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KDE 1.90 (2.0 Beta)
Jon347 writes: "KDE 2.0 beta has been released, and looking very slick, regular files are on kde.org's servers and rpms on people.redhat.com. This one has been delayed for a while but looks worth it. This is the first of three beta releases. "
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Perhaps, and it didnt bother me that he posted that information, but HOW did he post it.
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What's wrong with how he posted it? Considering that Gnome and KDE have more than a few similarities, it seems relatively on-topic (at least in the respect that people interested in a new release for one will likely be interested in the other).
What he asked was that people refrain from flaming, as he was providing information only. What do you do? Flame.
The irony is, erm, ironic.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
...but I will not allow my users...
[snip]
...any software which everyone can't get at free
Am I the only one who finds this incredibly humorous?
I guess one man's freedom is another's control.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
Why do you install it on servers?
[client] $ ssh user@server # ssh w/xauth fwding
[server] $ kmgmt-app
Why else?
Your Working Boy,
Oh Puhleaze!! If you want to know how something is licensed, just go look. To let you know, the libraries are under the LGPL, and the applications are either GPL, AL or BSD. A couple niggly things are under other licenses, but who cares. The whole kit and kaboodle is 100% FREE SOFTWARE.
GNU != Free Software. Don't believe me, believe RMS. Go to www.gnu.org and look up the definition of free software. You will find 4 points, freedom to use, freedom to redistribute, freedom to modify and freedom to distribute modifications. Every component in KDE, as well as every piece of software released under any Open Source license qualifies. Every single one. Including the new Qt that KDE2 uses. Including everything released under the Artistic, MIT and BSD licenses.
Don't be a GNU Automaton. Think for yourself. Read the licenses. If you eventually choose not to think, that if fine by me, as long as it is YOUR decision.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I'm using kde 1.9 (2.0 beta) right now. First, the bad stuff.
... this is just an annoyance and it only applies to the desktop menu - not app menus.
.tar.gz extension. Not a serious bug, just gzip the file to get a tar.gz again, but it does waste a lot of disk space.
.kde directory and your Desktop directory in $HOME ***before*** installing this beta. The installation tries to gently merge your existing kde 1.x settings but it doesn't get everything right. There will be duplicate icons on the desktop and other annoyances.... Also, if you have RedHat which puts kde executables in /usr/bin /opt. Most distros use /opt or /usr/local/kde if you build from source.
* menus are flaky - sometimes with repeated use items dissapear and then they come back. There is some kind of timeout that seems unnecessary
* adding bookmarks to Konqueror (the web browser and file manager) amost always causes a crash. This is a severe problem. Adding bookmarks with the popup on right click might work bettter. It automatically adds all Netscape bookmarks and these work fine with Konqueror.
* themes are awful and all look pretty much the same. On the other hand the overal graphics quality is impressive - a much better rendering engine than kde 1.x. Plese note that themeing is
temporarily very limited due to a change in how themes are handled that won't be ready until another month or so. The icons are beautiful.
*multimedia is missing - none of the multimedia apps are included in this beta but non-kde apps work fine with kde (like mp3 players, etc.). The arts real time synthesizer is not quite ready...
*jpg backgrounds do not show up, but jpg images do in the web browser and elsewhere.
*file transfers (ftp and http) of tarred and gzipped archives unzip during download, resulting in a tar file that wrongly has a
* most importantly, if you already have kde 1.x installed you are strongly advised to totally remove or back up and rename (move) your
you are advised to move them somewhere else out of the path. This is not a problem with other distros that put kde in
the good stuff:
*memory usage is a little higher than kde 1.x it seems, but speed is about the same, overall. By a little higher I mean that 32 megs. of ram is plenty and you don't need much of a swap even with that.
*koffice apps are impressive and this alone is worth using the beta. You really don't need any commercial office suites. This is much better and uses far less memory. Note: ability to read MS office file formats is limited but if you want that then use Corel Word Perfect. For native unix, KOffice is nice.
* the browser (konqueror) is impressive - aside from the add bookmark bug. It's much, much nicer than Mozilla in very noticeable ways. The interface works, for one thing. Compare this, a work done mostly by volunteers, to the failed Mozilla effort (flame on) backed by all the billions Netscape and AOL have had to invest in it after 2 years and all the hype.
espescially because anyone who wanted it *now* in whatever state it was in could have it - see http://www.kde.org/anoncvs.html. They weren't going to call it the beta until it was ready to be, but it was already available to any interested party who wanted to poke at it. Given that it was all already out there, what would the point of rushing out a shoddy beta to meet a date have been?
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
Is it? Yes.
KDElibs are LGPL
Parts of KDE packages (net, games, graphics, pim, multimedia, utils, toys) are GPL or Artistic License, varying by program to program.
KOffice is GPL'ed
Qt is QPL'ed
The DCOP IPC stuff is BSD licensed I believe.
So the answer is yes.
Of course, GPL bigots can't use Xfree, TeX, Perl etc as they are not GPL'ed, if they are that GPL bigoted. Free Software != Open Source, BFD.
My apologies for any offense ... I'm not a zealot for either desktop (indeed, until 11 months ago, I used fvwm).
I happened to see over at Linux Today that both were released, and it struck me as relevant to a story on beta desktop updates.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
KDE set a release date for this BETA. As that date drew near they found it wasn't quite stable enough to call a BETA. So they didn't release one until now.
Sure there are people who will complain about this but the fact is quality is more important than time.
As for new features. I have been using the CVS code for a few months now and the UI improvements are truly astounding. There is evidence of this KDE being extremely fast. I haven't bench marked it but it's faster than the old one IMHO.
