows. Maybe Xorg will change all that (soon I hope)

Alot of maybe's :)

Please see this bug report: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135561

Just click on the Printer Manager on the task bar also get this message.

I thought KDE has a quality control team (http://quality.kde.org/). It looks like at least developers did not even try to print something or just click on the Printer Manager button before the KDE 3.5.5 is released. It's a shame isn't it?

by Boudewijn Rempt (not verified)

Or they didn't had your problem, just like me. Everything printer-related works fine for me with KDE 3.5.5. Are you using Gentoo, by any chance?

I don't use Gentoo, I use my own, LFS. My Cups version is cups-1.1.23. According to KDE 3.5 requirement list, you need CUPS >= 1.1.9.

So I just downloaded all KDE 3.5.5 sources, compiled and installed. Note, the previous version of the KDE was removed before compiling the 3.5.5.

Did you compile KDE 3.5.5 from sources? What's the version of the CUPS?