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KDE 2.2 Tagged
ByTor-2112 writes "According to dot.kde.org, KDE 2.2 has been tagged out. Awesome." Plans were originally to release 2.2 today, but scheduled release is now next Monday, to allow some time for more stability/speed work. 2.2 rocks my world. Excellent work on the part of all the KDE developers. Other dates mentioned are 2.2.1 in September, and opening work up on 3.0, which will hopefully come out at the beginning of 2002.
:-)
I'm updating my installs the day it is released, just like I did with GNOME.
Apologies to any GNOME entusiasts for the comment. I like GNOME. I like GTK+. I like puppies, but not as much as GTK+.
KDE-2.2 is quite a lot (noticably) faster than KDE-2.1.1. Especially file management is a lot faster now, but also configuration dialogs and so on. Not as fast as Win95, but fast enough to feel snappy (on my P-ii-300).
If you are interested in startup speed, check out the objprelink hack for C++ projects, that was just recently done for KDE. It improves startup times of KDE apps by 30-50 % and might also be of use for OpenOffice, Mozilla and other large C++ applications. Of course it is just a hack until real (stable) prelinking in gcc is available. Note: This has not been included to KDE-2.2 by default, because it arrived during the feature freeze. Hopefully your packager will use this or just follow the step-by-step instructions yourself. It is easy and works like advertised. :-)
Have fun KDE folks!
Moritz
Great. I'm very glad to see that KDE is making headway. (Now if they'd just fix the minor security hole in their screensavers...) I'll be upgrading my Linux desktop for 2.2 pretty soon.
I just wish installing KDE on Solaris was as simple. Non-Linux situations just don't receive as much attention as they need to if KDE is really going to live up to its cross-platform promise. I've converted some of my Solaris users to KDE on the strength of the 1.1.2 release alone; if I can give them 2.2 on the SPARCs as soon as it appears on the x86s, I'll have won them over, I think. :-)
(They really like browsing the contents of a tar file in Konqueror. But they still laugh when the "system information" screen complains that it can't find the IRQs in use, or the game controllers, or any of the other all-the-world's-a-PC things. Enh, it's a start...)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
You simply must spend time diggin through all that 2.2 offers before offering an opinion on it. The depth of available features are astounding.
:-)
For example, I *love* how finegrained Konqueror's support for cookie and javascript is. You can specify particular sites that allowed to run javascript, to the exculsion of all others.
Kasbar, the newly spiffed up task switcher, pop up a scaled down screenshot of the app whose icon your mouse is hovering over. This makes it WAY easier to pick the web browser windows you REALLY meant.
Konqueror's support for file-data-as-the-icon has truly matured. It renders text, html, pics, postscript and pdf, alphablending in the normal icon underneath the data. Sweet and really effective for me.
KMail gives surprising good control of mail. Some of the options make procmail unecessary, except for really advanced stuff. ANd it supports IMAP now.
Konsole may be a bit bulky for a shell, but I love having a menu listing all my nachines on the network, giving me one click ssh to them, all in one manageable window.
How many times have you seen a newbie click the icon to launch a program, get tired of waiting for it to come up, and click it again? Of course, two copies get launched, confusing the user. Well, KDE now "attaches" the 16x16 icon of th program you asked to launch to the mouse cursor, throbbing gently until the app comes up. this gives *useful* feedback to the user. Not only does it tell them that something is happening(which an hourglass can do), but it tells them what is being launched, boosting their confidence.
The kicker can now take up less than the full screen. The default is not to have a handle on the left, making good use of Fitt's law; slam the mouse to the lower left and you are *sure* to get the Start Menu when you click.
KDE is full of wonderful touches. Keep digging, you'll be pleasantly surprised, constantly
poor little dot server. it goes down for like a week or something, and now it's being slashdotted.
maybe they should switch to an IIS server
if you think that was anything other than a joke, kill yourself; you're stealing my oxygen
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
FWIW, the Ximian guys (led by Miguel) always wanted GNOME 2.0 to be Bonobo based, while the Red Hat guys (led by Havoc) seem to be avoiding Bonobo at all costs. The fact that the GNOME core won't be Bonobo-ized for 2.0 provides some insight into which company has more clout in the project.