KOffice is truly ambitious. I have managed to get real work done in KOffice and some people have actually begin using KPresenter at conferences, What really impresses me though is the OLE like functionality. When you embed bits and pieces of different document types into a Presentation or a KWOrd doc you can edit them in place. The menus change on cue and the whole thing prefers not to crash. It dose keel over but not surprisingly often for a beta program.
This baby also comes in several languages already. English, German and French have nearly 100% coverage and some others come pretty close. Anyone who speaks another language natively and is fluent in one of these core languages should go join up.
Finally KWord is in need of developers. Sure there are other programs with manpower problems, even within KDE but KWord is IMHO the most important program for which the lead developer has made a special appeal.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
looks to be a very nice upgrade, one worthy of bumping the major version number
It's almost a rewrite - so definitely worth the bump from 1.x to 2.x.
The inclusion of a lightweight distributed object system is a bonus (early work with the MICO Orb showed that it was simply too heavyweight for a desktop environment), and removes a dependency on a large third party package.
All in all, KDE seems to represent an ideological alternative to GNOME. GNOME is ideal for hackers and others who love expermentation, tweaking, etc. KDE offers a more consistent and 'monolithic' environment, reflected in their infrequent releases versus the 'release often' philosophy of GNOME.
I reckon KDE is going to be the 'killer app' of the free software movement - not because it is better or worse than GNOME, but because it meets the needs of ordinary computer users perfectly.
Here's to version 2.0 of both KDE and GNOME!
Chris
Chris Wareham
Download it and try - I don't think you can call it vapourware when it's there for you to test. Pity you didn't do this before posting...
and the fact that just having it siiting there waiting for this kind of handy use doesn't take anything but a little disk space.
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
Uh, people, KDE Debian packages from within the last -- like -- year would be ... um ... helpful?!?!?
Seriously,
# apt-get install kde
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package kde
is really getting on my nerves.
Not everybody uses Red Hat and Mandrake (remember RedHatIsNotLinux), and not everybody has the time and disk space to download and compile all the sources.
I'm currently running 1.1.2 on my RS/6k (AIX 4.3) - took a little effort, but was amazingly easier to get working than KDE 1.1.1 or GNOME (though blackbox and iceWM worked almost straight out).
I'll probably wait until 2.0(.x) is out, but has anyone even given any of these pre-2.0 sources a shot? I'd be interested.
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
tdyc
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
(whiteflag -- no desktop flamewar, please)
GNOME 1.1.90 (GNOME 1.2 Beta) also has been released.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
its because its a beta. And they want to make sure no poor newbies get nuked systems when they try it. I'm sure thats it. I'd put monopoly money on it.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
The announcement/press release is here, source code here, and binary packages (only RH/Mandrake so far) here. The beta also includes KOffice. There will be two more betas before the final release in September.
--
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Everyone loves screen shots
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Competition is a good thing -- this way, they're not merely "chasing someone's tail" (from the Halloween Document), but are also driving each other to constant improvement.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
If you want to use the KDE applications, without the overhead and screen usage of the desktop, the KDE2 snapshots have been working great in WindowMaker.
/opt/kde2/bin/kde2
Follow the directions for using KDE 1 and 2 together. Add the line:
source
to your Xsession or xinitrc or whatever before the line that starts WindowMaker.Add the line:
kdeinit +kded
to your autostart file, or:
kdeinit +kded +kdesktop
if you want desktop icons. This works with icewm, also, and probably with anything else.
My one gripe is that kdesktop covers the real root window, which negates the greatest strength of WindowMaker -- 4,752 different Laetitia Casta themes.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I mean do we really need every application on our desktop to have the same style and widgets.
For the first, the second, and the last time, YES. Computer novices have enough trouble learning the difference between, say, checkboxes and radio buttons. It only makes matters worse when there are fifty different styles of checkboxes and radio buttons. Meanwhile, most Windows and Mac applications (knock on wood) have consistent fonts, dialogs, colors, and widgets. Obviously, things aren't perfect, but X apps still have a ways to go before they're as usable as those in other environments.
For more information, click here.
Both KDE and GNOME are voluntary projects. There is no Linux King. Everyone can do whatever they want. Freedom reigns within this domain. Asking them to merge is as ludicrous as asking those two neighboring liquor stores on the corner to merge. The only way you're going to do it is to destroy freedom. You'll have to rename it "slave software".
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Qt 2.1 is compiled by default without jpeg support. I don't know why. If you sit down and type "./configure", you won't get it. Apparently, this is what the RPM makers did. What you need to do is remove the Qt RPM, download Qt 2.1 source, and build it according to directions. You will need to type "./configure -system-jpeg" when configuring to get jpeg support.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
- It is easy to use
- It offers a consistent user experience. I can't stress this enough. One thing Microsoft has over us is that a user can sit down in front of any Windows machine and know where to expect to find the usual set of tools and buttons. KDE places emphasis on a consistent user experience as well, and I think this is very important if we want Linux to start showing up on more desktops.
I, for one, always deploy KDE when setting up Linux systems for my customers, be they desktop systems or server systems. KDE 2.0 looks to be a very nice upgrade, one worthy of bumping the major version number. Viva la revolucion!--
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Links
;-)
ftp://ftp.nebsllc.com/kde2
ftp://mandrakesoft.com/pub/molnarc
http://www.htw-dresden.de/~s2697
Also of interest
http://www.kde.org/mirrors.html
The beta is quite fast, fairly stable, and rather pretty. It has some problems, notably filemanager stability with JS, Java, and multiple windows, but it does embed its viewers for graphics and text well, is configurable, and renders slashdot, supporting cookies etc. That was of course, the important test
Source: ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable /distribution/
Rpms:ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unst able/distribution/rpm/
Better?
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?