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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.
Ive tried the KDE Beta 2. And I must say... Its a very very very stable pre-release. Hats off to the KDE developres.
The only problem is that some of the older KDE apps wont run correctly with the new KDE and they must be upgraded to work with the new QT packages.
Everyone should D/L it and check it out.
I want proof that Konqueror cannot be removed from KDE without causing severe damage to the OS!
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.
"You get what you pay for after all."
-Rob Malda
How useful can KDE be?
Anywho, the feature that I've been most looking forward to is tabbed browsing in Konqueror, due to appear in KDE 3.1. Galeon is the one constantly used app that isn't a part of KDE, and I use it because a.) it has tabbed support and b.) a smart bookmarks toolbar. Plus, it's a web browser. Nothing more, nothing less. Konqueror has various view settings (such as "file manager", "web browser", and whatnot, but in my experience, the different view settings don't always play nice. But since tabs are at the top of my wishlist, I will definitely reconsider Konqueror in the near future.
So, what are all you other KDE fans looking forward to?
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 ;-)
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?
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)
I'm really looking forward to KDE 3.
No, not because of the move to QT3.
No, not because of the improvements in Konq, KFM, or any of those - not even the multi-key shortcuts.
I just want to be able to use KMail for my Maildir mailboxes. I know there are hacks, workarounds, all that - but I don't want those. I just want to be able to plug in and go. Right now I use Mutt, but sometime in the future I'd like to be able to do some of the things it doesn't - like inline HTML viewing. KMail won't be for regular use, I guarantee it, but it will certainly be a nice complement to mutt.
A very close second is the switching of desktops when dragging a window - that's on the "KDE 3 List" and it's definitely something I miss from E. I don't know if it's going to be in 3, but I also really miss the ability to "walk off the edges" of the desktop and switch to a different virtual desktop. I've got the keyboard shortcuts set up, but it just isn't the same.
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 ...
*cough*bullshit*cough*
"Red Hat" doesn't hate KDE. Bero is a big KDE advocate, and maintains daily builds here:
http://www.linux-easy.com/daily/
Red Hat probably doesn't provide packages through other channels because they aren't going to support them. The KDE people are free to use the packages that Bero's put up, and they have in the past.
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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