LinuxPlanet Reviews KDE 3.0

It RULES! by topace · 2002-04-09 02:47 · Score: 1

It simply RULES! Ive been using KDE_3_0_RELEASE Branch from CVS for a few weeks now. If your still using 2.x... UPGRADE!! its well worth it!

KDE's appearance by Ween · 2002-04-09 02:49 · Score: 4, Interesting

I have had people tell me that KDE3 looks just like KDE2. Well, they werent paying much attention. KDE3 makes great strides in the little things visually that make this one very slick looking desktop. I even showed it in a lecture at my school about linux and many people were impressed and came up to me afterwards asking what that was.

Good job KDE Team.

--

Tis better to be silent and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt --Abraham Lincoln

Re:KDE's appearance by Crypt0rchid · 2002-04-09 02:53 · Score: 4, Insightful

Well, I don't think that _appearance_ is an important point. Things that change below the surface are more important since they change performance and usability more than a fancy GUI ;)

Just my 2 -Cents ;-)
Re:KDE's appearance by madenosine · 2002-04-09 02:53 · Score: 1

Who cares about looks? The main reason for creating a 3.0 was the (2.0 incompatible) release of qt 3.0.
Re:KDE's appearance by BlueUnderwear · 2002-04-09 02:56 · Score: 2

I have had people tell me that KDE3 looks just like KDE2.
Well that's the point. The purpose of KDE3 is not to have sth radically different, but only to adapt the existing KDE to Qt3 (former versions were running on Qt2). As far as the changes to KDE itself goes, this could as well have been named 2.3

--
Say no to software patents.
Re:KDE's appearance by ThePilgrim · 2002-04-09 03:07 · Score: 2

Unfortunatly joe Public does care about the looks, which is why we have flame wars over why Linux is not sutable for the Desktop yet.

If KDE 3.0 helps this then more power to them

--
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
Re:KDE's appearance by Khalid · 2002-04-09 03:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

Alas IT IS! and this is something that most geeks fail to understand. For the better or the worse. For many people this is the first contact they will have with a software, and this first impression has a major impact about the acceptation of a software by a PHB, like or not !!

I remember while at the university, students were fighting to do graphic or visual projects because experience has showed them that these were the projects which were rated better !!!!

This is something that the open source community is at last beginning to understand, to reach the masses, projects have got to be "pretty", with the recent integration of true type fonts, alpha blending, transparency, anti-aliasing, new good looking themes and so on.

It's just marketing ! this is what Apple and M$ have understood long time age.
Re:KDE's appearance by sheean.nl · 2002-04-09 03:28 · Score: 0

It's just marketing ! this is what Apple and M$ have understood long time age.

well, Apple understands look for quite some time now (since their cool iMac, well OK that's not completly true, couse if they really didn't care about looks they wouldn't have a GUI), but MS, well imho they didn't seemd to care a lot about look, really, their Win9x looked quite nice but not like funky & flashy, now with their Windows XP, they seem to care about looks, just like Mac, really, without all that Macish (read, MacOS X & iMac) stuff nobody would care about looks and Windows XP would probably be called Windows 2002 and looked just like all the previous Windows.

Before this will be getting modded down: if it was without that previous mentioned stuff KDE 3 would probably looked just as boring as WindowMaker (maybe even worse) and everybody (=the-non-geeks) would still be looking 100% at the amounts of Ghz instead of how well it fits in their living-room!

--

If at first you don't succeed, then sky diving definitely isn't for you.
Re:KDE's appearance by RoLi · 2002-04-09 03:39 · Score: 1

Well, that's the great thing about KDE3.0:
You get the stability and polish from a .3 release, but the marketing hype and media attention from a .0 release.
KDE 3.0 will make big inroads, while KDE 2.3 wouldn't.
Re:KDE's appearance by yaba · 2002-04-09 03:51 · Score: 1

Well, I don't think that _appearance_ is an important point. Things that change below the surface are more important since they change performance and usability more than a fancy GUI ;)

If you are an advanced Linux User and you ask yourself "Does KDE really help me to do my work more efficiently" you will probably say "no". IMO it's even worse. The whole KDE desktop distracts me from my real work. There are so many thinks to tweak and explore - it takes days to explore all functionality. So I'm stuck with my xterm and e and I'm happy.

So now, who needs KDE? KDE is the beginner drug for those people that were always using Windoze and are used to overloaded, unnecessary features. Users, that do not want to use the bash, because they didn't had the change to explore the real Power of Linux yet, because it's hidden in the "backend" and cannot be seen in an UI.

And these users really care about the UI and Look 'n' Feel of the desktop. They don't differ between the backend (Linux) and the frontend (KDE). If they finally got the nerve to try Linux they will start using KDE and if they do not see something slightly equivalent to their Windoze they are used to, they will give up shortly.

And what do these people expect to see in their short evaluation period? Easy customizability, nice look, better usability... That's what KDE addresses.
Re:KDE's appearance by lamont116 · 2002-04-09 03:52 · Score: 3, Insightful

You get the stability and polish from a .3 release, but the marketing hype and media attention from a .0 release.
This is definitely a .0 release, then. KDE 2.2.2 was more stable (albeit slower) on my system. In particular, the panel (kicker) has a habit of going belly-up periodically, and Konqui crashes much more often than it did in 2.2.2. Still, this release adds polish, a few features and some speed. I look forward to 3.1.
Re:KDE's appearance by pi+radians · 2002-04-09 04:00 · Score: 2, Insightful

Unfortunatly joe Public does care about the looks, which is why we have flame wars over why Linux is not sutable for the Desktop yet

Actually, if you read all the other posts that are discussing the difficulty of installing KDE 3.0, including the reviewers comments, and the only way to work around those problems, then you'll understand why Joe Public doesn't want to use Linux on his desktop. Sorry, but you'd never get a dependency error while trying to upgrade Windows, or Mac OS X for that matter.

