KDE 4.0 Release Candidate 1 Hits the Streets, Codename "Calamity"

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the
first release candidate for KDE 4.0
. This release candidate marks that
the majority of the components of KDE 4.0 are now approaching release quality.

While the final bits of Plasma, the brand new desktop shell and panel in KDE 4, are falling into place, the KDE
community decided to publish the first release candidate for the KDE 4.0
Desktop. Release Candidate 1 is the first preview of KDE 4.0 which is
suitable for general use and discovering the improvements that have taken
place over the entire KDE code base. The KDE Development Platform, the basis for developing KDE applications, is frozen and is now of release quality. The source code for the KDE Development Platform can be found under the "stable/3.96" subdirectory, on KDE's FTP server and mirrors.

Building on this, the majority of applications included in KDE 4.0 are now
usable for day to day use. The KDE Release Team has recently underlined this by calling
on the community
to participate in reporting bugs during the time
remaining before the release of KDE 4.0 in December.

Meanwhile, preparations for the KDE 4.0 release events are ongoing, with the main event taking place January 2008 in Mountain View, California USA. Make sure you don't miss it!

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Comments

by bele (not verified)

New dock is so cool ... can't really wait for KDE 4!

by Fred (not verified)

Cool, are there any screenshot's of this on the Net?

by Anon (not verified)

Better - aseigo has a screencast, which should be released as part of this week's commit-digest!

by Fred (not verified)

but, but, but...I want it NOW!!

:-)

by Plop (not verified)

Please please please... Publish this week's commit-digest, pleasseeeee !!! :)

by Rudolhp (not verified)

im using the svn version.

many people says that kde3.0 was untable, full of bug and that kde will be the same, but kde4 look really stable, some parts crash, but the are apps like juk, kwin4 like composite works without problems, dolphin stable, i have hope that when kde4.0 is released can be used like kde3.5.x.

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

> are apps like juk

remember that kde3 apps work just fine in kde4 sessions. yesterday i accidently launched konqueror from kde3 and it took me a few moments to figure out why it looked so odd, even if the rendering viewport was updating better. ;)

> can be used like kde3.5.x

well, it'll be usable for day to day work. 3.5 was rather polished, though. but yeah, you should be able to get by just fine =)

by Rudolhp (not verified)

>remember that kde3 apps work just fine in kde4 sessions. yesterday i accidently launched konqueror from kde3 and it took me a few moments to figure out why it looked so odd, even if the rendering viewport was updating better. ;)

juk from kde4 ;)

by André (not verified)

Congratulations to all contributors of KDE 4 on reaching this milestone! Excellent work, and I'm looking forward to a splendid KDE 4 series.

by Ben (not verified)

I too wish to offer my Congratulations.

by Sepp (not verified)

First: Thanks to all the KDE-Devs for your hard work! I'm shure KDE4 will rock!

I'm currently switching back from Kubuntu to Debian unstable. It's been a while, since I last used Sid, so here my question: are RC-Packages uploaded to unstable, or just to experimental?
Hopefully the Debian KDE maintainers release a new livecd with RC1-Packages soon (currently beta4):
http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde4livecd.html

by Anonymous (not verified)

Why not use the openSUSE based one?

by Quique (not verified)

Maybe because he intends to run KDE on Debian?

The most plataforms this RC is tested on, the most bugs will be discovered and ironed.

Besides, the Debian KDE maintainers have done a top-notch work while packaging the betas, identifying a number of problems.

Sepp: I'm afraid it will take a while for KDE 4.0 to land on Sid...

by Juhani Lyly (not verified)

Good, but not boot it Suse live-cd to me
sorry my 'english'

by Iñaki Baz (not verified)

Because Debian is better than Suse? XD

by Rob (not verified)

I switched from SuSe to Debian a year ago, and now I ask myself: Why did I wait so long?!

by Leo S (not verified)

They are only in experimental. However you can run them very easily. Add the experimental repos to your sources.list, then start aptitude with aptitude -t experimental, and upgrade all your KDE packages to 3.9.96. When I upgraded from KDE3 to KDE4 beta 3, it more or less hosed my KDE installation, and I had to force some packages to install manually with dpkg. However it is getting better and better, so soon you should be able to run all the KDE3 apps side by side with the kde4 versions.

