KDE 3.1.1: It's Not Odd at All!

The KDE Project has released KDE 3.1.1, the first maintenance release of the KDE 3.1 release series. It features more and much improved translations and many problem corrections. Read the Changelog
or jump directly to the download links. Those of you who wish to compile from source can use Konstruct for near automatic compilation.

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Comments

by josh_stern (not verified)

TeXmacs, http://www.texmacs.org/ is interesting for people who want to do latex type stuff in a WYSIWYG type way.

by Rithvik (not verified)

Still I would love to use Lyx to typeset my document and then tweak it by export to kword. I have faced some minor cosmetic problems in a report I had typed in LyX. I did not know how to correct the problems without tweaking the latex code (which I'm not familiar with). I simply love the consistency of output from lyx/latex and the speed and automation, but minor problems do crop up.

Lyx 1.3.1 is out now and the website says it has an improved Qt frontend. I wish they had an option to export to kword. Best of both. Maybe kword will not have cross-references/indexing etc features (and document consistency, most importantly) which lyx or latex excel in. But it certainly does better in the WYSIWYG dept (minor, per page, adjusting problems and annoyances) and for quickly writing a small letter etc.

I would like to know if kword can import Lyx documents. Heard of a PDF import filter for kword recently, and maybe a latex import?

by Matej Cepl (not verified)

> and for quickly writing a small letter etc.

I cannot believe anything want any WYSIWYG editor after ever trying
letter/scrltr style for LaTeX (all of them have LyX layout files
available).

Matej

by Rithvik (not verified)

Haven't tried it yet. Thanks for the suggestion.

I still feel small documents could be more easily handled by kword though. A one page letter need not be sent through the latex typesetting system,( previewed through the dvi viewer ) and then printed. It could be better done directly on a WYSIWYG processor. Same goes for presentations, where look is everything.
Where consistency counts more than mere looks, like a professional document (thesis, journal or legal document), LyX and latex are the way to go. (Formal letters do come under this catagory, but they are small enough to be handled by WYSIWYG, unless they are too rigid in structure).
The DTP-like features of kword come in handy here too. So if I have that nice book typeset using lyx and want to give it a fancy cover with wordart and eye-candy, I could use kword. Kword should really concentrate on this.
The only part of the modern LyX-Qt that I don't like is integration with Koffice. Apart from the above mentioned things, I would have liked to embed kivio or karbon14 artwork directly in LyX instead of using xfig, export to eps-latex and then embed. That's why I'm looking forward for kLyX.
Maybe someday they will develop KalyX (KLyX resurrected and integrated in KOffice) and a DTP-like wordprocessor Korolla (kword enhanced to work with former). Then we would have a real Whorl (hope u know yr botany;)

by Matej Cepl (not verified)

Could you please contact me via email? I would love to discuss with
you personally. Thanks.

Matej

by AC (not verified)

... focus-follows-mind ...

That's one technology that could get a lot of people into a lot of trouble.

by Johannes Wilm (not verified)

Well there is lyx (1.0.3) and it even has a qt-frontend.
The only problem have with programs such as scribus and lyx is that they don't use the kde-icons and the kde-file-dialog . And that makes it really imossible to push them unto Joe User, who doesn't understand anything but the standard kde-fd.

Does anybody know whether there are plans to get qt-apps to integrate closer with kde-apps?

by Rithvik (not verified)

lyx 3.1.1 is ... (oops, beg pardon, carried away:) lyx 1.3.1 is out now.

by Eva Brucherseifer (not verified)

There is an excellent KDE-editor for TeX called kile (http://perso.club-internet.fr/pascal.brachet/kile/). We use it on a regular basis at our lab.

And thanks for the font-link I am already installing ;-)

Greetings,
eva

by hmmm (not verified)

As nothing is perfect, I must add that those are unaccented fonts... Which annoys me to no end (that is, unless I am to write english). Thus, I am still looking for those very same fonts, but the European version.

