KDE 3.2 Beta 2 "Dobra Voda" is Waiting For You

Our first KDE 3.2 Beta "Rudi" was a huge success and resulted in over 2000 resolved bugs. As the code still has some rough edges, we decided to go for another beta. So here it is: Dobra Voda. Please continue reporting problems you see with it, your testing is much appreciated. You can download Dobra Voda at http://download.kde.org/unstable/3.1.94. Currently we have binaries for Fedora, Slackware and SUSE, besides the sources.

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Comments

by Jon (not verified)

That's very annoying -- the whole reason I want to use KMidi rather than KMid is that I don't have a sequencer, and KMidi was (through timidity) a software synth. Now I have no way to play MIDI files.

by jaquadro (not verified)

As a workaround, XMMS has a midi plugin that plays through some old version of timidity (comes as part of the plugin).

by kdeuser (not verified)

- Konqueror unusable with 100s of bugs in khtml
- Help system still unusable
- The joke KMenuEdit still exists and will exist next years, no challenge even for win 98 in user comfort etc.
- KSysguard with all it's dozens of useless features still exists.
- Performance poor as ever - but it's funny that konqueror now starts faster than a simple Hello-World-KDE-Application. One of the smaller problems of KDE, but annoying. Windows stays the only desktop which not forces the user to wait for simple tasks (Compare Taskmgr.exe and ksysguard, it's like using a 3 Ghz Pentium 4 and a 100 Mhz Pentium I)

After years of hope, it's time to admit that the KDE-Project seems to fail finally. It's no real challenge for Microsoft. Shame, cause Windows has also it's problems, but nothing in contrast to KDE.
I would suggest fixing at least one single application to escape this unsatisfying state: Konqueror. After 6(?) years of KDE konqueror isn't nearly finished. That must be solved.
Nonsense applications like kmenuedit or ksysguard should be banned from the project.
KDE should get win 98-like customizable menus.
That's way more important than to add permanently new useless features or to concentrate on incomplete themes or changing the icon sets.

by TrollKiller (not verified)

TROLL WARNING! dont feed the troll above

by Lars (not verified)

Actually, about the menu editing he has a point...

by Rayiner (not verified)

Yep. I guess if you fling shit at random, you're bound to hit something eventually.

by JC (not verified)

lol

by anon (not verified)

> Konqueror unusable with 100s of bugs in khtml

More like a thousand known bugs in khtml. And eight thousand known bugs in Gecko. I have no idea how many in IE, Microsoft doesn't maintain a public bug database :-)

Rendering engines are hard to make. It takes years.

See David Hyatt's most excellent post about that at http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/hyatt/archives/2003_11.html#004361 ..

> The joke KMenuEdit still exists and will exist next years,

That would likely require changes within Qt. That's why it hasn't happened yet.

by kdeuser (not verified)

Maybe, but khtml ist the buggiest rendering enginge by far.

by kdeuser (not verified)

why isn't konqueror called KONQUEROR-ALPHA-0.7.0.91.2 or something like that?
Would be more realistic.

by Tim Gollnik (not verified)

Why don't you call yourself TROLL?

by michaeln (not verified)

[quote]
why isn't konqueror called KONQUEROR-ALPHA-0.7.0.91.2 or something like that?
Would be more realistic.
[/quote]

Well probably for the same reason that winblows and explorer are not called explorer-ALPHA-0.0.1a
and
windows-ALPHA-000.00.0000.-1a

Trolling does not do anyone any good.

Regards

by kdeuser (not verified)

Explorer is ready to use for web browsing, firebird is, mozilla is, etc..., konqueror isn't.

by Luke Sandell (not verified)

That's a vague assertion, but can you back it up? The main reason IMHO why people don't like Konqueror is that it doesn't "feel" like a web browser.Netscape, IE, Mozilla all basically have the same menus; Konqueror is more like a universal protocol client, and should stay that way.

Yes, Internet Explorer is ready for Web browsing, but that's about it. Every version is equipped with a FTP browser that - well, doesn't work and usually freezes your computer with its annoying little swinging flashlight. It's like they put the GUI and FTP code in the same thread. Konqueror never freezes on FTP.

by Jason Keirstead (not verified)

Explorer is ready for web browsing??? Since when??? Check the facts.

Explorer has been around for 8 years and still doesn't have proper PNG support. It can't do alpha channels properly AT ALL.

