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 Dan (not verified)

I'm having trouble accessing this repository, i put it in my sources.list file and it shows up fine in synaptic, but after I update sources it doesn't register a new version of KDE and still says the newest version is 3.3.2

Thanks

Dan

by IvanSanchez (not verified)

That's because that packages are marked as experimental, not as testing or even unstable. You must edit /etc/apt/apt.conf in order to set your "current release" to experimental and be able to upgrade seamlessly.

However, this has a drawback: apt/synaptic/aptitude will try to install the experimental packages of any other tool. Be sure to upgrade KDE and just KDE in order to avoid unnecesary risks.

by Giacomo (not verified)

F**k, they should have written it somewhere. I spent the whole night basically version-forcing any package I had to install... :/

by LuckySandal (not verified)

or you could just use KPackage, which doesn't care about the release

by josel (not verified)

Ubuntu has them as of today

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary universe

by Dan (not verified)

will these work on Mepis Linux (based on debian)?

by josel (not verified)

I think they will. I have before been mixing kanotix, knoppix and debian debs on ubuntu without any problem. Its pretty much debian unstable with adaptments at the moment-
You could backup your .kde dir and add the ubuntu repository. If anything goes wrong reinstall from your old repository after removing the ubuntu one. That should fix eventual problems.

by Anonymous (not verified)

I just want to say thank you!
If it's as good as RC1, and I'm sure it will, it just rocks!

by ac (not verified)

There was talk about a feature guide with flash movies (http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-promo&m=110752276523698&w=2). Is this still coming?

A more visual "what's new" like the GNOME guys did for 2.10 (http://www.gnome.org/start/2.10/notes/rnwhatsnew.html) would be really nice. Instead of just linking to the very incomplete, former 3.4 feature plan.

Where are all the non-developer contributors who would like to help KDE when you need them? ;)

by Frank Dux (not verified)

Yes, a feature guide is in the works and should be out shortly, depending on the developer's free time.

by Alex (not verified)

I don't see any screenshots in the screenshots section of KDE.org. Is this still in the works?

by arekm (not verified)

Flash viewer is so architecture dependant product. Example - there is no flash for linux-ppc! No other, more open ways to make nice feature guide?

by Christian Loose (not verified)

I'm already happy that there might be a feature guide at all. So for me use whatever you want.

by Ted (not verified)

Just installed KDE 3.4 from Suse RPMs. When I use Konqueror for web browsing there is this very annoying animation when I try to use the mouse scrollwheel. Weirdly, it's not there in file management mode! Anyone knows how to switch it off?

Thanks.

by Gentoo (not verified)

If you want to have no problems on installing KDE, you should stop using Suse and start using a real distro like GENTOO or Debian.

I was a SUSE user since 6.1 but then I saw the light!!!!

Cheers!

GENTOO

by ralph (not verified)

Argh, how incredibly helpful.

And what on earth is a real distro? One that enlargens your epenis?
Btw., look at the many kde-3.4 threads on forums.gentoo.org and tell me again that people don't have problems with upgrading kde on gentoo.

To the grandparent, sorry for taking this OT and unfortunately I don't have any idea how to help you, but I just couldn't resist answering this annoying troll.

Ralph (Gentoo and Kubuntu user, btw.)

by Scott Wheeler (not verified)

Y3AH! GENTOO! DEFINITELY COOLER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE! MORE INFO HERE!

http://www.funroll-loops.org/

by Max Howell (not verified)

CHECK THIS ONE OUT TOO!11!!1

http://www.taglib-sucks-big-bum.com/omglolbbq/

;-)

by hgg (not verified)

I had the same problem yesterday, today I've noticed that the packages had been updated, after installing the new packages the problem went away.

I'm using:

kdebase3-3.4.0-12 and kdelibs3-3.4.0-11 on SuSE 9.2

only move to trash? Bug or feature?

by Kevin Krammer (not verified)

(Usability-) feature.

You can enable the action which deletes directly (bypassing the trash) in Konqueror's settings.

Or use SHIFT+DEL

Configure Konqueror -> Behavior -> Show 'Delete' ...

by Douglas (not verified)

Are there binaries for slackware ?

by fast_rizwaan (not verified)

Yes, it seems that Slackware binaries are late these days :(

by Douglas (not verified)

Yes...

i think that they will be released soon, but im wishing to much to use then.

by JC (not verified)

Hi all,

I'm the one who provides Slack packages for several years, and theses days I'm pretty busy (2 work + a new born) and have no time for kde and Slack. So I won't provide packages anymore i guess. :(

Jean-Christophe

by JC (not verified)

Or all of you guys, can send me some money over paypal and I will buy a laptop to be able to redo packages :)

by Pierre-Étienne ... (not verified)

I'd be interested to build KDE Slackware packages... If you could write a quick howto to build them (I guess you build the packages first using Konstruct, then you package them?), I'd be happy to provide them ! You can reply to this or e-mail me !

by ra1n (not verified)

I've done some packaged of 3.3.2 compiled with patches from kde-look.org and compiled with some libraries from dropline gnome 2.8(fam pam and openldap mainly) and other libs (like libidn for jabber) and OO.o 1.1.3 with kde integration I plan of making 3.4 pkgs too for 10.1 and based on dropline gnome 2.10 libraries
http://developer.berlios.de/projects/kdeslack/

by ra1n (not verified)

it's my first creation so please be gentle :-P it still lacks a home page because I need to find some spare time to make it, also this release targets slackware 10.0 (but probably can work on 10.1 too)

by John SUSE Freak (not verified)

First of all, I think the guys at SUSE are doing a wonderful job. They released binaries for the betas and RCs, and up until now I've been able to keep my old SUSE 8.2 pretty up to date, KDE included. It's really great to see a distro supporting their users for free for such a long time, right now they're handling 8.2, 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2!!