I have not yet lost all hope, as there exists indeed the accented version (in PS type 1 format). But for reasons as yet undetermined kfontinst will not install them properly...

by Randall Wood (not verified)

If I'm reading this right, as of 27 April 2003, development of Kile has been stopped. What the heck happened? Kile looked like a great piece of software. Burnout?

by KDE User (not verified)

If you ask the author and find out, let us know.

http://perso.club-internet.fr/pascal.brachet/

by Dan (not verified)

LyX (www.lyx.org) now has a QT-based frontend. It gives you the power of LaTeX but looks like a word processor so is easy to use. I used it for my PhD thesis and it was great!

Dan

by Secondsun (not verified)

I just finished installing 3.1 yesterday using Gentoo on a p2 300. (3 day compile time, if anyone can find ways to shorten that email me [email protected])

But anyway cudos to KDE team. It is the reason windows isn't my main OS.

by Me (not verified)

If you have a fast machine or machines at your disposal you can build binary packages for your packages.

CFLAGS="..." CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}" emerge -b kde*

emerge -k kde*

or something like that.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Use -B (capital B) to only build packages, and not merge. -b builds a package and merges it. It would be nice though for people with slower machines, if they could just download precompiled packages. (I build them for my slower machines, but not everyone has that luxury of course.)

by Blue (not verified)

Use Debian instead. I'm sure you can get it up & running in less than 3 days.

by Janne (not verified)

I switched from Debian to Gentoo, and never looked back. People often say to Gentoo-users "Maybe you should run Debian, then you don't have to compile so much". But many run Gentoo BECAUSE of the compiling, not despite it. And of course, there's alot of other things in Gentoo that attarct users as well.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Thanks for providing diffs from 3.1 to 3.1.1 for the source tarballs!

by Anonymous (not verified)

I read nowhere that 3.1.0 is overly plagued by bugs and there was no one asking daily here when 3.1.1 will be released although it was delayed compared to the release schedule. So KDE 3.1.0 must have been a good release. :-)

by yes (not verified)

the time spend in release candidate paid in the end

3.1.0 is very stable and useable !

thank

by aleXXX (not verified)

Hi,

unfortunately it seems that my latest fixes to the smbro-ioslave (the smb ioslave which doesn't link to libsmbclient.so) didn't make it into 3.1.1.
For those of you who have problems with this ioslave: either update kdebase/kioslave/smbro/ from cvs (HEAD or KDE_3_1_BRANCH) or get it as a single package from http://www.neundorf.net/src/smbro-3.1.tar.bz2

Bye
Alex

by Haakon Nilsen (not verified)

Konstruct is quite nice. Haven't used it before, but thought I'd use it to finally upgrade from KDE 3.1rc2 :)

However, it seems many of the mirrors it tries to download from still haven't got KDE 3.1.1. I have had to restart it several times (fortunately, it doesn't start again from scratch each time!). Minor annoyance.

Wouldn't it be VERY cool to wrap Konstruct in a nice KDE gui (don't talk to me about chickens and eggs! ;) that not only runs Konstruct and visualizes it nicely (think progress bars), but also parses errors and tries to suggest which packages you lack? For instance, I got the error that some cdda_*.h files weren't found, and had to research which rpms I lacked. This GUI could even be integrated with apt (which I have for my RH8) and urpmi to download missing libraries automagically! It should be feasable to make a "knowledge database" which is a function from "possible things that can go wrong" to "ways to solve it" (most often installing a missing library package). In addition, the GUI would let you set all kinds of options in the gar.conf.mk file. Wouldn't this be a killer argument for installing KDE and keeping it updated? I know Nick Betcher were working on a nice GUI installer like this, but it's complex when you have to worry about the low-level details such as locating and downloading source, unpacking, starting the build system etc etc... Konstruct does all this now, the GUI only needs the high-level logic.

I know I should put my money where my mouth is (that's a strange expression, I may have got it wrong), but I'm not a killer C++ God. If I get more free time, this may be the excuse I need to learn C++ more actively, perhaps :)

by OUSpirit (not verified)

> I know I should put my money where my mouth is...
No, you got it right :)

by Thorsten (not verified)

In a perfect world Konstruct should do the following.

cd konstrunct
./configure
make
make install

konstruct

Konstruct should be able to compile w/o any dependencies and get ALL the KDE dependencies right and compile KDE for you. All with a nice GUI once these libs are available of course.