What the open-source community has to realize (if they WANT Linux for everyone) is that Joe Public doesn't ever want to use the CLI. Ever. He wants to double click, wait a few minutes and start using his new enviroment.

If it had much to do with looks, Win95 would never have been so popular. That was one ugly SOB.

--

sin(6cos(r)+5A)
Re:KDE's appearance by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:06 · Score: 0

shoot, that's one of the problems w/ some in the linux community- this superiority complex that cause they use the cli they're somehow less clueless... i cut my teeth on vms and unix systems, and i like linux, but c'mon, a nice gui can definately make you more productive on lots of things. as far as kde distracting you, rather than ignoring it, why not try configuring it to the way you work?
Re:KDE's appearance by friedmud · 2002-04-09 04:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

I used E for years (assuming you mean enlightenment - and no I don't mean behind Gnome or KDE - just straight E) - But now I have switched to KDE (about 6 months ago).

I loved E and could get a lot of work done - but then I found myself spending a *LOT* of time doing simple things (like adding a new program to the Programs Menu), also I found that it ate a lot of resources (and actually was making me skip frames in 3d games). I thought I could do better so I went looking...

I am a C++ programmer so I thought QT looked interesting anyways - and as long as I was going to learn QT I might as well use KDE. Upon my initial installation (KDE 2.1) I thought "This is bullshit" - it looked like some kind of childish cartooney crap. But seing as how thousands of people use it everyday I thought, "there must be more to this".

So I went ahead and customized it (just like I always did for E - which by the way it takes longer to COMPLETELY customize E than it does KDE). What I finally worked out is something that was setup just like I had E setup - except I have a taskbar and k-menu - that are both easily configured. This is not too mention the fact that now when I install a program it automatically adds itself to the k-menu - as opposed to me hunting down the path to the binary and editing txt files in order to add it to E's menu.

I have never really looked back - I have a sleek very functional desktop that doesn't take forever to do simple things in and allows me to play my 3d-games at their finest.

You obviously haven't TRULY tried to use KDE so you can't appreciate it or properly comment on it.

Everyone has their environment - use what you like - but don't knock my environment down as "newbie trash" just because you think it has "Easy customizability, nice look, better usability" which I really can't see as a fault anyway......

Derek
Re:KDE's appearance by mark_lybarger · 2002-04-09 04:36 · Score: 2

where to start :).

are you saying that MSFT operating system upgrades are smooth and flawless for MOST desktop users? A quick usenet search shows otherwise.

a desktop OS (home user, office user, whatever) is ALL about look and feel or rather useability, which includes look and feel. sure win95 wasn't the greatest we've seen, but it was revolutionary at the time. it took the "other" os (win3.1) to a new level. we all threw away those floppies of 3.1 (or put them in storage somewhere). whatever you have against MSFT and their FUD/monopoly practices, etc, win95 became quickly THE standard because it was useable, and looked good (also, MSFT forced all manufactures to pre-install it, but that's for a different day :) )
Re:KDE's appearance by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:50 · Score: 0

many people...came up to me afterwards asking what that was.
Same thing happened to me when I went to a party with a goiter on my neck. Methinks curiosity does not signify beauty ;)
Re:KDE's appearance by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:05 · Score: 0

>If you are an advanced Linux User and
>you ask yourself "Does KDE really
>help me to do my work more efficiently"
>you will probably say "no".
>IMO it's even worse.
>The whole KDE desktop distracts me from my real work.

Good point, no good Linux hacker would ever think of using KDE (Linus) or GNOME (Alan).
After all, it would get in the way of their user experience. I would also expect that a good hacker would never stoop to something like Video 4 Linux (V4L by Alan) which would
also be interferring in the experience.
Re:KDE's appearance by mckeowbc · 2002-04-09 05:07 · Score: 1

OMG! Anyone who actually considers Win whatever astetically pleasing is doing some major hallucinogenic drugs. I would have to say that KDE has been much better looking than Windows. The major problem with Linux on the desktop for the average user isn't that it's harder, or even the software. It's that they're afraid of change. A lot of people have trouble just using a computer and for them to have to relearn everything they already know, is going to be hard on them. Also figuring out a better way of installing software wouldn't hurt. Packages are nice, but I know a lot of newbies are still confused by rpms. Also directories named things like /usr/bin and /mnt don't make much sense to newbies. Something called C:\Program Files is a little easier to understand.

All that aside, with a good distro like Mandrake that has mature tools to do configuration and software installation a lot of this can be overcome, and once you get someone using it on a daily basis, then the rest follows.
Re:KDE's appearance by spitzak · 2002-04-09 05:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

Flashy appearance is not what users want. KDE realizes this, and so did MicroSoft and Apple at one time. "Themes" like a lot of X11 users seem to think are cool do NOT impress basic users. All the badly designed and candy coloring only impresses geeks who like to program these things because they are too lazy to program useful stuff.

MicroSoft has obviously fallen into this trap, which is probably good for Linux, as long as KDE with it's simple basic appearance remains clean. Take a look at how many WinXP users have gone through the trouble of changing the "appearance" back to the old standard. It looks to me like more than "customized" older Windows by changing the colors.

Flashy graphics only distracts from the job and I am glad that KDE defaults to none.
Re:KDE's appearance by afidel · 2002-04-09 05:34 · Score: 1

I assume you havent seen OSX or WinXP?
Well if you had you would have noticed that user DO want themes, skinability etc. What is the first things that most users do with a new box, change the wallpaper and screen-saver. Me as a geek, first thing I do is change the defaults to hide everything potentially dangerous and turn off screensavers (lock works better). If users wanted spartan interfaces we would still be using either a win3.1 style or a palm/os style interface, face it people are animals at some level and animals like shinny things!

