KDE 3.1 Alpha1: Brings New Eye Candy, New Features

A brand new alpha of the breath-taking KDE 3.1 development branch has been announced. This release sports everything from wonderful new eye candy to tons of popular new features including new and exciting "easter eggs" (aka bugs) just waiting to be discovered. Remember, this is not a stable release -- those of you concerned with stability should use KDE 3.0.2, whereas those of you who want to help KDE 3.1 be the best KDE ever should use this alpha. Kudos to Dre for writing the announcement and to the tireless Dirk Mueller for coordinating this release. Party!

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Comments

by Anonymous (not verified)

The title says it all: Could someone please fix the broken link to the compilation instructions in the announcement...

Way to go! Thanks for a marvelous desktop.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

The one that points you to the "outdated" page or is there another one?

by Anonymous (not verified)

The one with the outdated page. I did not see any other one.

by ariya (not verified)

man, that drop shadow for menus are damn cool ! wonder what users of other competing desktop will comment :-)

by Andreas Pietzowski (not verified)

Yeah, this menu-drop-shadow really rules! It would also be nice if windows could have drop shadows. What do you think?

by ariya (not verified)

Hmm, I believe this is more of a job for X. Let's wait for Keith.

Anyway, drop shadow menu combined with mouse cursor shadow looks really kick-ass. Pick-up good icons/window decoration/splashscreens/ and you're set to make your Windows friends totally jealous.

by Andreas Pietzowski (not verified)

A BLACK X-mouse-pointer with a BLACK-drop-shadow...? *g*

BTW: Which windows-friends? :)

by ariya (not verified)

Forget the pointer. Those goodies will keep people busy anyway :-)

by Ryan Cumming (not verified)

> A BLACK X-mouse-pointer with a BLACK-drop-shadow...? *g*
Oh, that reminds me of another new KDE feature: builtin white mouse cursor support :). I'm not sure if it made it in to 3.1a1, though.

-Ryan

by . (not verified)

Someone please redesign those horrible X pointers. The whole font is butt ugly.

by theorz (not verified)

Yes they look sweet.

Just curious, does anyone want to explain how are these being done? I thought shadows like these are impossible in X.

by goo.. (not verified)

Better than windows; "Show shadows under menus" (Display Properties->Apperance->Effects) is a boring name. I don't know what exactly they are called in KDE, but I don't think it could be worse.

by emmanuel (not verified)

in the announcement, i believe it should be stated clearly that translucent menus are for all applications, not only for kate! (and they were already in kde3.0)

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

No screenshots and much "work in progress", but so far KDE-PIM package also has made great improvements compared to 3.0.x. Kudos!

Thorsten

by Tom Corbin (not verified)

Would it be possible for you to mention some of the kde-pim improvements/enhancements
we can look forward to? I am eagerly looking forward to the new kde-pim stuff.
I love the all the stuff now, and am excited about how good it will get in the
future.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Ok, you have a kcontrol module for selecting an addressbook storage backend.
So far you can select old multi-vcard file, single-vcard dir and an (untested) sql backend. There is some talk about a possible server approach for most of the pim datas.

kaddressbook has a configurable view style front end (tables, icons, cards...) with an instant category filter (show friends, show family). The card input looks like Outlooks contact dialog and is full featured. The addressbook has a printing backend.

What else.
There is hard work in stabilizing an common KDE sync API based on ksync and kitchen sync. If you compile the ksync backend program you get a tool to sync your bookmarks, calendars and addressbook.

KOrganizers support for publishing appointment to other PIM programs is now more compatible. A special highlight is a (free ;-) plugin for accessing an Exchange2000 server. But this is really work in progress and needs tester (*hint*).

I hope that file locking is ready for 3.1 so that you can put one central adressbook, calendar, bookmark, etc. file on a server and use this from multiple computers. I have one calender at home and another one at work. Often on both desktops runs an instance of korganizer. Caused by the missing file locking I can not use one file for both instances.

Other stuff like Outlook-like integration of the pim apps and kpilot is out of my personal interests so I don't know much about recent improvements.