In a less then perfect world a nice graphical tool that will download and install it all for you would still be very pleasing.

Some more cents of mine:
- Easy interface for other projects to configure konstruct so that developers can provide an easy way for people to get progs running without going through RPM Hell or provide a dozen or so rpms just for the major distros.

- Mechanism for security updates with minimum use of band with and compile time (May be as in just get the diff patch the source and compile the relevant parts)

Cheers,
Thorsten

by Marco Puszina (not verified)

just wondering if someone else got problems with css and konq 3.1.1?

e.g. http://bytesex.org/xawtv/ looks reaaaaaaaaly strange... when changing css handling to user spezified everything looks ok ..

rgds
marc'O

http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3064
Until all these issues are solved, KDE and Linux will remain labeled as "unusable on the desktop" by the mass media.

Don't get too excited, there's still a lot of work to be done.

Well, I know you use GNOME and that you agree on what's written on OSNews.com but those who use KDE actually belive that KDE is totally usable as desktop. The total success of KDE today is because it's the way as is NOW. I for my personal opinion don't like to see KDE suck down the way GNOME suck these days.

Well, I know you use GNOME and that you agree on what's written on OSNews.com but those who use KDE actually belive that KDE is totally usable as desktop
While it is easy to dismiss many authors, sometimes, it is better to examine closely what is said. Think about Linux and when MS showed that it had certain flaws. It was overcome and made to blaze. In this context, think about this author. Yes, some of what she says is crap and very subjective, but some may be valid and of great use.

Whether I use GNOME is irrelevant. GNOME itself is irrelevant. KDE is *not* ready yet. OSNews critisizes GNOME as being worse than KDE but that doesn't make KDE acceptable enough. KDE is bad, GNOME is worse than bad, but KDE is still bad.

> GNOME is worse than bad, but KDE is still bad.

Hmm, people that i know of that have *really tried* (more than 10 minutes) KDE think it's the best desktop they've ever used. Therefore i have to say that i deeply disagree, it's very much usable as it is. As a matter of fact, i think that give it a little bit of additional commercial software, distribution agnostic easy (read: GUI based) software installation process and we're in the mainstream. Big time.

I like to agree with you. Saying that KDE is not ready, just to express the frustrations over GNOME is not nice. I personally think that KDE is pretty much ready as Desktop Environment. I tend to say that it's in some cases far superior over commercial alternatives.

Then you tell me why sites like OSNews.com or all those "Linux reviews" out there mark Linux and KDE down as "not ready for the desktop"!
KDE may be the best desktop for you geeks, but not for Joe Average. OSNews.com and other sites have stated that over and over.

"Saying that KDE is not ready, just to express the frustrations over GNOME is not nice."

There you go again: you ignore constructive critism against KDE, and blames everything on GNOME. GNOME HAS GOT NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS! Stop your elitist attitude and start realizing that KDE IS NOT PERFECT FOR AVERAGE USERS!

> "Linux reviews" out there mark Linux and KDE down as "not ready for the desktop"!

As I see it, most of this comes from not-too-well productified linux distributions concerning desktop use. This is really not KDEs fault. Installation process is pretty good on most of the distributions by now, but 'every day usage' for joe average is painful. Usually this comes down to two things: installing new software is far more difficult than clicking setup.exe and administration tools are not a) easy enough b) robust enough c) coherent enough (similar metaphors between distributions are needed). YaST on the other hand is quite far, but there's always 'some little clitch' that makes Joe Average to give up on it.

Hmm, I wonder if it would be possible to create a generic application installer for KDE. Would be really nice.

Agreed. I've tried SuSE 8.2 with KDE for over a month now. The biggest issue that drove me back to Windows was the great difficulty in installing new/updated applications. Also little things--cut and paste not working across all applications, applications not rememembering their settings (e.g., size, location). Forget "Joe Average"--Linux isn't even ready for "Joe who knows a fair amount about computers and is willing to give it a good try but doesn't want to make configuring his computer his only hobby."

Because these reviews are written by people who like to see another merged OS such as BeOS or QNX where the Kernel directly boots into an easy to use GUI, without issues of installing drivers and stuff like this. These people have seriously wrong visions and ideas what Linux is meant to be and should seriously use Windows or whatever.