I really really am. I use GNOME and have virtually ignored KDE with extreme prejudice. I know it is rather small-minded of me but at least I admit it.
I love the progress that KDE has been making. It has been steady and strong. I love the sane orderly and approach that KDE has taken from the beginning.
Originally, I hated KDE because of the non GPL issue. Now that is resolved. Next I hated it because it lacked nice eye candy. There have been terrific improvements in the theming department though there is more to go before it wins me over. I still don't like the lack of choice in window managers but I'm having second thoughts on that position since by only having one WM, more uniform configurability is possible.
I still hate that seemingly everything has an inappropriate use of "K" in there somewhere. Of course GNOME stuff is prone to the same problem, but you have to understand, I'm in the U.S. and it reminds us of K-Mart... bleah... white trash... too much associative crap associated with "K" words.
Just the other day I was wishing KDE and GNOME would just merge.
And where is GNOME's promised 2.0 release!?!? I'm getting seriously disillusioned. I think when I install this RedHat 7.2(beta) I'll give KDE a try... nothing new for me to see with the GNOME 1.4 there anyway.
Damnit Miguel?!?! What happened to the enthusiasm and momentum?! Put your marketting hat on!
He could move the find button to another position on the toolbar (not squarely beside the magnifying buttons). That should reduce the confusion quite a bit...
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I also, for no particular reason, feel that GNOME is more lightweight than KDE. I have no evidence to back this up.
If anecdotal evidence is any indication, I do.
Under just X and Windowmaker on a 400MHz CPU and 384 MB RAM, under no other load at all, Pan 0.9.90 (Gnome-based Usenet client) takes about two seconds to start up. KNode from KDE 2.2 beta 1 (another Usenet client of similiar size and featureset) takes one and a half minutes to start up.
Take a wild guess which desktop environment I don't even keep around for the libraries anymore.
And yes, I know the reason for why KDE apps are slow to load under a non-KDE desktop, so nobody bother flaming me about it.
It's been a long, long time since I used my Amiga (I doubt I could even find all the bits now), so I'll trust you on that one.
:)
However, being able to open some files in one app and others in another wasn't what I was nay-saying. I interpreted the original point literally - ie that the poster wanted to be able to "say" to his computer "do this for me" as though speaking to a human. That's (probably) the Holy Grail of HCI - enabling people to literally say to their machine "reopen that letter I was working on last night, bring up Slashdot, oh and start an email to my brother...".
Rereading it, I probably did misread it, but s/he did say "I'd like to be able to say..."
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This sort of short update schedule, etc. is great. I've always like that about OpenBSD (new version every 6 months) and if I remember correctly, Linus had made comments about trying to get the Kernel on that type of track as well.
Fewer "massive" changes that take 2 years to complete and more "evolutionary" style.
Whatever happened to that idea? (Officially)
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Funny? I obviously agree with that.
Flamebait? Okay, in retrospect, probably.
Overrated? Okay, now that is the moderation of a karma whore, afraid to get fucked in M2.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Yes, any C++ application on Linux is slow to start up due to symbol relocation in linking, and the weak support for C++ in the GNU toolchain, from compiler to linker.
Strange that Mozilla, StarOffice / OpenOffice are all C++, all slow to start up.
Fwiw, I use Knode from CVS and it runs in ~8 seconds from a twm based X session, no other KDE desktop tools running. On a machine with twice the Mhz and half the RAM.
The excessive load time is probably misconfigured DNS, btw.
Great timing with this release. I figure by the time my infant gets into college, this'll show up in Debian stable.
(Blah, blah, blah. I use Progeny. Now go away Debian flamers, it's a joke.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
You're asking for things to be changed (directory structure, command names, etc) that are absolutely nothing to do with, and therefore beyond the control of, the KDE team.
:) The only thing I'm aware of that uses it is Enlightenment 0.17 and it's file manager, but I've not yet managed to get that compiled and running (only tried briefly during a quiet period at work)
If you dislike that many fundamental things about Linux that much, then it simply isn't the right OS for you.
Point 4) simply isn't possible right now, on any platform I've ever heard of. Sorry, but you're at least a decade ahead of us there.
