KDE 3.0Beta1: Ready For a Test Drive

The KDE Project today (OK, yesterday now)
announced
the release of KDE 3.0Beta1. The announcements contains the typical
package locations and summary of changes (visit the
developer's website for
a more detailed list of planned feature additions for
KDE 3.0 and the current progress). Since beta releases always
provide an ideal opportunity for newcomers to get involved and make a difference, the release also provides intriguing suggestions to
those of you who may in the past have pondered, "I really want
to contribute to KDE and help make my favorite desktop even better, but
what can I possibly do?
".

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Comments

by Storm (not verified)

Hmm... they have to work day & night to get that all done :-)

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

Developer:

Oh, I'm a KDE developer
I code all night and I code all day

Dotters:

He's a KDE developer
He codes all night and he codes all day

Developer:

I debug apps, I read my mail
I sync my CVS
On Wednesdays I read the dot
and debate the best of teas

Dotters:

He debugs apps, he reads his mail
He syncs his CVS
On Wednesdays he reads the dot
and debates the best of teas

He's a KDE developer
He codes all night and he codes all day

Developer:

I debug apps, I click my mouse
I like to write up memos
I put on both my suit and tie
and hang around in Redmond

Dotters:

He debug apps, he clicks his mouse
He like to write up memos (confused look)
He puts on both his suit and tie
and hangs around in Redmond?!?!? (horrified looks)

He's a KDE developer
He codes all night and he codes all day

"Developer":

I debug apps, I use Outlook
Visual Basic and notepad
I wish I'd been a paperclip
Just like my dear Papa

"Developer" and Dotters:

He debugs apps? He uses Outlook?!?!?
Visual Basic and notepad?!!?!?!!
(Dotters walk away in disgust)

"Developer":

I wish I'd been a paperclip
Just like my dear Papa

Woman off to the side:

"Oh, Billy, you said you'd *invented* Open Source!! Waaaaa..."

--
Evan

by Jason Hanford-Smith (not verified)

I just read this and it cracked me up... how long did it take you to write that?

The Monty's would have been proud.

--J

by Moritz Moeller-... (not verified)

I gave the SuSE RPMS a spin today. After some tweaking the SuSE binary RPMS let me start KDE3 just fine. Good.

First impressions: Not much has changed. Some little tweaks here or there, some things have become a little faster. No crashes so far. Looks good.

I have found a few little bugs:

No Font AA. Hmmm. My fault? SuSE's fault?
Network broswing (either lan or rlan) still does not work, the old komba2 works.
No Euro currency for Germany (yet?) and the euro key is broken.

What disturbs me is that Kcontrol is still not under control.
Horrible new and old entries there:

What is "Network-SOCKS"? No explanation. "System-XML-RPC"??? How will a newbie react to these? "Talk"?

Peripherals-Keyboard let's me "deactivate keyboard layout". Hmmm, interesting.
How about letting me "deactivate keyboard layout switching"?

Themes and Styles are still seperate, there is no usable way to configure sound events

Hmm, still lots of work to do... Bug reports to write and so on.

Does anyone get font aliasing to work?

From the KDE3 info page ( http://www.kde.org/info/3.0.html ) :

* Apparently there is a bad interaction between kdeinit and XFree86 which causes XRender (and therefore Xft) support to be disabled. It is currently investigated.

by Rob Kaper (not verified)

Restarting kdeinit after KDE launches seems to work somewhat. Applications that are started afterwards have perfect anti-aliasing. Restart kicker, kwin and kdesktop and everything is smooth!

by nq (not verified)

I also had this problem, until I compiled QT (instead of using qt3.0.1 from debian/unstable) myself. That solved many bugs...

by Rob Kaper (not verified)

I also compile Qt (qt-copy) myself, so I wonder if that is really the problem..

One Question about the SuSE RPM's. Do the SuSE RPM's replace the KDE2.2.2 system or is a parallel installation of KDE3beta and KDE 2.2.2 with this RPM's possible? I couldnt find a readme about this on the ftp server.