As I stated in my LWN response to this story, many of the issues raised there can't be directly addressed with a multiplatform X environment, anyway, at least to any great degree, while keeping the multiplatform aspect. Integration is a good example. Sure, KDE can and does provide the Linux Kernel Config control panel applet, but that doesn't do much for those using KDE on *BSD, for instance. There's a limit to how OS integrated it pays to get, when the object is to continue to be usable on all sorts of platforms. The same thing goes, but even more so, for consistency. KDE and all X environments continue to support all sorts of non-environment apps, which **WILL** bring consistency scores down, no ifs, ands, or buts, about it.

The one area where KDE excels, and the reason many users and MSWormOS switchers continue to use it today, is in configurability. Yet, even tho Eugenia says KDE is the most configurable of all those evaluated, she only scores it an 8, because she both doesn't like having to deep-dive several layers deep for her config options, and doesn't like hundreds of options on the same level. Well, when something as complex as KDE is as configurable as KDE unappologetically is, there WILL either be multiple layers of diving to do to get to the individual config option, or hundreds of options on the same level. With that many config options, there's simply no way around it. It WILL be one or the other, and she marks KDE down because of it, in the configurability area, even tho she admits it's miles more configurable than most of the competition. What can you do when faced with an evaluator that obviously biased against that sort of configurability, when configurability is unappologetically a goal of your platform, as it is with KDE?

Then again, get this: Even where there isn't a direct GUI option to configure something, Eugenia actually speaks approvingly of sticking it in some obscure registry setting, editable only with specialized tools, rather than in a highly commented plain text file, editable by any text editor you want to use. The other at least makes some sort of sense, for those scared of config options. This makes no sense at all.

Many of us using KDE left MSWormOS in part because it was to constricting -- it didn't allow the sorts of deep config we wanted to do, or made us pay a price for it. We are attacked to KDE for the same reason -- it's configurability.

[E-mail address omitted due to the huge volume of spam I received the last time I posted it here -- I had to shut down that address and start with a fresh one. The spammer address harvesters unfortunately LOVE this site, it would appear.]

by KDE Fanatic (not verified)

Excellent post, good points.

now everyone try this:

Install XP
Install Office 8.0 (you paid 400$ for it)
Install Photoshop
Install Mozilla
Install strange tcl/tk app mandated by company you work for
Install Java applications
Install DOS games
Install client apps (wtf is that written in) for corporate finance application

Now if you can get all that to even *run* tell me if everything is totally consistent down too all the configuration panels and open/save dialogs etc. Remember this is a company with 50BillionUSD ... why isn't is *perfect*?

Answer the question "why" ... Now apply answer to much more open environment of OSS/BSD/Linux/X etc etc

Conduct same tests on MacOX/S with carbon cocoa java etc.

BTW as we all know it is possible to create a totally consistent GUI for Linux/BSD without X ... in fact these exist already. If this were the only stumbling block there'd be no more MS-Windows. BeOS (as the review notes) had a great consistent UI ... BeOS is now dead. Same goes for NeXT. Windows3.1 had possibly the worst GUI ever conceived (esp. compared to OS2 at the time) but which won out?

The stumbling block is hardware vendors and software operating system monopolists. That's it. The rest is peanuts.

"Install XP
Install Office 8.0 (you paid 400$ for it)
Install Photoshop
Install Mozilla
Install strange tcl/tk app mandated by company you work for
Install Java applications
Install DOS games
Install client apps (wtf is that written in) for corporate finance application"

I have a CD thats does all this for me automatically. And its not running gimp software. Your point? Noob.

Huh?? Is that from some Microsoft employee??
Pretending to be unbiased but in fact full of prejudice
and ignorance. I've switched from Windows to KDE about 7 months ago
at home as well as in my office. I have never used or even seen Linux in action before.
Now my experience:

Responsiveness/Speed:
Windows XP's responsiveness may be better than KDE's -
with a Pentium XXII with 200 THz - Or with Big Blue - Perhaps -
I don't know, because I just can't afford such a machine.
I was constantly complaing that my Home computer (1 GHz / 128 MB) was
very slow under Windows XP (fresh install). There was constant HD activity
and starting applications like Word did take quite a while. Everyone was telling
me: 128 MB is not enough! You need more. Instead I installed KDE and everything
works just fine. So - do I really need more? Doesn't matter anymore, KDE does
everything what I need and I'm quite happy I don't hear that disk thrashing anymore
which I thought was normal on a PC.