If you are interested in kde-pim enter the mailing list or listen via a read-only ML2NG mapping at
news://news.uslinuxtraining.com

Bye

Thorsten

by Paul Wiegers (not verified)

>So far you can select old multi-vcard file, single-vcard dir and an (untested) sql backend. There is some talk about a possible server approach for most of the pim datas

This would be very great. The mail problem my clients have with KMail is the inabillity to have a shared adressbook. If you could tap into an SQL-server (MySQL comes to mind!) they could all share one adressbook.
I would be more than happy to test this feature!

For the rest of the KDE team: you are unbelievable! KDE's great...

by Stefan Stolz (not verified)

I confirm this.
The only thing i am waiting very hard for is to connect my mysql addresses to kaddressbook!
All other stuff is great for me.

by Jaana (not verified)

I took snapshot from cvs HEAD about week ago and I'll have to say that konqi is in very good shape. It's much more stable than 3.0.2 and startup speed is very good. Overall functionality feels more stable than alpha quality. 3.1 Will Rock Your gSocks Off ;)

by Greg (not verified)

Screenshots......*drool*

Congrats again KDE - especially everaldo on his wonderful icon
theme.

KDE is really starting to distance itself from most other desktop
environments without creating a totally alien environment.

Can't wait to get home and install.

by Anonymous (not verified)

Hi!
Looks great!!!
I would really like to know if what we've been hearing about gcc c++ linker being not so good has been solved as we were told with gcc 3.1.
Does it finally make KDE fast loading apps? :-)
I am really looking forward to have a good distro with KDE 3 compiled with gcc 3.1. This must fly!!!
Huuuha!!!

by emmanuel (not verified)

unfortunately, it seems g++ 3.1 isn't quite that nice, at least for kde:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=102166265006814&w=2

:O/

emmanuel

by Anonymous (not verified)

I read it
That's a shame :-(
What has happened with all what was said?
I am really surprised of that results... What is happening?
And why should we use gcc 3.1 if it's WORSE BOTH in time compiling and starting apps?

I guess KDE will be faster starting apps only in a couple of years due to faster PCs. Or should we hope on something I missed from the post? ->http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=102166265006814&w=2

by Ryan Cumming (not verified)

The results are a bit dubious, as the -g3 parameter does very different things under GCC 2.95 and GCC 3.1. I suspect that relocating the DWARF symbols that 3.1 produces with -g3 accounts for the extra relocation time. Oh, and GCC 3.1 produces faster code, more friendly warnings and errors, and is more standards compliant. Some people care about more than speed.

by dwyip (not verified)

Why? Because GCC 2.95 sucked as far as C++ support was concerned. Any C++ compiler suite that

(1) didn't implement the STL correctly (look at the header files)
(2) won't let you do templated friend classes (least never worked for me)
(3) doesn't understand namespaces (2.95 faked understanding)
(4) allows file descriptors to work with iostreams (bad behavior; the C++ Standard outlaws this)
(5) a lot more that I'm missing

just, well, is bleh. GCC 3.1 fixes these.

As far as GCC 3.1 goes for speed, eh, oh well. If you turn on the optimizing features of the thing, I've found that the performance is great -- both in synthetic benchmarks and in everyday use. I've used GCC 3.1 to compile everything on this system, and although C++ compile time is slower (who really cares about that?), performance is more than acceptable.

by Anonymous (not verified)

I guess you are right, but it really shocked me the benchmark results showed above.
I didn't know about the 5 nice fixes you said. I only knew that speed was going to be better because this was the only thing explained in user forums like this one.
Good to see that at least some problems have been solved.
Thanks for your work developers!!! :-)

Could anyone give a reasonable schedule to see when (if ever) we'll see loading apps speed increase with better compilers? After all, is it really a problem, or just waiting for faster PCs is the way to go? Should developers concentrate their efforts on writting a nice desktop waiting for those faster machines in future?
Developers replies with their feelings on the topic will be greatly appreciated.

by azhyd (not verified)

> and although C++ compile time is slower (who really cares about that?)

well developpers on not so new (but no so old) cpus :(

by dwyip (not verified)

> well developpers on not so new (but no so old) cpus :(

Eh, I don't really mind. Gives me an excuse to say "I'm working" when all I'm doing is waiting for a compile to finish :D

by Perfomance must... (not verified)

Not everybody in this world has the money to buy a new PC. Look at most of thecountries in the third-world. Linux (and ofcourse KDE and other open-source)has very much chances, because thos people don't have much money to spend and Linux is free. But if people have to spend a lot of money to run programs with acceteble performance they will proberly stick to a system like Windows 95, 98 or ME. Simply because these sytems run very well on low-resource machines.

by aleXXX (not verified)

This is certainly true.
But it ain't simple to make it run faster.
Another option would be to have one quite fast server and a bunch of slow (e.g. old pentiums) boxes acting as X terminals.