3.0 does not overwrite 2.2....

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

Does that mean that if I install it on my primary, working, daily use, desktop machine, I should have no problems? In other words - can I just install the RPMs, add a new user, and login from KDM, picking on the dropdown "KDE3", and try it out, and then go back, log in as my normal user, and continue working as normal?

--
Evan "A little nervous to try it, considering I have deadlines crunching my butt" E.

Absolutely. You should have no problems if you read the README file from your distribution.

euro IS supported. that's a xfree issue, you have to bind the key in XF86Config.
NOTE: you or your distribution (if you ask me, that's their job).

http://www.kde.org/documentation/faq/configure.html#id2764594

(yes, i know the link is broken at the moment)

there is even an example kword document with an euro symbol in it, just to show it IS done.. from the KDE side.

--Themes and Styles are still seperate

and they should be, cause they are two completely different things

AA worked here out of the box. I compiled KDE 3 beta1 from cvs.
Regards,
antialias

by Travis Emslander (not verified)

ummm, no it doesn't. I looked at your screenshot and you deffinitely do not have anti-aliasing of fonts.

Check the titlebar

Yes, it was the wrong shoot :(.
See the new one :)

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

There should be a hard and fast rule about posting screenshots - always state what theme/style/etc. you're using.

In this case - what theme, style, window decoration, color scheme, icon scheme, and fonts are you using? Those icons are the first I've seen that might tempt me away from the KDE defaults.

Very nice.

--
Evan

by Evan "JabberWok... (not verified)

Also the background - seriously, that's a nice desktop.

--
Evan

by Christian A Str... (not verified)

What icon-theme is that?

A new one. Kudos to qwertz.

A damn nice one.
Is it on kde-look.org?

QT 3 supports AA only for XFree 4.1 and higher. So the AA support is only compiled in for the SuSE 7.3 rpms.

This is not the case, the problem is an interaction between kdeinit and XRENDER which disables Xft. The problem is resolved if you are running Xfree greater than 4.1, basically cvs.

I haven't had eny problems with AA, just had to edit ~/.xftconfig and installed my TrueType fonts to ~/.kde/share/fonts/TrueType.

This is not the case, the problem is an interaction between kdeinit and XRENDER which disables Xft. The problem is resolved if you are running Xfree greater than 4.1, basically cvs.

>Network broswing (either lan or rlan) still does not work, the old komba2 works.

Did anybody say that network browsing will work with KDE3?
"Working Network browsing" would be a completely new feature, maybe introduced with KDE3.2

by cosmo (not verified)

I don't know what the problem is, rlan:/ works great here. Remember to set the reslisa binary to suid root and delete /tmp/resLisa-username and you're set! That's about all the setting up you need to do.

Most rpms do not ship with suid binaries (rightly so, but this one should be safe as it drops privileges soon) so you'll have to do this once.

Some other problems though, like plugins not working, and CUPS not being detected at all are keeping me from running it all the time, are these things issues or am I messing something up (SuSE 7.1 RPMS)? Very stable, no crashes yet.

by cosmo (not verified)

Silly me, forgot to install the nsplugins package.

Navindra, can you delete the extra posts, got carried away :)

by cosmo (not verified)

I don't know what the problem is, rlan:/ works great here. Remember to set the reslisa binary to suid root and delete /tmp/resLisa-username and you're set! That's about all the setting up you need to do.

Most rpms do not ship with suid binaries (rightly so, but this one should be safe as it drops privileges soon) so you'll have to do this once.

Some other problems though, like plugins not working, and CUPS not being detected at all are keeping me from running it all the time, are these things issues or am I messing something up (SuSE 7.1 RPMS)? Very stable, no crashes yet.

by cosmo (not verified)

I don't know what the problem is, rlan:/ works great here. Remember to set the reslisa binary to suid root and delete /tmp/resLisa-username and you're set! That's about all the setting up you need to do.

