KDE 3.4 is Out

KDE 3.4 has been released today. "After more than a half year of development the KDE Project is happy to be able to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Among the many new features that have been incorporated, the improvements in accessibility are most remarkable." Read the full announcement for an overview of the many changes. You can download source and binary packages from download.kde.org or use the Konstruct automatic build tool.

Lars Stetten from the accessibility user group Linaccess said about the release: "The new accessibility features in KDE 3.4 are an important step for the future, to enable disabled people to get to know the KDE desktop and to join its community."

As well as the new accessiblity features major improvements have been made to KPDF, groupware server support for Kontact and Kopete, HAL support for detection of removable media and the inclusion of Akregator RSS feed reader. In total 6,500 bugs have been fixed and more than 1,700 wishlist items fulfilled.

Many thanks to all of KDE's hard working developers, translators and helpers.

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Comments

by Berkz (not verified)

Any news of a Live-CD?

by Jakob (not verified)

A kubuntu live cd with 3.4 is underway.

by Eike Hein (not verified)

It's a great day for free software.

by Johnny (not verified)

Reading through the KDE 3.4 features list, I noticed this under Base/KWin:

"Support for the XComposite extension through managing a fork of xcompmgr. Including windows translucency depending on window state, configurable window shadows and fading effects on window mapping"

But I don't see anything in the highlights section about this...

Seems to me that if 3.4 introduced true alpha blending & real drop shadows, that would be quite a highlight. I'm guessing that the underlying support is now in place, but other aspects of the system still need to be updated?

Anyone know any details about this?

So, I guess my question is, how close are we to a 3D accelerated KDE with all the eye candy?

by desau (not verified)

It's in there. If you go to window properties you'll see the config screen. When it works, it works quite well (assuming you've got a good video card). It looks great. However, I've found it to be quite unstable (the X extension.. not KDE).. it likes to crash quite often :)

by ch (not verified)

would it be possible to add a "VIDEO" Screenshot ???

i would do it , the flash capture is not good enough i think...

anyone ?

by ac (not verified)

just cool :)

by Robert (not verified)

What's more, the xorg people have not yet got it working with xv or gl. So no accelerated 3d or video at the same time.

by James L (not verified)

It works.

Just it runs the risk of crashing.

(I'm running an nvidia card + drivers, which requires you to specifically enable both if you want both, via:
Option "AllowGLXWithComposite" "true"
as well as turning on XComposite itself. I am running HEAD, and haven't had a crash for quite some time related to that.)

by Ookaze (not verified)

It can crash your X server. I experienced crashes in XFCE (I talk about XFCE because that was the only DE with composite support without patches), where I launch GL games. The game would refuse to run, the screen goes black and then, the X server crashes (and gdm restarts one).
Thet was with the precedent NVidia driver, I have not tested with the new one yet.
I suppose KDE will suffer the same fate if the new NVidia driver did not correct this.

by Melchior FRANZ (not verified)

> Thet was with the precedent NVidia driver, I have not tested with the new one yet.

The most recent one is even crashier. It freezes the server just by running ... tadaa ... ksplash.

by Anonymous (not verified)

If KDE would list it as highlight and it then fails because the underlying support is still experimental and unstable whom do you think would the users blame?

by Martin (not verified)

Not a point IMHO. This might sound a bit harsh and I'm all
for user-oriented ungeeky OSS but by all
means: That's just not how OSS works. And I think that's
a good thing. It's just not how many things in life work today ;-)
You cannot remain unenlightened (i.e. let's face it: stupid) and at the same
time want to have the advantages. You must learn to seperate
the myths from the truth. Or you can say: Oh that's all too complicated
and... pay! So it's OK when KDE strives to be more user-friendly,
but when people activate an *experimental* Composite extension in the
xorg.conf and afterwards complain about KDE, well Good Riddance!
I wont expect any non-commercial entity to support such users in the
near future.
That's just like KDE says it supports i.e. USB 3.0 (just making this up)
and then you plug your cat at an USB port and fry it thoroughly and
complaing afterwards about KDE. That's really out of line if you ask me.

by ch (not verified)

YEAH Lets go for KDE 4 with QT4 and work with trolltech to make the initial qt4 a nice release and perfect fitted for kde.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Sadly by now the influence is limited to bugfixes as Qt4 API freeze was already missed.

by ch (not verified)

so it was an error to make kde 3.4 ? we should habe made kde 4 before the freeze was. but i think if we find serious problems - they will fix them even if they are in a freeze.

when we wait until qt4 ist done , there are facts. so we need another qt-copy branch in kde-cvs - i dont like this qt-copy thingy...

ch

by firephoto (not verified)

http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde-3.5-features.html

always look at what u paste when it comes from a middle click. ;)

by James Richard Tyrer (not verified)

I would like to add to this list:

Fixing the CrystalSVG vs. HiColor/KDEClassic icon theme _mess_.

NOTE: CrystalSVG is really a misnomer since HiColor now supports SVG icons.

We need to have a correct HiColor theme for compliance to the proposed standards:

http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/icon-theme-spec

And YES, I AM volunteering to work on this. I will even try to be the leader if people want that. But, it is going to take a lot of work by a lot of developers to undo the mistakes that have been made.