5) is actually being worked on - for more information, go to http://oss.sgi.com/projects/fam for more information. Note though that this project is in development, and requires you to patch and recompile your kernel - more unintuitive stuff, I'm afraid
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I am runing 2.2 beta and here are some new things that I discovered in konqueror:
An interesting (and very usefull) feature is that Konqueror will show the HTML DOM Tree, therefore making much easier to study a document structure.
Another very important tool is the web archive (something I've been waiting for a long time) - it makes you a tar with a html and all the pictures, a complete web page (Opera had this also but it didn't compress). Web archives can be opened directly in konqueror.
You can validate html's directly from konqueror toolbar, and from the same toolbar you can use babelfish to translate pages.
In the file manager you can see thumbnails of ps and pdf pages now, (up to 2.2 you could see html, text and images).
Sorin M
For more information on KDE, the release and support for 2.2, please visit irc.openprojects.net #kde-users. For anyone interested in the development path that we'll be taking in the future, discussions about that will happen on the mailing lists (lists.kde.org) and #kde. Please do not fill #kde with support related questions... go to #kde-users for that if possible. Thanks, and enjoy the release. Troy Unrau troy@kde.org
I can't find any. Can someone relpy with some links for all?
Thanks.
Mandrake's distro is trailored for quite seamless use of KDE. RedHat is not and, frankly, I've been disappointed in RedHat's KDE offering to the point where I dropped it. Of course, now they're going to take it more seriously, but I'm still tired of RH and their crap.
Just give me the libraries for KDE so I can continue to run the programs in their new and improved form on my AfterStep desktop.
Yes, even with 1.x Ghz CPU and 1 Gig RAM, KDE is still a pain and I don't particularly like the way it's set up. If I wanted to run Windows, I would. I LIKE my 18 desktops and low overhead of Afterstep and the automount thing is a pain in the neck when you're running VMWare. I'm sure you can turn it off, but is that not what Linux is good for, the choices?
But, the libraries are great, then you can run the programs without the KDE overhead.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
If anybody wonders what Fitt's law is, here ya go.
I like c++ alot. I just think the fsf version of it really sucks. I love tail-recursion and the way c++ does handles. I believe oop can really make gui development faster and more bug-free if its done right. I hate gnome's c++ like hack written in c.
Anyway the orignally arguement why c was the defacto standard in gnome and not c++ was that g++ was mediocre and sucked really bad on anything non-intel. The other one was that comprises in the core QT libraries had to be made so it could compile under g++. This slowed kde down quite alot. I know alot of c die hards like to blame c++ on this but I believe its due to limitation in the g++ compiler. I noticed some code really runs fast on Visual c++ and runs slower and is more bloated on linux with gcc. Anyway I would love to see faster load times on kde3.0.
Do any of you know if the new compiler can help make kde3.0 run better?
http://saveie6.com/
AAAHHHH!!!
That's the goddamn Windows 2K file selection dialog, with the same damned problems it has.
Has anyone at GNOME ever done task analysis about what the user is most likely going to be doing when trying to save a file? While the shortcut bar to the left is nice (and I truly hope there's some obvious way to add new shortcuts, via the dialog), the most common task is to find the folder where the file either is (on open) or should be (on save) - ie, a tree view of files, or a separate list of folders from the list of available files. The old Gnome dialog used to separate the folders from the files - the new one apparently doesn't (although that completion is nice) - although there is evidently a mode to set it to.
Given that the dialog is already so damned big, couldn't a tree view be placed somewhere? And I really hope the greyed-out Folder icon next to the file type drop-down is "Create New Folder," another very common task when saving files - all the examples are evidently showing a file being opened, so I suppose removing the option on open sorta makes sense - although disabling it on open is a bad idea, IMHO.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
KDE 3.0 will basically be what you would imagine KDE 2.3 would be (i.e. no world shaking new changes), but ported to QT 3. This will enable much better handling of 'foreign' languages, and a rewritten styling/themeing engine, plus other extras (data aware widgets for example).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
How is xinerama support in kde nowadays? I'd love to use it but since enlightenment seems to be the only window manager/desktop environment to reasonably support two or more monitors I think that I'm stuck with it..