Most rpms do not ship with suid binaries (rightly so, but this one should be safe as it drops privileges soon) so you'll have to do this once.

Some other problems though, like plugins not working, and CUPS not being detected at all are keeping me from running it all the time, are these things issues or am I messing something up (SuSE 7.1 RPMS)? Very stable, no crashes yet.

I too tried to give the SuSE rpm's a spin. Almost nothing works - immediate crashes in kmail, konqueror, kontrol, etc. etc. So I removed and went back to kde 2.2 (which is not as stable as 2.1).

by Will Stephenson (not verified)

Please, tell us that you posted bug reports! If you've got a knack for finding problems, use it to let developers fix them.

No I didn't send a bug report. The reason was that so much didn't work with KDE3.0.beta1 that I was fairly desperate to get back to a version of KDE which worked.

But if someone can give me a hint on how I can do get something which works a bit better than my first disasterous attempt then I could give it another try. Christmas is a good time to experiment.

For instance, should I have first disinstaalled KDE2.2 (which I didn't).

My hardware is a new AMD 1.4 GB, 40 GB Disc, 640 MB memory very standard sytem.
i.e. no problem installing first SuSE 7.2 and then updating to SuSE 7.3.

For development work I have been using Qt3.0 for some time but this was seperate from the version KDE2.2 was using and the version which can be installed from the SuSE KDE3.0 binary rpm's.

Malcolm

by Malcolm (not verified)

If all that people did was submit a bug report when they came across errors it would be a start.

Please don't moan in public if you haven't told us by the official channels.

:o)

Malcolm

(KDE English proof reader)

by Loranga (not verified)

My Debian 2.2 box is now compiling Beta 1. I will also give beta 1 a try on a Solaris 5.8/Sparc machine too.

by Mike Machuidel (not verified)

Hi,

I never got KDE to build on Debian 2.2 (Potato) after KDE 2.2, KDE 2.1 builds fine.
Debian (dpkg-buildpackage) always complained dependencies were missing or outdated, when I upgraded all the dependecies I again broke other depedencies.
That's the reason I'm running Sid/Woody by now (only to get the latest KDE
packages).

Can you please tell me what you do to build KDE in Debian 2.2?

Thanks,

Michael

by Loranga (not verified)

Hi,

Due to a slow machine, kdelibs hasn't finished compiling yet (PIII-550, 128 MB RAM, SCSI disks). I started to complile Qt 20 minutes after I posted the former message, so I can't give you a complete answer.

But anyway, the Debian 2.2 I use isn't vanilla (as you might expect :) ).
Qt 3.0.1 compiled without problems, but for kdelibs, Potato required some "minor" updates.

I have installed OpenSSL and PCRE from source instead of using the Potato ones. I use the two day old PCRE 3.8. Potato provides 2.0.8, which is from 1999 :) Other dependency problems are libxml2 and libxlst, but they are not mandatory, so I skipped them. Of course, if you have your old prce installed, and not want to install the newer pcre, just use --disable-pcre.

Good luck!
Mats

BTW: Thanks KDE for updating the configure script with the following information:

"Some influential environment variables:
CC C compiler command
CFLAGS C compiler flags
LDFLAGS linker flags, e.g. -L if you have libraries in a
nonstandard directory
CPPFLAGS C/C++ preprocessor flags, e.g. -I if you have
headers in a nonstandard directory
CPP C preprocessor
CXX C++ compiler command
CXXFLAGS C++ compiler flags
CXXCPP C++ preprocessor

Use these variables to override the choices made by `configure' or to help
it to find libraries and programs with nonstandard names/locations"

by Antonio D'souza (not verified)

Bug 23205 is still a problem, although they saw fit to close it with no explaination given.