Stability:
Windows XP is quite stable when you first install it.
With every application you install and uninstall it gets worse.
Corrupted registry, OLE problems, you name it - I know it :-(
And the worst thing: When you search on google you always find lots
of persons with the same problem but nobody has a solution. And nobody
can find a solution because it's closed source.
With Linux I have installed and remove a lot of RPMs and my Linux/KDE machines are still as stable and fast as if they had been freshly installed.

Looks:
My KDE with Noia icons and Liquid even amazes the Mac folks in my company
which is quite an achievement ;-)

Is it "ready for the desktop"?
I think it's quite clear that KDE/Linux can "host" any application at least as
good as - or even better- than Windows. The foundation is definitvely there.
And if you compare Windows XP to Windows 3.1 than Windows 3.1
would have lost. But does that
mean that Windows 3.1 has not been "ready for the desktop". The
whole "ready" thing is quite ridiculous IMO. The only thing that matters is:
Are there enough applications for what you want to do?
An office which mainly wants to write letters can do so without any problem.
On a wider scale: What's really missing IMO is some kind of GIMP with a better
UI. The lack of an web image-editor with a good integrated UI like Adobe ImageReady
or Fireworks is what still lets many of my colleagues boot to Windows.
But forunately ImageReady runs quite well with the latest Wine version.

by joe average (not verified)

Don't feed the troll.
And I believe your name is really spelled FUBAR

by Haakon Nilsen (not verified)

Konstruct is still going here, but i had to remove k3b building from the Makefile as it *just wouldn't build*. I kept getting the error at http://www.lstud.ii.uib.no/~s1027/kde/konstruct-error.txt - it seems to me like a coding error. This is still kde3.1.1, and k3b 0.8.1.

by binner (not verified)

Remove "--enable-final" from apps/k3b/Makefile and you should be fine after a "make buildclean".

by Haakon Nilsen (not verified)

Thanks, worked wonderfully. Maybe --enable-final shouldn't be there in the first place?

by Kev (not verified)

I see the darn Konqueror bug which causes a delay in opening tabs is still there. And all this downloading for naught. It's a valid bug in the bugs database (marked as "unconfirmed") but I couldn't be bothered to find the number again.

Basically opening up a new tab takes 3+ seconds. At least on dialup. This necessitates me using mozilla and I'd love to just stick with Konq.

by binner (not verified)

> I see the darn Konqueror bug [..] but I couldn't be bothered to find the number again.

It's as easy as going to http://bugs.kde.org and clicking on the "Most hated bugs" link. If your most hated bug doesn't appear there, vote for it (you have at maximum 20 votes points per report and 100 per product) and if another user has voted for it too, it will appear magically in this list.

by Kev (not verified)

Hey thanks - I just went and gave it a full 20 since it's the only thing holding me back from using Konq full-time.

by binner (not verified)

This is no bug but a shortcoming of QTabWidget. There is work done atm for a super-duper new tab widget for Qt 3.2/KDE 3.2 which will allow to create a tab before its widget.

by David Faure (not verified)

Hmm, so the problem is that we have to wait for the widget until we create the tab around it? Why don't we use a wrapper widget, that will only get its child when it's available? ... KonqView does that btw, so I'm surprised. Or would this lead to geometry management problems? (in a tab widget, I doubt it...)

by Kev (not verified)

Thanks to everyone for taking a peek at this. The delay really makes the tabs effectively useless. 3 seconds is a conservative estimate. Sometimes it takes 15+ and the secondary problem being that one has to wait for the qeued tab to arrive before requesting another. Just sitting around... waiting...

PS - thank you whoever started making xdeltas for the source tars. This really saves so much time. And while I can't see spending the time to get the Berkeley DB running for xdelta 2.x, versions 1.13 works really well. A big kudos to all.
K