--
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Re:KDE's appearance by IamTheRealMike · 2002-04-09 05:58 · Score: 2

Actually, if you read all the other posts that are discussing the difficulty of installing KDE 3.0, including the reviewers comments, and the only way to work around those problems, then you'll understand why Joe Public doesn't want to use Linux on his desktop. Sorry, but you'd never get a dependency error while trying to upgrade Windows, or Mac OS X for that matter.
Yeah, but that's usually because a major OS component upgrade is done for you by Apple/Microsoft as part of a major upgrade. I could go and download KDE 3 for SuSE right now, but I'm not going to for exactly that reason, I'd rather wait until SuSE 8.0 comes out, and then I'll upgrade all at once. I am 99% sure that I won't have any problems then, because the upgrade has been done by the people who built my system, not me. With MacOS/Windows though you don't get that choice.
What the open-source community has to realize (if they WANT Linux for everyone) is that Joe Public doesn't ever want to use the CLI. Ever. He wants to double click, wait a few minutes and start using his new enviroment.
And somebody upgrading to the next version of Mandrake/SuSE/whatever will probably use the graphical installer, which will fulfill this requirement.
Don't get me wrong, the whole RPM dependancy thing really sucks, in fact imho software management is THE weakest area of Linux. RPM is dominant but without strange hacks like urmpi can't even match Debian or Gentoo for one-command/one-click installations (you know what i mean). That's one of the things I hate most about SuSE: no smart package management.
Re:KDE's appearance by aardvarkjoe · 2002-04-09 06:21 · Score: 2

Oh, be honest. Joe Public *doesn't* update his OS. He uses whatever was on his computer when he got it until he buys another one. I would doubt that more than 10% of computer users know what Windows is beyond (if you're lucky) "it makes my computer run."

What the normal user wants is not the same thing as what the hacker wants. The whole community would be better off when people realize that "Linux for Everyone" isn't such a great goal -- when that happens, it's going to be useless for those who created it.

--

How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Re:KDE's appearance by yaba · 2002-04-09 06:28 · Score: 1

I found myself spending a *LOT* of time doing simple things (like adding a new program to the Programs Menu)

Well, I have found e16menuedit and e-conf that are very helpful.

I found that it ate a lot of resources (and actually was making me skip frames in 3d games)

Actually I can use Unreal Tournament und E (42 fps). If I have KDE running in the background it's unplayable (15 fps). And I have a rather slow machine. The trick is to disable all these FX effects in E.

You obviously haven't TRULY tried to use KDE so you can't appreciate it or properly comment on it.

I used every KDE 2.x.x release for several weeks, but switched back to E after these weeks, because I've discovered that KDE did not give me any real advantage.

but don't knock my environment down as "newbie trash" just because you think it has "Easy customizability, nice look, better usability"

You missunderstood me and I'm sorry, if I have expressed myself wrong. What I wanted to say is that you can not sit a Linux Newbie that is used to the Windoze world in front of a plain Window Manager like E, Windowmaker or FVWM. This does not imply that a Linux professional should not use KDE and I never stated and meant that KDE is "Newbie Trash" as I've never stated that Windoze is "Newbie Trash".
Re:KDE's appearance by friedmud · 2002-04-09 07:51 · Score: 1

Ah!

What is this???

A calm, cool, AND collected response on Slashdot! Interesting... ;-)

No, but really, it is good to see that you at least have your reasons - and in general KDE just doesn't do it for you, which is understandable (that is why we're using linux right - so we have a choice?)

And you are completely correct about sitting down a windows user in front of a bare E-Machine (that is funny to say!) - they would freak.

Since it seems that E is near and dear to your heart have you tried E17? I was looking into helping on the project for a while but couldn't ever quite get my feet wet (I still subscribe to the devel list - but man E17 is a mess to get started with). E17 is definitely going to be cool (if they ever get it finished)

Derek
Re:KDE's appearance by d0s · 2002-04-09 08:55 · Score: 1

I assume you havent seen OSX or WinXP?

OSX may be pretty, but it's most certainly not "themeable" out of the box. in fact, the only real options you get in that respect are changing the color of the close/minimize/expand widgets at the titlebar (you can choose from graphite or fruity colored), and changing the wallpaper. I believe there are 3rd party apps that let you theme OSX, but I haven't played with them.
Re:KDE's appearance by spitzak · 2002-04-09 09:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

I assure you I have seen WinXP. Why do you think I said "MicroSoft lost it". And WinXP is exactly what I was talking about when I said users seem to be setting it back to the Win98 appearance.

Very few people change the window colors (they do like to change the desktop wallpaper, I agree). Get out of the computer lab and look at some real users such as secretaries. I would be suprised if you find any of them have changed their Windows boxes other than the desktop image.

I still feel that "themes" are an excuse for programmers to feel elite and avoid working on hard stuff (like the ability to render an image with fewer than 2 pages of code, or to draw UTF-8 text without hundreds of K of libraries). Making the screen look like Deep Space 9 does not make it user friendly!
Re:KDE's appearance by afidel · 2002-04-09 10:36 · Score: 1

Since I do desktop support all day your comment about getting out and seeing users is hellarious. I deal with not only weird setups (I even discovered a bug in windows due to a real weird one, if you have multimonitor enabled on win2k and have the task bar anywhere but the bottom of the first monitor with autohide disabled then windows sends incorrect screen geometry to apps call the GDI, I found this cause a user was having screen corruption in the X windows client that runs their pos app cause they moved the task bar) but also almost completely un-usable (for me) desktops because of the level of customization many users do.

--
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Re:KDE's appearance by cyclist1200 · 2002-04-11 05:19 · Score: 1

I'm pleasantly surprised by KDE3. I was half-expecting only a bug-fix-and-performance-tune upgrade, but there's so many little improvements in looks and usability that it's worth the effort to download and install. Hell, getting a working, updated version of KWeather made it all worthwhile.

Change Log by Epi-man · 2002-04-09 02:49 · Score: 4, Informative

In an effort to spare their poor server, here is a copy of the change log:

Changes between KDE 2.2.2 and KDE 3.0

This page tries to present as much as possible of the problem corrections that occurred in KDE between the 2.2.2 and 3.0 releases. The primary goal of the KDE 3.0 release is to port the existing codebase of the KDE 2 series to be based on the Qt 3 library.