The only reason that the GNOME core won't be bonoboized is if there isn't enough time before the freeze to do it in. (The GNOME guys are really serious about getting the release out in a timely fashion, they set an early freeze date of July 31 and limited the feature set due to that.) Havoc never had any objections to the GNOME core being bonoboized, the argument was about his library (GConf) being replaced for GNOME 2.0 without his knowledge. The gnome-core maintainers have always planned on bonoboizing the panel (Vertigo), nautilus already uses bonobo, and the control-center is moving away from any embedding mechanism, which was a joint decision with both the Ximian guys (Chema, Zaphod) and Havoc.
Sorry for drifting so far off-topic...
Two at the bottom of this page:
e warticle&artid=12
http://www.warpedsystems.sk.ca/sections.php?op=vi
-- I care not for your foolish signatures.
Yeah, like everybody's favorite compiler... It stalled for a year or so due to political arguments, hence the EGCS fork. After the FSF formally handed control of GCC to EGCS, the team got the 2.95 series out the door... but it still took forever to get 3.0 released. Afterwards, everybody sat down and said, "Okay, now that that's done, what could be improved?" and the result is the new development plan. The 3.0.1 code should be freezing in another ten days or so.
I suspect that this is just part of the growth of projects. A massive growth spurt (fast development) followed by a slowing and ossifying, followed by a clean-out-the-crap cycle which leads to a growth spurt...
You realize that can mean anything you want it to mean, right? It's way too vague of a term.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
And here's a KDE weakness. Right smack next to the 'font enlarge/shrink' icons is another magnifying glass, but this one is for searching in the webpage! Anyone who thinks for 2 minutes about this realizes it's a bad idea to have very similar icons with completely different functions next to each other, but somehow these sort of glitches appear in KDE.
You can fix this yourself easily. Go to the Settings->Configure Toolbars section and select the "Main Toolbar " toolbar and simply remove the "Find" button from this toolbar. I agree, it's quite unbelievable someone didn't think twice about this one. A bug report is still in order... But the fix is here now...
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
twm forever baby!
dude, that is too sick. far too sick.
but aside from the fact that i'm floored by your hoopy voodoo hack, i have a fundamental objection to asking people to run a shell script (as root!) without having them look at it. true, you never said "don't read it, just run it." but shouldn't we be discouraging this "su and say" behavior? especially just having people run a shell script that's stored remotely. making things easy to install is good, but "configure && make && make install" is good enough for me. (although i don't even encourage that. do a "./configure --help" first and decide what you really want/need. and do a "make -n install" to try and figure out what's going where in case things break.) A lot of people prefer package management schemes like rpm or apt, but i always feel like i lack a degree of control when i use those. anything past installing rpms is going too far for ease of use. (note to those who think my grandma should be able to use linux: i never said there couldn't be a gui frontend to rpm.)
#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}
F(#define F(x) int main(){printf(#x,10,#x);}%cF(%s))
I just wish installing KDE on Solaris was as simple.
PatriotSoft makes Solaris 8 KDE packages. Only catch is they replace Sun's dtgreet logo with their own but that is easily fixed. We have been using their KDE 1.x package in production where I work for 1.5 years now. The KDE 2.x stuff seems to have problems when you logon on graphically more than once but that might be fixed now (run the control panel while logged in twice but only on a box no one cares about).
You can get the packages at: ftp://ftp.patriots.net/pub/solaris_packages/8-Spar c/KDE/
-- Argel
Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll get hit by a nuclear submarine.
-- Argel
I think that most companies would pay the $1500 and use software libraries that do not have GPL anywhere in them, just to be safe. Also if it takes 3 more days to develop in Gnome than KDE because KDE is easier (KDevelop, Kylix, etc) then that $1500 has been made back anyway.
You are confused.
GtkHTML2 is a completely new code base, separate from GtkHTML (which is what we based our code to build the HTML editor). GtkHTML has all the copyright notices in place.
GtkHTML2 is a new code base, new abstractions, and has complete CSS2 support.
Miguel.
This is my opinion, but its shared by a lot of people. What the hell, its only karma...