That said, take some care if you're upgrading SUSE 8.2 as there are some minor problems. One of them is that not all the rpms are provided, for instance kdebase is still 3.3.2 as well as the graphics packages. I hope it's just a matter of time. Still I'm already using many kde 3.4 packages like kdelibs, and other base libs like qt and arts, as well as multimedia, networking, and game packages. All works fine and I even noticed a speed increase. Everything feels smoother.

Now another problem is the libspeex dependency in kdemultimedia3. It's pretty weird, it asks for something like libspeex-0.99.so. It should in fact look for libspeex.so.1. It think they've mess that up. I've installed the rpm for SUSE 9.0 instead and all worked fine, so you might want to try that. That ended up leave me wondering if installing other 9.0 packages that I'm still missing in 8.2 would work too :) But for now I decided to wait.

Good luck!

by John SUSE Freak (not verified)

Just to make sure that was clear, I installed the kdemultimedia package for 9.0, not speex. The speex version in SUSE 8.2 is enough.

by andy (not verified)

Is there a yast source somewhere or have you got to install the packages manually?

by John SUSE Freak (not verified)

Did you read my post ;)

by Anonymous (not verified)

Yes, but replied to the wrong post.

by John SUSE Freak (not verified)

Hmm nevermind that talk about speex, seems like they got it right. I'm the one who's using a too recent speex version which I got from packman... anyway using SuSE 9.0 rpm for kdemultimedia3 worked fine. I'm also using SUSE 9.0 packages in 8.2 for kpdf and other graphics packages, kdeutils and a cuple more things. KDVI didn't work though, so I'm stiking with the one from 3.3.2 for now.

I tried the Core 3 RPMs but it complained about a number of dependencies. Do I need to do "yum "update" before installing these RPMs?

Maybe this will help:

Add the kde-redhat repo to you yum directory, you can downloaded it from http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat/fedora/kde-redhat.repo

create a new .repo repository with:
[kde-3.4]
name=Kde 3.4
baseurl=http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/kde/stable/3.4/contrib/kde-redhat...
enabled=1

I havent tried because I downloaded the hole thing, but it just might work

by slavka (not verified)

Hi! I've just installed 3.4 from SUSE rpms.
Kicker now looks much better, but I can't drop anything on panel, right-clicking it brings only Help menu.
What's this?

by slavka (not verified)

And when I try to move it on top or just enlarge it through Control Center, nothing happens!

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

sounds like you've got your kickerrc locked down. look for [$i] in your local or systemwide kickerrc.

by slavka (not verified)

Nothing of a kind in ~/.kde/share/config/kickerrc.
Is it really $i?

by Aaron J. Seigo (not verified)

that's what locks it down, yes. [$i] ... perhaps there's such a thing in the system default kickerrc. to know for sure, try starting kde as a new user and if their panel is non-configurable as well then it'll be a lock down somewhere in the global settings.

by Roumen Semov (not verified)

Guys,
Thank you for all the development efforts you have put into this. KDE is my favorite project out there.
Congratulations!
Roumen Semov

by Anonymous (not verified)

Thanks for bringing us the most exciting DE ever!

There was a nice collection of interviews with the developers some years ago... what about a new round?? I'm really curious to virtually meet the people behind KDE :)

by Macavity (not verified)

Me too! I'm especially interested in what the developers think is good and bad about the social "feel" of the KDE project. It has become increasingly clear to me that the succes of an opensource project depends much more on the interaction between the contributers, then on how "hardcore" the "hackers" are.

How are personality-strong individuals dealt with/cared for?
Are there problems with peeple being afffectionate about their code?
How are trolls on the devel-ml handled?
Which personal characteristics are in general high esteem among the inner circle of the developers?

etc. etc. ;-)

I think these are important questions to answer, since i find that a lot of the (esp. younger) die-hard kde-fans are very quick to pick up on the jargon. I think that a bit more focus to this subject could help the KDE project become even more outstanding when it comes to friendliness. I stress this because I find a great many of the other projects directly hostile towards its users... Not to mention users who are generally hostile/rude towards everything and everyone...

~Macavity

P.S.: Can't wait to try out 3.4!!!

I'm sorry but I have to disappoint you all.

Most of you will have heard the news that Waldo is leaving Novell/SUSE/KDE on March 31 to pursue a new careerpath. Intel approached him and has offered him a exciting position as Linux Desktop Architect which he has accepted.
Which also means he will stop his KDE development work and we both will be moving on to new pastures. Since he will no longer be involved in the KDE community it will be difficult for me to keep up to date of what's happening and what's hot within the developers/contributors world.

Therefor there will be no new People Behind KDE interviews. I will hand over the People Behind KDE website to the KDE-NL guys who are hosting the site and who I admire very much and know they will do the right thing.

I want to take this opportunity and thank you all for a hectic and intense 6 years, it has been interesting ;-)
Until we meet again!

--
Tink
France

by ac (not verified)

A job as Linux Desktop Architect which doesn't involve KDE?