The use of Qt 3 provides a set of new features and improvements as well as allows a long period of binary compatible releases.
General

* A lot of fixes for reported bugs in all applications
* Porting to make full use of the Qt 3 GUI toolkit
* Performance improvements in some areas
* Arts has been splitted in a KDE-independent part and KDE-bindings

Arts

* More PlayObjects (more fileformats)
* Improvements of the MIDI capabilities (alsa support)
* Integration of new GSL scheduling code
* More support for using samples as instruments (.PAT loader)
* Environments/Mixers
* Recording support in the APIs (kretz@kde.org)
* Threaded OSS support (should run more reliable on more kernel drivers)
* Moved code to a separate CVS module

kdelibs

* KSSL: Completion of certificate and CA management tools
* KSSL: X.509 and PKCS12 certificate viewer and import tool part (KPart) - embeddable in Konqueror
* KFileDialog: URL Speedbar
* Support for Icons on Buttons in various dialogs
* A GUI Item class that encapsulates KAction attributes
* Added plugin interface for the Renaming Dialog
* Improved service activation (dcopstart)
* Support for Multi-key shortcuts (emacs-style) added.
* WebDAV support
* Plugin interface for retrieving / modifying meta information of files
* KDirLister is now cached (i.e. directory listings of ftp servers in konqueror)
* Optional emulation of traditional Mac keyboard
* KDEPrint: Improved CUPS support.

kdeaddons

* Improved stability of some of the plugins

kdeadmin

* Reinclusion of KDat

kdeartwork

* Inclusion of several themes (icon, window decoration etc)

kdebase

* KWin: smart mechanism that avoids focus stealing from windows the user is active on by windows that pop-up (M. Ettrich)
* KWin: don't crash when popup-menu of a window is still visible when that window gets closed
* KWin: don't shade/unshade (gross ugly flicker) windows that are moved fast in hover-unshaded state
* KWin: deny to the masochist the resizing of a shaded window
* KWin: automatically unshade on maximize, on restore-from-maximized and on restore-from-minimized
* KWin: work around ugly jre-1.3.1 bug with popup dialogs vanishing forever after first use
* KWin: improve moving by keyboard and bring back Ctrl-key ordered fine/coarse-grained keyboard moving
* KWin: abort keyboard moving of windows with Escape too
* KWin: no active desktop edges on resizing
* KWin: don't warp mouse pointer when touching desktop edge (with active edges enabled) if desktop isn't actually changed
* KWin: contain desktop navigation inside a box (don't wrap around from last to first desktop of a line or column)
* KWin: don't stack windows under desktops
* KWin: gracefully handle more than one desktop client application
* KWin: fix bogus gravitating for non-NW-gravitated windows on session restore (i.e., no more drifting of Xclock when started with -geometry -0-0 or such)
* don't allow +Alt+mouse to do things as if it was Alt+mouse (L.Lunak)
* any mouse button moves window when dragging titlebar, unless mouse click was popping an operations menu (this greatly improves consistency for configurable mouse bindings)
* don't show operation menus for desktop (no more move desktop to desktop 1 %-)
* KTip: center on screen
* KTip: readable on dark color schemes
* Kate: added plugin and new KTextEditor interface
* Kate: XML Plugin
* Konqueror/khtml: GUI for animated gifs: Always / Play Once / Never
* Konqueror/khtml: Major rework of the ECMAScript ("Javascript") implementation
* Konqueror/khtml: Major improviements in the DHTML compatibility
* Konqueror/khtml: Added "smart" window.open Javascript policy that skips popup banners
* Konqueror/khtml: Support for Actions in the new sidebar
* Konqueror/Sidebar: Added "New directory" option
* Konqueror/Sidebar: Added mediaplayer
* Konqueror/fileview: Extended tooltips for information about files
* Konqueror/popup plugins: Added "kuick", the quick copy and move plugin
* Konsole: New parameters: --nomenubar, --noframe, --noscrollbar and -tn (set $TERM=)
* Konsole: Keyboard shortcuts to activate menubar and rename session (Defaults: Ctrl-Alt-m & Ctrl-Alt-s).
* Konsole: New options: Blinking cursor, configurable line spacing, no/system/visible bell
* Konsole: Monitoring for activity and/or silence, sending of input to all sessions (cluster management)
* Konsole: History of a session can be cleared, searched and saved to a file.
* Konsole: Session types can specify a working directory.
* Konsole: Changed behaviour of "New" in toolbar, now starts session of type last selected.
* Konsole: Session buttons display state (e.g. bell) and session type icons. Double click renames them.
* Konsole: Sessions can be reordered via menu entries or keyboard shortcuts (Default: Ctrl-Shift-Left/Right).
* Konsole: Extend selection until end of line if no more characters are printed on that line.
* Konsole: Stop scrolling of output when selecting.
* Konsole: Drag & drop of selected text (like CDE's dtterm)
* Konsole: Pressing Ctrl while pasting with middle mouse button will send selection buffer.
* Konsole: Hollow out cursor when losing focus.
* Konsole: Support for ScrollLock with LED display.
* Konsole: Write utmp entries (requires installed utempter library).
* Konsole: Proper implementation of secondary device attributes, MODE_Mouse1000 and wrapped lines.
* Konsole: Session management remembers and activates last active session.
* Konsole: DCOP interface, sets environment variables KONSOLE_DCOP & KONSOLE_DCOP_SESSION
* Konsole: Made embeddable Konsole part configurable.
* Konsole: KDE Control Center: Added "Terminal Size Hint" option and session type editor.
* Kicker: Implemented support for centerring the panel on screen
* Kicker: new applet: kpf - a web server applet, designed for sharing files
* KControl: Unified behaviour of root-only modules
* KControl: Rearranged dialogs
* KControl: Font Installation Assistant added

kdebindings

* added Objective C bindings
* added C bindings
* updated and improved the existing Java bindings

