KDE 2.2 Released

Well, we had covered it being tagged last week, and now, after a hardware problem with one of the main download servers, KDE is ready for download. Except that you'll probably want to go to the mirrors to actually get it. You can get more about it about it from Dre's dot.kde post, or you can read the KDE announcement - and have a good time!

Comments

Mirrrors list (someone had to do it, right?)

[pdiaz]

Europe:
ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/hci/kde
ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/kde
ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/MIRRORS/ftp.kde.org/pu b/ kde/
ftp://ftp.rz.uni-wuerzburg.de/pub/unix/kde
ftp://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/pub/Linu x/ kde
ftp://sunsite.auc.dk/pub/X/kde
ftp://ftp.dataplus.se/pub/linux/kde
ftp://ftp.dit.upm.es/linux/mirrors/ftp.kde.org/p ub /kde

Asia:
ftp://ftp.au.kde.org/pub/kde
ftp://casper.yz.yamagata-u.ac.jp/mirror/kde
ftp://linux.sarang.net/mirror/desktop/kde

Africa:
ftp://ftp.sun.ac.za/sites/ftp.kde.org/pub/kde
ftp://ftp.na.kde.org/pub/kde

America:
ftp://ftp.matrix.com.br/pub/kde
ftp://mirror.chpc.utah.edu/pub/kde
ftp://ftp.rutgers.edu/pub/kde

Now, could anybody tell me when the debian (potato) packages of the 2.2. will be available?

Re:Work with the GNOME people (and vice versa)

[Drone-X]

Better interoperability between KDE and Gnome could only improve the situation for both desktops. Isn't The X Desktop Group supposed to be working on with KDE and Gnome on this?

There is activity going on on their mailing list. E.g. right now they're coining up a standard for storing image thumbnails so Nautilus, Konqueror and the GIMP will be able to share them.

Been running it for a week now, great release.

[cybrthng]

KDE 2.2 is a huge leap in usability for KDE. I personally can't wait for 2.2.1 as they may include a prelinker for compiling that optimizes the loadtimes on the applications. It shouldn't take the amount of time it currently takes to load, but it is usable.

New features I like:

Pulsating icon when program is loading

Interface cleanup - Finally looks good on hi-res LCD

Bug fixes - Browser is getting more usable day by day

Kdevelop - intriguing program. Hope it continues to mature at it's current pace. Very familiar coming from MS Vis Studio.

Koffice - Hope to see you at 1.1 soon! looking great

Schemes, Colors, Sounds and everything are much snappier

Control panel cleanups!

Setup wizards (makes it easy for windows converts

And lots of GUI toys & options - can change icon & font rendering, window popup speed and much more. eye candy for sure

Again, compile times suck. It takes a few hours to compile kde_base alone on a 1ghz P3 with a gig of memory.

Hopefully Gcc 3.01 /3.1, QT 3.0 and KDE 3.0 will be the killer desktop. 2.2 is a VAST improvement, but only that.. an improvement on existing interfaces and bugfixes.

I do like KDE's object model of sorts, widgets and kparts. Very will thought out implementations, i just hope they learn to quit breaking binary compatibility with each major release :)

Keep up the good work KDE team!

Re:Been running it for a week now, great release.

[10Ghz]

i just hope they learn to quit breaking binary compatibility with each major release :)

Doesn't GCC 3 break binary compatibility regardless? KDE decided to move to QT3 when they did so end-users would have easier time. If they did it otherwise, users would lose binary compatibility when changing to GCC 3, and then again when moving to KDE/QT 3. This way they can move to GCC/KDE/QT 3 in the same time, breaking binary compatibility only once (instead of twice)

There was a long discussion about this among KDE-developers

Re:Improvements...

[bero-rh]

1) kdesupport is gone. It was a collection of libraries that are used by KDE, but not part of KDE.
On the Red Hat side, I've replaced it with the non-kde subdirectory on ftp.kde.org.

2) kdm configuration has changed quite a bit, but I don't see what could be causing this. Please send me your old kdm config files.

3) backtrace?

4) agreed ;)

5) The best way to fix this is to tell them to fix up their setup - we can't keep trying to figure out what proprietary browsers are doing forever. ;)
Most of the cases where Konqueror "misrenders" something can be traced down to the fact that it's actually more intelligent than it's proprietary counterparts. Take a look at a couple of changes in the KDE_2_2_BRANCH in CVS for examples.

some notes

[HeUnique]

Hi people,

Just few words about this release (and future road-map)..

This is the final major version of KDE 2.2 - expect KDE 2.2.1 next month with all the last-minute bug fixes (without any new features), and translations update..

The next major version is going to be KDE 3.0 that will be out at around January 2002 featuring QT 3.0.x (with all the QT 3 features), and some changes in the backend, among other things. Most of KDE will be ported from 2.2 to 3.0. SO people who want to either developer QT or KDE applications might want to download QT 3 snapshot and play with it. It's got some bugs - but it's pretty stable.

People who would like to contribute to the KDE development are most welcome to join - you don't have to be a C++ programmer in order to contribute - Graphics artists, GUI guru's, HTML experts and others are more then welcome to join the big KDE famility of developers..

I thin it's also a good time for you - the reader/user to post what do you want to be changed in KDE? what do u hate about KDE? what do you like? What do you think should be improved? What do you think should be removed? most of the KDE developers read slashdot - so maybe your request will be fullfilled - you never know...

As for other platforms - expect KDE 2.2 to be available within days for Solaris (X86 & Sparc), HP/UX, SGI's Irix, IBM AIX, and others..

Enjoy the release people - lots of work has been done on this one - and you get as a bonus %30-%50 speed increase..

Re:some notes

[ozbird]

I thin it's also a good time for you - the reader/user to post what do you want to be changed in KDE? what do u hate about KDE? what do you like? What do you think should be improved? What do you think should be removed? most of the KDE developers read slashdot - so maybe your request will be fullfilled - you never know...

I would dearly love to roll out KDE as the Unix desktop at work - works great on Intel platforms (with > 64MB RAM to avoid "excessive" swapping to disk) but ran into some problems when trying to get it working under Solaris. I haven't tried 2.2 yet - hopefully this fixes some of these issues.

What I would like to see changed are its resource requirements. Slim it down! We're considering replacing our current X-terminals (some old Labtams, Tektronix and NCD boxes) with diskless PCs running Linux - disks are not an option. If KDE can run on a diskless machine with 128MB RAM (with an NFS-mounted /home directory) - this would be a real winner.

Increase scalability. Apart from RAM, KDE spawns a bunch of processes. On a workstation this isn't a problem, but scale it up to a several hundred users on a large box and things can get a bit ugly. (Haven't pushed it this far - extrapolating for a handful of trial users.) Do you really need so many kdeinit jobs?

I love KDE; my boss likes it. Now if I could just get it to work as well as the users expect things to work...