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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. "
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.
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.
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 ?
(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!?
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
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...
- 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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