kdegames

* Various improvements to the games
* Generalized more functionality into a libkdegames

kdegraphics

* KDvi: Copy and paste text from a DVI file
* KDvi: Full text search
* KDvi: Export DVI files to plain text
* KDvi: Forward search with Emacs and XEmacs
* KDvi: Inverse search with a variety of editory
* KDvi: DCOP interface
* KDvi: Improved commandline options

kdemultimedia

* Noatun: Global XML import/export for the playlist
* Noatun: Winamp skin loader
* Noatun: Icecast / shoutcast streaming
* Noatun: Hide close status und tag displaying

kdenetwork

* KMail: Maildir support
* KMail: Distribution lists and aliases
* KMail: SMTP authentication
* KMail: SMTP over SSL/TLS
* KMail: Pipelining for POP3 (faster mail download on slow responding networks)
* KMail: On demand downloading or deleting without downloading of big mails on a POP3 server
* KMail: Various improvements for IMAP
* KMail: Permanent header caching
* KMail: Header fetching is much faster
* KMail: Creating/removing of folders
* KMail: Drats/sent-mail/trash folders on the server
* KMail: Mail checking in all folders
* KMail: Automatic configuration of the POP3/IMAP/SMTP security features
* KMail: Automatic encoding selection for outgoing mails
* KMail: DIGEST-MD5 authentication
* KMail: Identity based sent-mail and drafts folders
* KMail: Expiry of old messages
* KMail: Hotkey to temporary switch to fixed width fonts
* KMail: UTF-7 support
* KMail: Enhanced status reports for encrypted/signed messages

KDEPIM

* New Addressbook API (libkabc). Ported applications to use the new API
* KPilot: Rework conduits as plugins
* KPilot: Support for USB Visors
* KPilot: Extensive addition of tooltips
* KPilot: Move to .ui files as much as possible
* KOrganizer: Plugin interface
* KOrganizer: Group scheduling
* KOrganizer: Split alarm daemon in a lowlevel and a GUI frontend
* KOrganizer: pinning contacts to appointments and TODO's

KDESDK

* KBabel: Catalog Manager is now a standalone application
* KBabel: Find/Replace in all files

KDEToys

* New Applet: KWeather
* KWeather: Better reportview, support for european weather data
* KWeather: Improved report view, uses http to get the data more quickly
* KWeather: Improved METAR parser support
* KWeather: added DCOP interface
* KWeather: improved support for iconscaling

KDEUtils

* KRegExpEditor: new
* Kpm got replaced by ksysguard

KDEEdu

* New in KDE 3.0, a collection of edu(cation/tainmnent) applications for KDE

Last modified: Sat Apr 6 21:32:57 EST 2002

KDE and K Desktop Environment are trademarks of KDE e.V.

Re:Change Log by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:14 · Score: 0

I remember seeing somewhere that there were to be mods in KDE that were to help people who used Enlightenment as the wm and KDE as the application system. Does anyone know what thoses mods were?

Post Mirrors Below This Thread by metacosm · 2002-04-09 02:50 · Score: 1

If anyone had time to mirror this site, before it was hopelessly slashdotted, please reply on this thread. Thanks.

P.S. I would sure like to read this article.

Re:Post Mirrors Below This Thread by kn. · 2002-04-09 02:51 · Score: 1

It wasn't much of a review anyway, more of an installation HOWTO.

Didn't even check out the links eh? by swagr · 2002-04-09 02:50 · Score: 5, Interesting

I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out.

I guess you didn't even look at the links. Sign of a true professional.

KMail: Maildir support
KMail: Distribution lists and aliases
KMail: SMTP authentication
KMail: SMTP over SSL/TLS
KMail: Pipelining for POP3 (faster mail download on slow responding networks)
KMail: On demand downloading or deleting without downloading of big mails on a POP3 server
KMail: Various improvements for IMAP
KMail: Permanent header caching
KMail: Header fetching is much faster
KMail: Creating/removing of folders
KMail: Drats/sent-mail/trash folders on the server
KMail: Mail checking in all folders
KMail: Automatic configuration of the POP3/IMAP/ SMTP security features
KMail: Automatic encoding selection for outgoing mails
KMail: DIGEST-MD5 authentication
KMail: Identity based sent-mail and drafts folders
KMail: Expiry of old messages
KMail: Hotkey to temporary switch to fixed width fonts
KMail: UTF-7 support
KMail: Enhanced status reports for encrypted/signed messages

--

-... --- .-. . -.. ..--..

Re:Didn't even check out the links eh? by ichimunki · 2002-04-09 03:03 · Score: 1

Now if only they'd throw SpamAssassin in as an included component, KMail would be the perfect mailer! :)

--
I do not have a signature
Re:Didn't even check out the links eh? by jeffehobbs · 2002-04-09 03:16 · Score: 1

I guess you didn't even look at the links. Sign of a true professional.

A "true professional" wouldn't trust a list of supposed fixes -- a "true professional" would reserve judgement until after actually downloading and personally using the software...

~jeff
Re:Didn't even check out the links eh? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:18 · Score: 0

Also, if it ran under windows.
Re:Didn't even check out the links eh? by dogas · 2002-04-09 03:31 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Interesting. For all those features, kmail still crashes every 5 minutes for me. It never crashed in 2.2.2. Evolution, here I come.

--
'When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.' -HST
Re:Didn't even check out the links eh? by VPN3000 · 2002-04-09 03:31 · Score: 1

.. Not to mention the advertisement is twice the size of the actual article content. That *is* the sign of a professional, right? :)

Victor
Re:Didn't even check out the links eh? by Per+Wigren · 2002-04-09 19:01 · Score: 1

"systems just aren't made of bricks, they're mostly made of people"
You may send them into hiding, but they'll be back again!
;-)

--
My other account has a 3-digit UID.