At the moment, most of RC1 is there.. Still waiting for oxygen icons package to be able to upgrade kdebase, but everything else upgraded fine.

by Moritz Moeller-... (not verified)

Do kmail and digikam (both KDE3) still work if I upgrade to KDE4 in Debian?

What do you mean by "hosed"?

by Leo S (not verified)

Hosed as in "I had to uninstall a lot of KDE3 apps because they conflicted with KDE4 packages". Not sure if this is still the case

Seems like digikam and kmail can be used side by side with KDE4. Not 100% sure because I don't use them myself. However some apps (yakuake for example) will not conflict but will no longer run (crashes on start).

by G2g591 (not verified)

now the only conflicts are kcontrol, kdebase-bin-kde3, kdesktop, kformula, and kpersonalizer. Oh and the oxygen icon package is now in experimental also. I intend to be totally insane and go fully experimental and unstable.

by Sepp (not verified)

Thanks, I'll try it that way, then. I currently have a fresh install anyway, so if things go seriously wrong, I can wipe my HD and start again...

by fogge (not verified)

Congratulations guys, I am using an svn version updated an hour ago and it rocks! The only small problems I see are:
a) System tray is WIP
b) Krunner dialog looked nicer in last weeks version
c) Still can't drag 'widgets' to the bottombar (which is immovable)
d) Location bar height has been squeezed to < font height in Konq
e) Okular will not show PS in the window but in a tiny separate window.
These are mostly cosmetic problems and are clearly obvious to the talented developers (so I don't clutter bugs.kde with them). This is just to forewarn those who will be testing this Beta.

Looking good guys! - Especially with the dark 'Wonton Soup' colorscheme for those of us who value our retinas ;)

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

a) System tray is WIP

yep. getting closer every day now though.. it positions itself properly on screen even. ;)

b) Krunner dialog looked nicer in last weeks version

it's just a different SVG showing that krunner is more properly themable, following along with the other plasma bits, now.

c) Still can't drag 'widgets' to the bottombar (which is immovable)

you can now, but it's still not movable by the user (it is movable though in the code ;)

d) Location bar height has been squeezed to < font height in Konq

being addressed right now on k-c-d; qt style issues

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Looks like the day I'm goind to do the switch to 4 is coming near.
Just some questions about KDE4, so I can decide if RC1 is for me:

- Does it use much more resources than 3? I have a small duron 1.6Ghz with 512 RAM, you know.
- is it stable enought to at least run without crashing without user interaction? (I mean, opening ktorrent and letting the box downloading) :)

by Rudolhp (not verified)

im testing from bet3 and feels really stable. the problemas are the non main apps, like juk, okular, the fails, not often, but fails.

by SSJ (not verified)

CPU is rarely the bottleneck nowadays, do here are some informal mem stats. Here, "memory use" is defined as the entry in the "used" column and the "-/+ buffers/cache:" row in the output of free -m. Note that I use my own custom Qemu VM image, so there is some overhead - in particular, it uses the KDE3 KDM. The KDE4 install was compiled with maximum debugging info, then all executables were stripped with objdump.

- X + KDM only (baseline): 34M
- Boot to default Plasma, with background (+wallpaper), panel, klipper, Kickoff and Clock: 76M
- As above, but with a Konsole open (2 tabs), very small KWord (alpha still!) document, very small kwrite document, and Konqueror with one tab open to dot.kde.org - 142MB.

So I think it's using slightly more than KDE3 at the moment (although if someone running KDE3 could repeat the experiment and give numbers, that would be great!), but considering the devs are mainly at the Make It Work/ Make it Work Well phase, rather than the Make it Work Fast (and Light), I think it's doing pretty OK. IIRC, KWord took up a big chunk of this, which comes as no surprise as it is still alpha.

