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KDE 3.0 Beta 2 is out
Subject says all - the next beta of KDE 3.0 is out, after a short delay. You can find the downloads at this announcement. Click below to read more details about this version.
One of the most important things that the Konqueror teams wants from people are test cases of your regulary visited pages, where Konqueror either fails to render or render things incorrectly, and submit it using KDE's Bug Tracking system. URL's will not be helpful as it takes lots of time to strip a page from all the HTML code in order to find the actual problematic part of the web page.
Just to save the search for some people: Mandrake, SuSE, Slackware and Tru-64 binary packages are available now. Others will be available soon. Source code is of course available also.
You, the users, are responsible for building our binaries (or, erhm, someone that works on FreeBSD). KDE only releases source code.
are they making it tighter and faster or just adding features?
This is the SINGLE most important question asked on slashdot about KDE 3.0
I know a lot of people who were scared away from KDE2.0's unstability and bugs.
It's a marketing-thing. People tend to only try out .0 releases, so a 3.0 release that is in reality a 2.3 is the best thing that can happen to KDE :-)
The second-best feature of KDE 3.0 is the configuration of animated pics, BTW ;-)
First of all, the major reason for KDE3 is QT3. QT3 has several advantages over QT2 for developers, and the KDE project want to use these to their advantage. As an end user, you probably won't be aware immediately of the changes, but developers will, which means that better programs will be coming your way.
Also, look at http://developer.kde.org/development-versions/kde
:Peter
The suse packages have a few minor installation conflicts. Make sure you have the prereqs installed and just --force and it will work. They use a separate .kde dir (.kde3-testing) so that you don't lose your old kde2 environment. However they don't migrate up your old settings. You can do this by copying the .kde2/share/config and .kde2/share/apps directories into .kde3-testing/share before your launch kde after you update. kconf_update will migrate your settings forward.
/opt/kde3 and you have to log in with the kde3 session entry in kdm if you use that.
I was unable to get the lisa package or kdevelop to install due to dependency problems, and I didn't try. Make sure you install the mesaglut-devel package. It's needed.
The packages install into
Known bugs so far:
- Browser identification doesn't always work correctly.
- Greek keyboard setting is giving me Russian characters instead for some reason. (this may or may not be a bug)
Just make sure you keep KDE2 libraries around and your old KDE2 apps will still work. They just won't directly interoperate with KDE3 apps. For instance, you can't embed old modules/plugins into new applications.
KDE1 was not even close to binary compatible with KDE2. Anyways, KDE3 broken binary compatibility because Qt broke it with Qt3 so it was a good opportunity. The transition shouldn't take too long before you have all KDE 3.0 applications though. Don't worry, it won't be that painful.
Part of the job of the beta is to get people porting their apps to KDE3 too.
I agree with the tabbed browsing, I can't wait for t to appear in 3.1. But the smart bookmarks toolbar; I find that vastly inferior to Konqueror's web shortcuts feature, mainly because it is so much simpler to use. Why do I need a bulky toolbar cluttering up my screen when I can just type "php:fopen" to search the php manual, or "rf:gaim" to search freshmeat? It's very cool. if you've never tried this feature, go into your konqueror settings under "Enhanced Browsing". It's very easy to add your own sites.
I can't speak for KDE (though I believe they have a Usability team), but look here for the GNOME Usability Project (aka GUP). I know that Sun has done user testing on GNOME.
~~~~~~~~~
dissertus scribendo latine videri volo.
Actually what I would like is clear simply instructions on how to have the kde call openBrowser(url) open in something other then Konq.
Ok, your wish is granted.
Each user to his own browser. Just how I like it. Very easy to change.
Simple enough? I think so.
What peope don't seem to realize is that kde is more customizable than any other DE/WM. It's also scriptable. Type dcop in a term.
Liberty.
To my knowledge, Debian KDE packages are separated. To install KWord, the dependency koffice-libs (to my recollection) is installed with it. I could be wrong (I'm not at my comp right now to check how apt-get handles everything), but when you do apt-get install koffice it installs all of the individual components quite nicely. Check out this page to see the list of KDE application packages. I also checked the library page and confirmed koffice-libs.
Granted, you get a small amount of bloat if you just want KWord (compared to a more standalone wordprocessor), but it beats the RPM distributions easily. The quality and ease with which KDE is handled in Debian was one of the major deciding factors in me switching to Debian from Red Hat.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Apparently they are making the cut-copy functionality more configurable so that you can have windows style (Ctrl-C) or unix style (highlight). It sounds like it will also integrate with other apps (gpm?) better.
I can't find it now, but I swear that I've read it.
Or maybe you are just a troll.
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
Try the Font Deuglification HOWTO.
You might find a more recent copy on linuxdoc.org, but they seem to be down at the moment.
Alan
this is very much an evolutionary release as opposed to a revolutionary one (as KDE2.0 was), but the changes are quite noticeable. they make the general kde experience smoother and more useful IMO. one nice thing about it being evolutionary is that it is immediately stable and familiar ...
Tabbed browsing is set to be included in 3.1. And Konsole changes are important to me. I was thrilled to see the additions.
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
Since noone else has.
Here is the secret link to the new
KDE 3.0 Beta2 screenshots
This has nothing to do with likes or dislikes of a particular desktop (you'll notice there are no RPMs for the recent GNOME 2.0 alpha either).
;) ) right is much more important (especially because next release + KDE 3.0 will be an officially supported configuration, 7.2 + KDE 3.0 isn't and probably won't be, releasing such a large errata that even breaks binary compatibility is not very likely to happen).
There will be packages for beta2 later (probably some time tomorrow); the problem is sheer lack of time. I've tried, but still haven't found a way to work more than 24 hours a day.
And generally, building alpha/beta packages for previous releases is pretty low on my priority list (if you look at rawhide, you'll see KDE 3.0 post-beta2 has been in there for a couple of days).
Getting the next release (7.3, 8.0, Linux XP or whatever it will be called
But FYI, I'm currently building the beta2 packages for 7.2 on x86, ia64 and alpha in a different tty.
kdelibs, kdebase, kdeadmin and kdemultimedia are done, kdegraphics requires some more work because of different gphoto versions, and I haven't started on the others.
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