As far as I know, the bug number 23205 is not theirs - it's fault of Xfree86. XRender extension that provides antialiased fonts, requires separate configuration file with separate directory list, and doesn't work with fonts provided by font server. As simple as that. GNOME just doesn't use antialiased fonts by default, it should be configured very special way. Offtopic,but anyway - this font management thing has always driven me just crazy - why should I maintain two configuration files with two directory lists for antialiased fonts and for non-antialiased fonts? XRENDER for this, regular X don't know what for that... Add to that CUPS/ghostscript with yet another one font list, and the picture is perfect. Why can't there be one font server for it all, antialiased by request or by configuration, the same for display and for printing? Why create a "font hell" with our own hands?

Ok, on topic. I completely agree with your point - bugfixes before, features after. Bug number 33254 - the developers declared the feature working, and it doesn't work. And the bug is there since KDE 2.2 untouched as of KDE 2.2.2.
Or bug number 33152 - it is there since KDE 2.0. Little thing, but not so pleasant nevertheless.

Provide the "still doesn't work with KDE x.x" information to the bug system.
dot.kde.org is not bugs.kde.org!

>Provide the "still doesn't work with KDE x.x" information to the bug system.
That's exactly what I did :-) I've provided bug numbers, as you see.
They declared some feature working, and then I submitted the bug.

by DaCh (not verified)

And it would all be so much more worth it if only they could have the default AA be in 256 shades instead of just 5. The freetype library actually includes an alternate smoothing algorithm which is far superior to the default one. It produces 256 shades of gray in one pass, and is suposedly faster than the default renderer for font sizes under 20 points. It seems that Nautilus and the GNOME desktop (but none of the other apps, of course) use this alternate module, but KDE still uses the crappy method.

For an example, look at the difference between Times New Roman (or probably any roman font) at sizes 12, and 14. At 12 it looks skinny and blury, and at 14 it looks fat and bold. However, if Nautilus is configured to use Times New Roman, it scales very nicely. I think the text produced by GIMP is another example.

Both WinXP and OSX have finally gotten AA right, and for Linux to be a contender on the desktop, this is a must.

Better write this to [email protected] or ask the developer who closed it _as the text that informed you told_.

by jcostom (not verified)

You know what the biggest shame of all is? The kmail developers are completely unwilling to fix their message threading problems. Want to see it for yourself? It's extremely easy to replicate...

1. Subscribe to a mailing list.
2. Use procmail to filter your list into a folder
3. Use kmail via IMAP to read the folder on the mail server.
4. Turn on threading for the mailbox for your list
5. Start reading.

Presumably you'll have several threads. Suppose the first two threads, A and B came in in this order:

A: 1,5,6,7
B: 2,3,4,8

When you first start reading the folder, you hit thread A first. Suppose you delete the first message. Kmail immediately removes this message from your view, then proceeds to re-order your mailbox, leaving this:

B: 2,3,4,8
A: 5,6,7

I filed a bug on this, only to be told this isn't a bug, and in fact, I'm somehow reading my mail incorrectly, since I deleted a message. I suggested they take a look at how threading works in mutt or even Evolution. They still think they're right, and there's no problem. Nothing like closed-mindedness, huh?

by ian reinhart geiser (not verified)

I cannot seem to duplicate your example here...

I would try thinking harder, or at least present them with more descriptive errors. I know that I have had two bugs fixed by them only after actually telling them the problem and provideing test cases and screen shots. Chances are it is your config.

Cheers

-ian reinhart geiser

by Michael Häckel (not verified)

Hi,

Well, I do know the problem. When sorting by date, the threads are sorted by the date of the message starting the thread. If the user deleted the first message in the tread, this can cause the thread moving to a different position in some cases, because the date of the message starting the thread can be different now.

I consider this correct behaviour, because this is just how sorting by date works.

Regards,
Michael Häckel

To me it is also the correct behaviour. However, it would be nice to have 'Yet Another Configuation Option': "do not rearrange threads when in date sorted view". You could add an easy shortcut to it by having a RMB popup on the date/sender/subject bar with the option.