So 512MB should be fine, I'd say :)

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Thanks a lot for the info!
Looks like I'll have the chance to test kubuntu's packages :D

by Ben (not verified)

CPU is an issue for some people, e.g. the teams that refurbish old donated hardware with Linux and give it to the needy. (and no, I can't say I'm one of them) So it shouldn't be ignored.

by Kyo (not verified)

CPU is an issue with my wife. She has a 750 Mhz Duron machine with 512 MB RAM. Now she is using KDE 3.5.8 and it's not fast but fast enough. I would like to put KDE 4 on her computer but, if it is much slower that 3.5 I won't change it over. I guess I'll stop upgrading her box before KDE 4 goes into Lenny (now I upgrade it with apt-get from time to time).

It's not that we are poor; we can afford to buy her a new computer but she wouldn't want to buy one when she's getting along just fine with what she has.

by André (not verified)

I think you shouldn't count on KDE 4.0 being as fast and optimized as 3.5.8. It will get better over time as things stabilize a bit, but I think the focus for 4.0 is on getting it to work, not on getting it to work fast.

by Anon (not verified)

Indeed. Note in particular that KDE3.0 was hardly a speed (or not-using-much-memory) demon when released, but steadily got lighter and lighter as time went on.

by Richard (not verified)

I tried beta 4 and last barely a few hours with it because it was considerably slower than 3.5. Eating up large amounts of memory, so hopefully that has improved.

by Emil Sedgh (not verified)

Congratulations.Everyone, This Is The Result Of Many Years Of Development Of A Huge Community.This Is The Moment That We Were All Waiting For!

(My experience: Applications are in a good shape, stable and usefull.but Workspace needs the last bits...oxygen, plasma and kwin need some little things to be done)

by duSoo (not verified)

great work, guys... today, i updated svn and i couldn't belevie my eyes! it's so wonderful! thank you a lot

P.S.: after locking the screen i can't get back, so i have to restart X, my password isn't accepted at all.. not a disaster, but... :)

by Chippy (not verified)
by Michael (not verified)

Interesting that this bug appears here again. I don't use KDE4 and had this problem for ages with Kubuntu. After every "apt-get upgrade" the problem was back again and I had to do a CHMOD on that file. I always thought it was a distro problem and a little bit annoyed that they didnt solve this seemingly simple bug for years.

by Luke Anderson (not verified)

If you ever find yourself in this annoying situation, try logging in as root from a VT and typing:

killall kdesktop_lock

Hope they fix it soon :)

by mactalla (not verified)

Thanks for all the hard work, everyone! (devs, artists, documentation teams, etc)

by Shuss (not verified)

I second that.
Thanks for all this.

you made my day, and my desktop :D

by nae (not verified)

Yes, thank you all for all the hard work (and patience).

by Anonymous Coward (not verified)

The dot needs an update. See
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=152375

Dear dotties, please vote and hope ;-)

by anonymous (not verified)

I think this is the lowest priority for now.
This site uses slashcode (some old version i guess), it does the job well enough. Even though i'm a hardcore KDE user and like eye-candy, i don't see any reason to "upgrade" the site to a different back-end.

by Andreas (not verified)

No it isn't, it's based on squishdot(http://www.squishdot.org), which is based on Zope(http://www.zope.org).

by Fred (not verified)

Well, it IS kind of weird that akregator can't get the story contents in a "normal" way. I would like to see better RSS support

by Bobby (not verified)

I am a bit surprised that Calamity isn't written with K. I really admire you guy's fantasies though.
Thanks for you great work and the fun in it :)

by Debian User (not verified)

They started recently to always use names with "C", making fun of the old "K" naming habit. Expect more such names now. :-)

Yours,
Kay

by doeppjakab (not verified)

I guess that should be "Cay" :-)

I'm also very excited, and can't wait to get the stable release. Have any of you installed the RC on Slackware 12 (or Slamd64 12)?

Jim

by Wyatt (not verified)

Personally I second this. The rampant K-ing of things has always titillated this editor.

by Ben (not verified)

Its a joke about the constant use of Ks

I think they'll be back to Ks as soon as the betaing is over.