All I was able to see by Kircle · 2002-04-09 02:52 · Score: 1, Redundant

Well...looks like the server was /.'ed. This is all I was able to see before the db went down:

KDE 3.0 Review: Bumpy Install, Smooth Run
Introducing KDE 3.0

Dee-Ann LeBlanc

For once, I wish I could rate the installation process separately from the product itself. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is a nice, mature Graphical User Interface (GUI). It's been around for years, a lot of people like it, and it's free. Can't ask for much more than that. The huge problem is this, though: getting a new version of KDE installed is a big pain. Once you actually get into the GUI itself it's great and a lot of fun. Personally, I look forward to when KDE 3.0 comes pre-rolled into the newest distributions.

Supported Platforms

KDE 3.0 runs only on Unix-based operating systems, and I am going to focus on Linux since that's my reader base here. Architecture and other requirements depend on your particular distribution's requirements more than on KDE.

Getting KDE 3.0

To see if there's a binary set of packages available for your particular Linux distribution, FTP go ftp ftp.kde.org and look in the directory /pub/kde/stable/3.0. If there isn't, then you either need to find out if a version is coming for your Linux distribution from that distribution's web site or contact email address, or you'll have to build KDE 3.0 from source (see http://www.kde.org/install-source.html for how to accomplish this task).

In this article, I assume you're using one of the following Linux distributions that already has a binary version of KDE 3.0 available: Connectiva, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE, or YellowDog. Since the vendors themselves provide the KDE binaries, be sure to check and see if any more distro versions have been added since this article was written.

There are a lot of packages involved here. Typically, I just grab them all so I don't have to go back and get more, but I've got a high-speed connection. If you don't want to wait there for the whole thing you can either download it in parts as you go through the installation process, or order a CD-ROM from the KDE web site containing all of the KDE code.

If you really hate installing this kind of stuff, you can always wait to get a distribution version that has KDE 3.0 in it by default as well.

--

-- Kircle

Re:All I was able to see by Linux+Freak · 2002-04-09 03:15 · Score: 3, Insightful

This will undoubtedly get modded down as a troll (KDE vs. GNOME, blah blah blah) but I wish the KDE developers would take a look at what Ximian has done with Red Carpet as far as installation and upgrading packages go. There really is nothing easier than getting GNOME installed and keeping it up to date than with Red Carpet (which also has a nice feature of including non-GNOME "channels" such as Red Hat, Evolution, etc., to keep a variety of software up to date).

I know that installation code is the least sexy piece of code to be working on, but the end result is definitely worth the pain involved.
Re:All I was able to see by ichimunki · 2002-04-09 03:44 · Score: 1

You know. Installing KDE from source is infinitely easier than installing Gnome 1.4 from source. First the sheer number of tarballs required for a minimally functional install of KDE is at least 1/3 of Gnome. Second, the non-KDE dependencies are a breeze to find/download/install and consists primarily of QT. Finding the dependencies for GNOME is a hellish process (at least the first time you do it).

And Gnome 1.4 just ain't as good as KDE2 was (and now KDE3). Maybe Gnome 2 will be better, but I tend to think not. KDE's main selling points are applications like KMail and Konqueror. While Gnome may have Galeon available, it depends on Mozilla (a real dog to install and run). I think my attempts to get to Evolution were thwarted by the install process (but I seem to be blocking those memories for some reason).

So sure, it would be nice if KDE had a company like Ximian offering a service like Red Carpet. But that's Ximian, not GNOME. And for my money (which is $0), you can't beat the process of installing KDE from source. Besides, I love the way KDE tends to release a unified upgrade all at once, minimizing the need to worry about this process on a regular basis.

--
I do not have a signature
Re:All I was able to see by Otter · 2002-04-09 03:50 · Score: 1

There really is nothing easier than getting GNOME installed and keeping it up to date than with Red Carpet (which also has a nice feature of including non-GNOME "channels" such as Red Hat, Evolution, etc., to keep a variety of software up to date).
Seems to me the simplest win-win situation would be for Ximian to swallow a bit of their pride and include a KDE channel in Red Carpet. KDE doesn't have the money, bandwidth, personnel or desire to compete with Red Carpet and has no interest in running a competing business. If Ximian is serious about making money through update subscriptions, they should offer what their customers want.
Package management is enough of a mess already -- the fewer competing factions messing around with your installation, the better.

--
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Re:All I was able to see by chowells · 2002-04-09 04:29 · Score: 1

Yes, it sounds easy in theory, but very difficult in practice due to the fragmentation in the RPM based market. There is no standard way of downloading requried dependencies. apt4rpm is a step in the right direction, but until all distros make a repository it will remain difficult.

I attempted to write a KDE installer. It can be found in http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenonbet a/kalypso/ . I might restart and turn it into a KDE Updater, rather than installer. This should make the dependencies easier.

Chris Howells
Re:All I was able to see by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:31 · Score: 0

Indeed. I have gentoo on my pII 400.. It takes FOREVER to compile all of gnome 1.4 from source. This is mainly due to Mozilla. All of KDE+dependencies took about 3 hours, while gnome 1.4 took about 11 hours. Of course, I'm not complaining since portage makes compiling so easy.
Re:All I was able to see by krmt · 2002-04-09 22:08 · Score: 2

I don't think I agree with you. Kpackage is already available, and supports apt just fine, at least in Debian, and presumably it should work fine for Redhat et al as well.

Packaging and distribution of software is exactly the job of a distro, because what's a distro if not a neat collection of nicely packaged software scattered about the net? Ximian has usurped the job of the distro with RedCarpet. Not that I think this is totally bad, but I think they should have kept their focus on the tool itself, rather than the service through the tool. Sadly, this is their plan to make money (best of luck to them) but it does duplicate the functions of the distros.

I, for one, will never download Ximian packages on to my Debian box because Ximian will simply never do as good a job supporting them as the Debian maintainer will. I'd imagine this is true for just about all distros.