Bye
Alex

by dan (not verified)

> But it ain't simple to make it run faster.

well.. i hope gcc 3.1 will be further improved (a lot!) during the next months.

another idea: what about using the intel compiler suite instead of gcc-3.1? anybody tried this one together with kde 3.0/3.1? i've read the intel compiler made a lot of progress regarding "gcc compatibility" recently.. and it's supposed to be faster and create about 10 to 30 percent faster binaries than gcc 2.95.3.

by tschortsch (not verified)

afaik the startup time is adressed in the dynamic linker which is a part of glibc and not of gcc. so we should see an improuvment with glibc-2.3.
any experiences with glibc CVS?

by Anonymous (not verified)

There is also a patch against glib-2.2.5 contained in the prelink sources: ftp://people.redhat.com/jakub/prelink/prelink-20011010.tar.bz2

by jmk (not verified)

Anyone made SuSE 8.0 RPMs of these yet ?

by jmk (not verified)

Redirects me to download.au.kde.org, which seems to be empty (no kde-3.1 dir in unstable).

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

There are some on download.kde.org mirrors (in unstable/kde-3.1-alpha1/SuSE/i386/8.0/); I'd assume Adrian/SuSE has made them, but I do not know for sure.

by Navindra Umanee (not verified)

Increased Apache MaxClients to 800:

10:51pm up 3 days, 16:33, 5 users, load average: 0.61, 2.00, 3.57
749 processes: 738 sleeping, 11 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 2.0% user, 7.7% system, 0.0% nice, 90.1% idle
Mem: 643696K av, 627828K used, 15868K free, 0K shrd, 18788K buff
Swap: 819304K av, 4536K used, 814768K free 211340K cached

Finally, we're more comfortable now. :-)

by Daniel Dantas (not verified)

Great job guys!!!
This release seems to be more stable than 3.0.2. How could it happen??
The only issue is that this release don't have the drop shadow menus.

by halux (not verified)

I don't have the alpha here but you can enable it under look --> style I think.

have fun
Felix

by Matt Casey (not verified)

Are there plans to allow for closing a tab in konqueror without having to right-click the tab, or use a menu option? I've used tabbed environments in mozilla and visual studio .net, which handle this issue differently. Mozilla provides an X on each tab, while vs.net provides an X to the far right of the tabs which closes the active tab. IMO, both of these implementations are more efficient to use.

I can't wait to get my hands on this one :)

by crazycrusoe (not verified)

YEAH we need the X buttons to close each of the tabs like galeon tabs for example
please add this feature

by DavyBrion (not verified)

btw, do u know how to enable the tabs by default, so that every time u click on a link it will open in a tab instead of a new window? because right now i have to right click on a link, then select Open In New Tab before it'll work and i want it to happen automatically.

by Yaacov (not verified)

Try Ctrl-click to open links in new tabs

by Mathi (not verified)

I just compiled kdelibs & kdebase with gcc3.1 and is running fine. I need to enable the shadow menu and transparent panel. how do I do that? I don't see any option for that in the control center....

-Mathi

by Anon (not verified)

No transparent Panel in alpha
Also no shadows(its post alpha)

by Mathi (not verified)

:(

by Anonymous (not verified)

Pull the patches for these revisions from WebCVS, apply them and recompile:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&m=102587761819332&w=2
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-cvs&m=102587727619017&w=2

by Mathi (not verified)

can you explain me how to pull the patches from WebCVS or point me to some doc.....

thanks a lot,
-Mathi

by Anonymous (not verified)

Are you sure, that you have the right knowledge to do all this? Read the links, search the file in WebCVS e.g. http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdelibs/kdefx/kstyle.cpp and click on "Diff to previous 1.17".