Explorer has been around for 8 years and still doesn't have proper CSS support. It doesn't even fully implement CSS2!!! www.w3c.org/Style/ doesn't even render half properly.

Explorer has been around for 8 years and still doesn't have proper DOM support. They don't even do DOM Level 1 let alone DOM 2.

Explorer has been around for 8 years and is still plagued with security issues left and right.

KHTML and Gecko both have full proper PNG support.

KHTML and Gecko both have near full proper CSS2 support, with the exception of some CSS bugs in KHTML.

KHTML and Gecko both have full proper DOM Level 1 support, with much of DOM Level 2.

KHTML has no non-trivial security issues in the bugs database.

Looks like Explorer is the browser that's "not ready". And all these problems have existed for at least 2 years since version 6 was released, and they all remain unresolved.

by Martin (not verified)

Unfortunatly, what KHTML can do, is not particularly useful at the moment. And in my opinion priorities are wrong if effort is going into these features instead of getting KHTML to work with most websites. I have lost count of the number of times i've had to switch to netscape to look at a website, the nvidia website displays wrongly when you download drivers, i check the websites for where i'm going skiing and both www.skifrance.fr and www.avoriaz.com the menus fail to work. Even the download page for flash player won't display (http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/alternates/).

Its a shame, but theres no point in trying to pretend its usable, because for what ever reasons (granted maybe because internet explorer is more popular people design their pages to work with it), I can't use it to browse the web.

Martin

by Tim Gollnik (not verified)

:-)

Hahaha

lol

I'm soo disappointed..

:-)

by Nekkar (not verified)

Every time I install kde, I customize the menu with kmenuedit. If you don't like this application, just don't use it!
Two years ago, on my PIII 866Mhz, konqueror was slow. It took 1.3 sec. to start. Now, with preloading disabled, it takes 0.3 sec. Now I am very happy.

Bye bye.

P.S. If you hate kde, if you like windows, just use Windows!!

by a.c. (not verified)

Interesting that you compare taskmgr to ksysguard. It has been literally years since I have done Windows, so .... . Ksysguard is a loosly coupled app that can look over other systems. In addition, it is easy to extend it.

Is taskmgr something that is distributed and easy to extend?
You have indicated that it has speed, but MS is notorious in their taking of shortcuts for speed and monopoly.

by kdeuser (not verified)

Taskmgr does its job like ksysguard. Taskmgr is extendable, not overloaded, but has no network capabilities. That's not really necessary.
Taskmgr is only a click away, ksysguard is a click away and the usual 2 seconds, like kfind, etc... For slow users no problem at all.

by Luke Sandell (not verified)

Point 1: KSysGuard is zero clicks away. Try CTRL-ESC.

Point 2: Task Manager takes a second or two to come up on my system.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Windows better than KDE? I find it interesting that a windoze user actually finds his way into the KDE3.2 beta message board.

As to Konqueror ... I agree, I find its way of handling the web inferior to the Mozilla project. On the other hand, I wouldn't want a different file manager. The right click menu in Konqueror beat everything MS has to offer in their version. The fast access to Ark and the "Copy To" and "Move To" shortcuts are simple features that have come in handy almost every day. If you feel Windows offers a better way of handling things, then stick with Windoze but don't tell other people that their stuff is "useless" if they, in fact, can make great use out of it.

As to KSysguard ... I really don't see your point. Back in my windoze days whenever i needed taskmgr to shut an app down that crashed it itself crashed. I'd rather stick with ksysguard which i don't even have to look at since my apps don't crash anymore.

As to KMenuEdit ... I agree, it's a silly solution, although not a silly program. It's a powerful program that gets the job done - what's useless about that? I do miss the right click available on windoze in the KMenu, but to be honest, I don't use that particular feature often enough to make me run windoze again. It's merely a small convenience.

The greatest thing about KDE is though that we can all post to a message board like this and speak our mind and tell the developers what we would like to see changed or added to KDE. Can you do that with windoze?

by Janne (not verified)

I'm sure that you have already decided to help KDE-project to fix any annoyances you have. What was that? You are just sitting there on your fat ass, doing nothing but whine when group of people spend their time to give you kick-ass software for free? That's what I thought...