I use three main PCs, each with 128MB or more of RAM, and one with 640MB. They're all PII 400 or better. I update GNOME to the latest stable Ximian every day. see lots of news on the GNOME lists about the new CC, and Bonobo vs GNOME flamewars, but I've yet to see a version of Nautilus with a useable UI, which responds to mouse clicks, can quickly show the contents of directories, can actually surf the web like it was goddamned supposed to, can edit launchers without a text editor, can edit menus without a text editor, and do other things that other desktops can. And if I can somehow do this, then why it is so damn obscure I can't find it, when GMC was entirely understandable, if featureless.
All GNOME 1.4 game me was antialiased fonts for the desktop and Nautilus which should have been introduced in GNOME 2 via XRender, a file manager that doesn't fucking work, and a better file open and save dialog box.
That said, the newfile open / save dialog and CC look OK. As in, they don everything they're supposed to and nothing else. But how long does it take?
Waldo Bastian's document demonstrates that the current g++ implementation generates lots of expensive run-time relocations. This translates into the slow startup of large C++ applications (KDE, StarOffice, etc.). The attached program "objprelink.c" is designed to reduce the problem. Expect startup times 30-50% faster.
:)
The Dot
/me smiles
I want to express my heartfelt thanks to the KDE team. KDE is amazing.
Bush's education improvements were
Perhaps this would be a good time to plug one of my favourite X programs, Desktop File Manager. There a lots of screenshots there to show you what it's like.
It's basically a simple, low-overhead way to manage files in X. It's not as full-featured as its Gnome or KDE equivalents, but it's not supposed to be. It's stable and fast and works very well with any window manager you'd care to name. It even has full DND support.
And if you've got XV thumbnails of images, those thumbnails will be used as the image's icon. Handy little feature. :)
All you need to use it is X, the XPM libraries and GTK. Fairly standard for any distro.
End plug.
Umm, not exactly a FUD...
;)
Here is an example - at my previous work I had to install them some sort of developer enviroment for the developers - and since I use personally KDE all the time - I thought, what the heck - and installed KDE 2.1 and KDevelop...
All the developers loved it. Just the CEO asked me where did I get a version of Visual Studio for Linux and do we have license for this. Guess what my answer was...
I've seen it on lots of cases, talking to commercial companies who develop some Linux solutions. Most of them use KDevelop even for developing kernel modules!...
Hetz (Heunique)
My only complaint is that there isn't a similar automatic feature for Javascript.
umm...
Try at ftp://ftp.patriotsoft.com
From my experience (only tried it on Sun Ultra 60) - Their KDE packages are AWESOME!
You can find also the packages for KDE for HP/UX, IRIX, AIX, and Tru64 among other platforms that KDE supports (directly and indirectly) [but not on the above ftp site]
Hetz (Heunique)
While it doesn't give desktop icons, xwc is a fantastically snappy file manager. On my p200 it starts up and runs fast enough that it actaully feels fast.(and not a lot of apps do here!)
xwc has an optional two pane layout, and a tree widget. Very nice.
I actually run dfm, and on it I have an xwc icon ;)
[Science] is one of the very few things that raises human life a little above farce and gives it the grace of tragedy.
If you like DFM, you will absolutely LOVE ROX-Filer:
http://rox.sourceforge.net/
Really nice stuff! If you want to see a screenshot of my Windowmaker desktop running with ROX filer, check out http://freefall.homeip.net/temp/gregdesktop.jpg and http://freefall.homeip.net/temp/gregdesktop2.jpg
This is only a very simple example of the beautiful way in which ROX combines GUI + Command line in a truly elegant way. Go get a copy and try it for yourself. You may start questioning the overhead of all that crap that KDE runs in the background to...hmmm..what exactly does all that stuff do that resembles usefulness anyway?
RedHat doesn't seem to take packaging too seriously, unlike Mandrake, Suse and Debian, which typically provide the packages in just a few days.
I'm not quite sure why I haven't yet switched from using RedHat. I guess there was some reason, I always seem to forget what.
You spoony bard! I was happy with DFM! Now you come along and show me something that shatters my little world! :)
Seriously, Rox is very nice, I agree. You have a convert.
I was an OS/2 user in the past. DFM tried to be something like WPS on the Linux desktop. It did a decent job, but always seemed a little off to me.
The thing I love about ROX is it's simplicity. What can be simpler to use and understand than using the OS's filesystem to maintain applications? :)
Now if only Pronto Mail would use Xdnd properly...ooooh, I'd be one happy linux user :)