All in all, I think KDE is right not to work on a package like RedCarpet. I think a graphical installer along the lines of installshield would be a good project, perhaps as a frontend to compliment apt and Kpackage, but on the whole I think the strength of the KDE project is that they have focus. They know what they want to provide: the best desktop environment for UNIX, and they seem to be doing it. There's no attempts to sell services or any such thing, they are simply building the best software they can to suit themselves, and the results have been fantastic. They know that their job is not to package software and set it up for people to download easily, that's the job of the distro. Instead, they provide a tool like KPackage which integrates as a frontend for the distro's system, and they leave it at that. KPackage itself can, and will, be improved, but it will never attempt to provide all that functionality itself. And if one day we're all using KPackage or RedCarpet as frontends to apt downloading either rpm's or debs as set up by your distro (which appears to me to be the way things are headed, thankfully) then I think we'll all be better off for it.

--

"I may not have morals, but I have standards."

I have used it for 3 days now by hattig · 2002-04-09 02:52 · Score: 4, Informative

My experiences so far (ignoring installation problems with Mandrake):

It is a good desktop environment, it has lots of features, etc. If is more polished than 2.2 for sure.

However there are some new problems. Most notably form handling in Konqueror (which is much better overall now, but I need to use Mozilla to avoid the form handling problem) when using POST instead of GET (as far as I can see) fails about 40% of the time.

I can now use non-truetype fonts at the same time as truetype fonts when using anti-aliasing for KDE apps. This is great for consoles.

The monospaced font problem has been eliminated.

GIF animations in Konqueror still have not been fixed.

Re:I have used it for 3 days now by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:23 · Score: 0

GIF animations in Konqueror still have not been fixed.

That's a feature, not a bug.
Re:I have used it for 3 days now by flipflapflopflup · 2002-04-09 03:28 · Score: 1

> (ignoring installation problems with Mandrake)

I hate to ask, but what does this entail - I was planning on upgrading soon...
Re:I have used it for 3 days now by hattig · 2002-04-09 05:14 · Score: 1

Oh, it just isn't as simple as your would hope unfortunately. There is plenty of stuff on the newsgroup comp.windows.x.kde that will sort you out should you have any problems.
Basically, the problems are with KDM launching KDE 3 if you are running 8.1. I got TWM whenever I selected KDE 3 from KDM, this is a problem with the chksession script which fails for sessions with spaces in the names... you need to mess around with files in /etc/X11 as well.
Re:I have used it for 3 days now by mickwd · 2002-04-09 06:57 · Score: 2

Note that the original packages for Mandrake 8.1 were quite buggy - but newer packages have been put up on the KDE site (and its mirrors) which cure a lot of the problems - Mandrake 8.1 users should check that they've got the latest packages.

I've not quite sorted out the best way of getting KDM3 to work properly yet, but the following works (note that the old KDM works fine without doing this):

a) In /etc/X11/prefdm, look for the setting up of $PATH, and add /opt/kde3/bin to the start.

b) mv /usr/share/config/kdm /usr/share/config/kdm.old

c) ln -s /opt/kde3/share/config/kdm /usr/share/config/kd m

There may be better ways of doing it, but this works for me (on 8.1).

Yet another victem to the ./ effect by chabotc · 2002-04-09 02:52 · Score: 1, Redundant

Going to the review now gives me the folowing page:
"Unable to connect to the database. Please email"

Gues the old ./ effect is still stylin' and crushing any who oppose it.

Anyone manage to catch a mirror of the page?

RC3 is nice by div_2n · 2002-04-09 02:52 · Score: 1

I have played with RC3 at work a bit and it is very nice. With the additional bug fixes, the final release can only be better.

It is bringing me one step closer to never booting an MS OS at home and possibly work.

One bug I ran into that I HOPE has been fixed is that whenever I clicked on the "Lock Workstation" button on the toolbar, it would log me out.

D'oh! by Ctrl-Z · 2002-04-09 02:52 · Score: 0, Redundant

Quoth the webserver: Unable to connect to the database. Please email

This is either one of the quickest slashdottings on record, or something is fubar over there.

--
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.

Tits up already. by caluml · 2002-04-09 02:52 · Score: 0, Redundant

Unable to connect to the database. Please email :o(

--
Get your own free personal location tracker

Beautiful! by MonkeyBot · 2002-04-09 02:52 · Score: 1

The new KDE is really pretty, and it seems to run a bit faster as well. My girlfriend doesn't make me reboot my computer into Windows when she wants to do something now because she likes the look of the new KDE so much!

Awesome!! But... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 02:55 · Score: 0

The Slackware packages that were made available seem to have some bugs to be ironed out. I'm thinking I'll probably download the source and compile it (one night when I have *nothing* else to do) and see if that works better. KMail is really nice this time around. It's replaced Mozilla as my mail client. I've also started using Konqueror more, but even that seems to have its hangups (literally). I'm guessing for most people it would be a good idea to stick with 2.2.2, which I found to be rock solid -- wait for 3.1 (or 3.0.5, or whatever.) KDE3 has real potential, but it's not quite there yet!

Re:Awesome!! But... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:02 · Score: 0

Am I the only one who finds it funny that a distribution that people love to say is dying/dead/past its prime has kde3 packages before Debian does?

Hell, even sid (unstable tree) still only has kde2 packages.

(Nothing against Slackware, it's how I learnt Linux and I used it for several years, but the packaging system leaves something to be desired...)

Oh dear...Unable to connect to the database. by cca93014 · 2002-04-09 02:55 · Score: 0, Redundant

One of these days someone's gonna figure out content caching...One of these days...

--

Invoicing, Time Tracking, Reporting

Re:Oh dear...Unable to connect to the database. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:05 · Score: 0

You mean stealing ad revenue from the original site?
They keep telling you why they don't mirror the site. Most sites use all the hits to make money.
Re:Oh dear...Unable to connect to the database. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:21 · Score: 0

No, moron. If you weren't such a jackass idiot, you would know what he is talking about. To serve up dynamic pages statically for a specified period of time or until the content has been changed == caching. It cuts down on server load and prevents these kinds of outages.