Seriously, I find your comment to be moronic and pointless. If you don't like KDE, why not start your own desktop-project? Hell, you can even fork KDE if you want to. No-one is forcing you to use KDE; there are other alternatives out there. But I bet that you are not going to do a damn thing, you are just going to sit there in your moms basement and whine.

by Zsigabiga (not verified)

You spoke from my heart!

by Anon (not verified)

Just my two cents. I hae been trying to customize my taskbar wih windows XP. I can say in one word... sucks. I have not yet seen a help that actually answers my question. Troubleshooting is great too; have a problem with this; oh well dd u download latest driver; yeah; doesnot solve your problem; call tech support for the hw maker; yes no clues; sorry can't help you. It is a joke.I rather do the same thing in kde than xp sh.. Next time u go around slinging words,remember Microsoft is no longer supporting 98 so bzz off...

by Chris Hope (not verified)

At least when you ask ksysguard to kill an application it actually does it...

by mrT (not verified)

Hey, kdeuser!

Did you ever try to validate MS's web page to a w3c validator?
How about Nvidia's?

Ok.
So now we can agree, that pages that do not adhere to common standards might not show the same way in all browsers.

Now.
I am a web designer and curently I use Opera and Konqueror to validate, weather I screwed up in CSS. A typical page with all it's markup takes only a few K, validates beautifully for xhtml 1.1 and looks exactly the same in Konqueror, Mozilla and Opera.

IE you cry?
Well, I am spending 90% of time trying to use alphaImageLoader SHIT (failing randomly) and screwing about with nested shit not respecting parrents etc....
IE is not even alpha quality. It's a random hack (and not in Linux sense, where you can use random hacks on production machinery for years without a reboot).

One thing, where IE excells at:
It makes an excellent use of Microsoft's EULA, whereby you get the right not to sue the owner of the software (Microsoft), which YOU payed for, because there is no guarantee that the particular software you payed for is actually fit to do anything. The EULA gives a meaning to IE. Without EULA, IE has no purpose. Couple IE to EULA and it's like: "Come here, Idiot customer, pay me for something which I am not going to give you and I guarantee it is not necessary for it to do anything in particular. If this software does something, you can not sue me."

And yes. There are no significant bugs in MS software. Should your software stop preforming for ay reason you probbably do not know how to use it (Bill Gates, 1993)

Does anyone know of a Knoppix development release or other LiveCD distro that has this on it so us peons can pop it in and give it a whirl without the risk of busting anything too bad on our work installations?

Thanks!

by evangineer (not verified)

As I commented in another post. The SLAX LiveCD contains beta2 releases of KDE 3.2 and KOffice 1.3. I'm using it right now to post this.

http://www.slax.org

by James (not verified)

I had beta 1 installed, but now that i got beta2 the html part of konqueror doesnt work. When i try to go to a website (or local html file) it crashes with a Signal 6 error. Whats the deal here?

Oh, heres the terminal output...

kparts: loadPlugins found desktopfile for khtml:
kparts: load plugin autorefresh
kparts: loadPlugins found desktopfile for khtml:
kparts: load plugin Crashes
kparts: loadPlugins found desktopfile for khtml:
kparts: load plugin khtml_kget
kparts: loadPlugins found desktopfile for khtml:
kparts: loadPlugins found desktopfile for khtml:
kparts: load plugin khtmlsettingsplugin
kparts: loadPlugins found desktopfile for khtml:
kparts: load plugin krpmview
kdecore (KLibLoader): library libkrpmview.la not found under 'module' but under 'lib'
konqueror: factory.cpp:79: virtual QObject* KParts::Factory::createObject(QObject*, const char*, const char*, const QStringList&): Assertion `!parent || parent->isWidgetType()' failed.
james@linux:~>

by GeorgeM (not verified)
by Chris Colohan (not verified)

I am having difficulty getting this release to compile on a RedHat 7.1 system... In particular, I am having trouble with gcc, which gives me the following error halfway through compiling arts:

/afs/.cs.cmu.edu/misc/egcs/@sys/archive/libexec/gcc-3.3/lib/./libstdc++.so: undefined reference to `_Unwind_Resume_or_Rethrow@GCC_3.3'

I gather this is a gcc bug which I am hitting. Does anyone know precisely which versions of gcc are able to compile this release successfully?

by Hubert Hoffmann (not verified)

I compiled kde-3.2b1 and kde-3.2b2 successfully on a RedHat 7.3 system (gcc-2.96-113). The only problems were with -O2 optimization for kdelibs and --enable-final for arts and some other packages (info from http://bugs.kde.org).

by Pedro Sam (not verified)

I have had a similar problem with my slackware-9.1. Basically the system comes with gcc-3.2.3, but I added a second compiler gcc-3.3.2. If you have a similar setup, try to use the compiler as provided by your original distribution, or else make sure your gcc installation is sane (try reinstall).

by Luke Sandell (not verified)

Well, I'm happy to say that Konqueror now starts as fast or faster than IE on my 300 MHz. Unfortunately, it's the only application that starts any faster. Prelinking my binaries caused no noticable speedup. (Remember, the GNU runtime linker once served as the scapegoat of the Qt/KDE slow startup problem, now what is it?)