A first step for applications developers is to try to follow our own standards:

http://developer.kde.org/~larrosa/iconthemes.html

--
JRT

by Romanujan (not verified)

Strange... I thought, taht KDE 4.0 won't be using ARTS...

well, lets hope it really won't use arts, but this so-called 4.0 feature plan seems to be the unfinished leftovers from 3.4 feature plan.
These changes, most possibly, will go into 3.5 (at least for arts- stuff; and if this branch will ever happen)

by ricky (not verified)

what would arts be replaced with? gstreamer?

by Dan Leinir Turt... (not verified)

It will probably be replaced by kdemm, which is a more simple audio system than aRts, in that it only supports simple playback, stop, start and nothing much more. Advanced audio applications would then be based on separate libraries, for example the way amaroK works, or the way JuK supports both aRts and GStreamer. Also, be sure to read this "probably" as the dictionary describes it, noone is really certain yet ;)

by desau (not verified)

Does anyone know who built the Fedora Core 3 RPMS?

by Corbin (not verified)

I believe it was the KDE-RedHat people at http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net

by Rex Dieter (not verified)

The KDE maintainer at redhat made the rpms in the "Fedora" folder. kde-redhat's build is in contrib/kde-redhat

by Al (not verified)

This is a fantastic release, and when people will use it, they will be blown away. Or maybe before that with the Flash demo.

Also, it's kind of bad timing for linspire, they released Five-O with KDE 3.3.2 a day before KDE 3.4 was out.

by vrabcak (not verified)

The same for Mandrakelinux. New versions freeze for 10.2 was only 8 days ago :-(

by Luke Chatburn (not verified)

Do remember that disties need at at least a month or so in order to compile and test KDE and other major apps for their releases. Mandrake especially spends a lot of time working at creating and applying patches to smooth things over, before releasing. They don't just download, compile and then dump things on the user :)

by superstoned (not verified)

that's true. but they knew KDE 3.4 was coming. they should have done as SuSE did, wait so they could deliver KDE 3.4 to their users...

by Joe Lorem (not verified)

Don't forget, GNOME missed a SuSE freeze date by 1 day not so long ago.

At least, this is reassuring that SuSE is still KDE-biased :)

by Anonymous (not verified)

> GNOME missed a SuSE freeze date by 1 day not so long ago.

I think that's a myth. No distributions let's a release enter before having tested betas/release candidates for weeks before.

by superstoned (not verified)

but the last suse release didn't include gnome 2.8, while it could have...

but me likes the KDE bias, too :D

by Roland Wolf (not verified)

A phantastic release. KDE 3.4 brings the spring to your computer. My favorit improvements:
- KPDF rulez, no more need for Adobe's clumsy Acrobat viewer
- Konqueror file browser is very fast now (all file previews switched off)
Thank you KDE team!

Roland Wolf

by Matt (not verified)

Way to go KDE!!!

I can hardly wait till my distro ships it.

But, I am confused, is 3.5 next or 4.0. And please don't tell me it's being developed in parallel because that is insane!

by Morty (not verified)

Hopefully there will be no more confusion and insanity in the development process than usuall. Next is 3.5, but this will mostly be an applications release with only minimal changes to the libs. This will give the developers who work on the core libs, time to stabilize the API for 4.0 prior to the porting of most of the applications. It also gives the application developers ability to work on new features, and they don't have to work against constantly changing libraries. Most of the application developers don't do much work in the libs, so insted of sitting around waiting for the libraries to stabilize for 4.0 they do 3.5.

by Matthew Robinson (not verified)

there's many different idea's how to do this. The most sane i have heard is do 3.5, wait until qt4 is released and stable, then develop kde4 then, hopefully with some help from trollteck, although i dont think anybody has asked them if they would (presumably the developers would be free after finishing a major release and a good kde4 would help them advertise their product too).

Thats the best idea in my opinion, although it would require trollteck to donate developers which im not so sure they would do (fair enough, they're paying for their dev's)

by José Costa (not verified)

is there any project porting the config files of KDE to LDAP?

it would be wonderfull if i could configure many kde desktops with openldap.
using openldap + kiosk would be excelent and easy to administer like windows 2000 Active Directory.

by AnonymousCoward (not verified)

Ask Buchan Milne (google for his address or check cooker(at)linux-mandrake.com), he has been LDAP'izing everything he can.

by cm (not verified)

Has this work been done on the stock KDE code or is this Mandrake-specific?

by MoobyFR (not verified)

Yes this could be an excellent solution to manage large part of KDE desktop :)

by José Costa (not verified)

well, i've added to the Wish List :D

http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101716

by idlecat (not verified)

Next step, it will be packaged into rpms and be used by all my colleague.
Can not wait:)
I bet there must be many people downloading. So slowwwww

by ac (not verified)

uhm, does anyone know a source of debian/unstable packages...?

by kig (not verified)

Packaging is now being tested here:
http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kde-3.4.0/
(most of it is done, base, pim, graphics, network, multimedia, etc.)

Apt-get upgrade as usual, no problems.

Mailing-list about packaging efforts is there:
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-kde-talk/

I'm using it right now, feels fairly alright, though there are a few problems with kdm, but a fix is mentioned in the mailing-list archives.

HTH.

by ac (not verified)

Are these packages compiled with gcc-3.4 using the "hidden symbol" (IIRC) options...?

I ask coz I can not see any speed improvements over KDE 3.3