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.

Comments

what about FreeBSD binaries?

[Anonymous Coward]

It turns out that a large silent number of
people are running KDE (and GNOME) desktops
under not *linux, but under FreeBSD. It would
be nice if more FreeBSD binary packages were
built.

Re:what about FreeBSD binaries?

[JabberWokky]

Why does KDE produce binaries for a few selected Linux distros, but not for other distros or other operating systems?

KDE does not produce any binaries.

Let me say that again: KDE DOES NOT PRODUCE BINARIES... they ONLY release source. Any binaries that are available at a version release were created by the distros themselves. It's in just about every single FAQ that KDE produces.

KDE aims for portability against just about every X and *nix out there, including AIX, Solaris, BSD and Linux. I mention those in particular because there are KDE developers who use each as their primary platform. About the only drawback to the "source only" policy is the occasional distro that releases a binary with all the debugging turned on, or gif support turned off, etc. But that has gotten more rare with better documentation.

--
Evan

No jumbo packages please

[2Bits]

This applies to KDE as well as Gnome.

These two environments tend to come with huge packages (e.g. gnome-applets, kdenetwork, kdemultimedia, kdegraphics, koffice, ...).

Sometimes, you just need one or two in the packages, and you are forced to install the whole jumbo packages. Why? Why can't we pick and choose?

E.g. I use Kword sometimes for simple word processing, but I never use the spreadsheet and the presentation app. Same for kdenetwork. I use KMail and KNode, but I don't need korn,ktalkd,ksirc,.... And kdemultimedia, I don't do MIDI stuff, and I don't want to waste 10MB for timidity++ and other junks.

Oh yeah, same for Gnome. Why do I need to install the whole gnome-applet package if I only need one applet? Same for other jumbo packages.

I'm on RPM-based distro. How about apt-get-based?
I don't know the internal details of the code, but isn't there a way to separate them out?

Re:I demand to see the source!

[Arandir]

You wanted "clear simply instructions on how to have the kde call openBrowser(url) open in something other then Konq". That's what you got. Clear simple instructions on how to have the browser of your choice called in place of konqueror. No, it's not a perfect scheme, but then again, nothing in life is perfect.

But I'll let you in on a little secret just so you can sleep better at night. The file associations are used by the file manager to associate file types with applications. Something else handles URLs. And you know what that is? The file manager itself. The name of that file manager is Konqueror. And that's the reason why the file manager doesn't need to be told which URL scheme goes with which URL handler. The file manager IS the URL handler.

Re:Redhat?

[bero-rh]

One of the reasons, I believe, for RH to sport such an aggressive testing strategy is, that the next RH release will be build entirely with the GCC 3.x compiler

That, and the fact that I don't think it makes sense to leave a version with known bugs in there for too long. A week from now, most of the commonly noticed problems with beta2 will be fixed in CVS, while possibly introducing new ones. Those new ones are the ones we need to know about. (We aren't planning to ship anything official with beta2 - so bugs specific to that version don't matter much - getting bug reports about things that are already fixed is not very useful).

If KDE 3.0 is stable when RH 8.0* hits the market, you can be sure they will include it.

That's the plan (no comment on the version number though). We generally don't throw stuff into rawhide that we aren't planning to ship.

And yes! cups (www.cups.org) look like it is going in too.

It's going in, and Qt, KDE and wine are built with cups support.