Unfortunately, Kopete is broken. I try to start it and am asked to enter my KWallet password. I don't really get why I would need to enter more passwords on when I am already logged in as the user in question (or for that matter, have a separate password for KWallet). At any rate, Kopete stashes drops a dead icon in the tray icon and that's it.

by anonymous (not verified)

yes. Kwallet is annoying.
anyway to turn it off ?

by anon (not verified)

kwallet seems quite useful, but I wish it would just work for the whole session after you input the form password once like in every other browser, i.e, mozilla, opera, IE, etc... especially's Mozilla's PSM (personal security manager)

kwallet is pretty nice, but it needs to be more friendly to the needs of most users, who don't give two more that two shits about protecting form data more than is needed.

by George Staikos (not verified)

Did you ever think to configure it? You can make it stay open for the entire session once it's open, you can disable it, and much more. The first use of KWallet gives you a wizard to configure it, and it provides suitable defaults if you choose to enable it. If that's not enough, there's a KCM. Try it.

by Janis Klava (not verified)

The first time Kwallet pops up should be with an install wizard which carefully explains what to do and how to use it. At present it pops up and asks for a password ... a password for what? the next time it pops up and asks for a password again ... again, for what.

I install Linux (mainly SuSE)for people who do not understand English very well, if at all, and Kwallet is a major nuisance as it usually ends up in people not being able to get their mail resulting in bad opinions of Linux because of one badly behaved app.

The way Kwallet pops up reminds one of Gates' idiot paper clip and is in danger of becoming just as disliked in this neck of the woods. Turning it off after the fact is too late as mail and other apps all require you to enter paroles every time they are needed again resulting in bad rap for Linux in general.

Let's face, the way it works at present is a pain in the okole and it needs to be cleaned up. It may be readily apparent to the genius who wrote it but it not so readily apparent to the rest of us.

Thank you for your attention,

Janis

by CodeMonkey (not verified)

I *do* like KWallet, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to configure it, under 3.2. Help!

by anon (not verified)

i was very confused too, until i figured to apt-get install kwalletmanager.

it's a shame that kwallet is in kdebase, but kwalletmanager isn't.

by CodeMonkey (not verified)

Doh! Thanks ... :)

by Luke Sandell (not verified)

aha! just had to delete my old kopeterc

by anon (not verified)

> Prelinking my binaries caused no noticable speedup.

Perhaps because prelinking wrt KDE and Qt apps is broken for the vast majority of installations (and has been for a while) until qt 3.3b1 (or equivalent snapshots from TrollTech). This is because of Qt's dependencies on libGL, which is usually compiled non-PIC. That breaks prelink. libGL is optional in qt 3.3b1.

So yes, you can still blame the linker :-D

by Luke Sandell (not verified)

No, I applied Leon Bottou's patch and ldd shows that my Qt is no longer links to libGL. So no, I can't still blame the linker. At any rate, linking only takes a fraction of a second even for KDE apps.

by Charles (not verified)

Weren't there some dynamic linker enhancements coming in 2.6? I thought that the old crunky dylinker was still present in 2.4...

by LesBangs (not verified)

I'm not a big fan of "package kde-blahblahblah is needed by kde-moreblahblahblah" when issuing manual rpm commands. What order should these packages be installed in to minimize this annoyance. Yes, I know this is trivial but I am a lazy, lazy man. Better yet, are there any Fedora apt/yum/up2date/etc repositories with beta2? Mmmmm, automatic dependency resolution...[*]

Lester Bangs.

*Typing that last sentence officially made my transition to complete and utter nerd complete.

by Anonymous (not verified)

rpm -U kde-*.rpm

by Robert Bobert (not verified)

rpm -U kde-*.rpm

I would have loved for the above command to have worked in Fedora Core 1, but I still get dependancy errors. Yes, I'm a bit new to this, and would love to check out this release of KDE.

by Nicola Di Nisio (not verified)

place all the RPMs in a directory and run
rpm -Uvh --force --replacepkgs *rpm