But you're just a fucking chimpanzee with a brain the size of a squirrel. You must be an American. Too bad you weren't up in WTC 1 or 2 on September 11th!

/.'ed : Review Text by purplemonkeydan · 2002-04-09 02:56 · Score: 0, Redundant

KDE 3.0 Review: Bumpy Install, Smooth Run

By: Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Monday, April 8, 2002 10:13:47 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/413 8/1/

Introducing KDE 3.0

For once, I wish I could rate the installation process separately from the product itself. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is a nice, mature Graphical User Interface (GUI). It's been around for years, a lot of people like it, and it's free. Can't ask for much more than that. The huge problem is this, though: getting a new version of KDE installed is a big pain. Once you actually get into the GUI itself it's great and a lot of fun. Personally, I look forward to when KDE 3.0 comes pre-rolled into the newest distributions.

Supported Platforms

KDE 3.0 runs only on Unix-based operating systems, and I am going to focus on Linux since that's my reader base here. Architecture and other requirements depend on your particular distribution's requirements more than on KDE.

Getting KDE 3.0

To see if there's a binary set of packages available for your particular Linux distribution, FTP go ftp ftp.kde.org and look in the directory /pub/kde/stable/3.0. If there isn't, then you either need to find out if a version is coming for your Linux distribution from that distribution's web site or contact email address, or you'll have to build KDE 3.0 from source (see http://www.kde.org/install-source.html for how to accomplish this task).

In this article, I assume you're using one of the following Linux distributions that already has a binary version of KDE 3.0 available: Connectiva, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE, or YellowDog. Since the vendors themselves provide the KDE binaries, be sure to check and see if any more distro versions have been added since this article was written.

There are a lot of packages involved here. Typically, I just grab them all so I don't have to go back and get more, but I've got a high-speed connection. If you don't want to wait there for the whole thing you can either download it in parts as you go through the installation process, or order a CD-ROM from the KDE web site containing all of the KDE code.

If you really hate installing this kind of stuff, you can always wait to get a distribution version that has KDE 3.0 in it by default as well.

What's Different in KDE 3.0

Of course, with all this downloading ahead of you, you're probably asking yourself why you should bother. After all, nothing's wrong with the version of KDE you've got now, right? Under the hood, the main change is that KDE 3.0 utilizes the Qt 3 library set. On the surface, however, there are a massive number of changes. These additions include:

A pile of bug fixes.
A collection of improvements in the arts package for those who like to use various sound applications.
Full set of SSL certificate tools.
Better CUPS integration in the KDE print tool.
Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens.
Any number of tiny performance tweaks to the operation of keyboard, mouse, desktop, and windows.
XML plugin for Kate, a text editor for programmer.
Additional functionality for Konqueror, including controlling how much to show animated GIFs and whether or not to allow JavaScript pop-up windows.
Much additional functionality to Konsole, the KDE command line terminal window, including the ability to monitor for new activity, or no activity.
Font installation assistant.
A huge collection of new features for Kmail including distribution lists, aliases, and SMTP over SSL.
Much, much more.
The full list of new features and fixes is too long to include here. See the changelog at http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelog2_2_2to3 _0.html for more details.

Installing KDE 3.0

What you have to do to install KDE depends on what distribution you're running, what software you already have installed, and what packaging system your distribution favors. Many people would rather have their toenails pulled out one by one than deal with installing such a complex package with so many separate components. Why? Even if you use your distribution's packaging system (RPM or DEB, typically) the individual pieces are not all collated together in one large install. I'm working on SuSE 7.3 with RPM, my own comments will be biased toward this setup. However, I'll try to keep them pretty general, since I have no way of knowing what packages you've installed on your system. You might have a lot more dependencies to satisfy before you can proceed than I do. In my case, I started by trying to install the kdebase3 package, since if I can't install that there's no point bothering adding any of the special KDE 3 widgets to go along with it.

Trying to install this package of course gave me a pile of dependencies from RPM. So, I looked through the list and noticed that one of the items was straightforward: ksysguardd. I tried to install that using rpm -ivh but got a conflict, so tried rpm -Uvh instead, and that did the trick. So, back I went to trying kdebase3 again. The list was shorter but I still had a way to go.

The first item on the list now was a package containing the string DCOP, so I typed the following to see if this item is in one of the packages I downloaded:

rpm -qlp * | grep DCOP

Turns out that it is, so from there it's just a matter of figuring out which package. After playing for a while with regular expressions I found that the file was in kdelibs3, so I went to install that package, but got caught up in yet another dependency issue. This time I ran the same command as before but grepped for libartsflow, which turned out to be in the arts package. Of course arts needed yet another dependency (are you starting to see why so many people don't like to do this manually?), which I found in qt3. No surprise there, qt3 is the programming library used to build KDE.

From there part of it was like dominos. Installed qt3, arts, and tried kdelibs3 but I still needed another dependency for that one. Tracked it to libxslt, which needed libxml2, so I installed libxml2 (had to use another update there), libxslt, kdelibs3, and then kdebase3.

Now that I had the base package installed, I went for the relatively painless bells and whistles: kdeaddons3, kdegames3, kdeadmin3, kdeartwork3, and so on.

Configuring and Running KDE 3.0

There is much to the configuration part of the process as far as the basics go. The most important step is typing at the command line: WINDOWMANAGER=kde3. The KDE 3.0 installation doesn't overwrite your KDE 2.2 install, so this action ensures that you'll be opening the right GUI. You have to do this for every account that you want to utilize KDE 3.0 within.

Even better, add this environment variable setting to your .bash_profile or .profile (depending on what distribution you're using) so it will be set properly at boot time. To accomplish this, be sure to add the following line to one of those files:

WINDOWMANAGER=kde3

Then, ensure that you either add WINDOWMANAGER to the end of the export line, or create this line at the end of the file:

export WINDOWMANAGER

After this, type startx or init 5 or whichever your preference is to enter KDE 3.0. When the GUI opens you'll have the opportunity to choose the settings you were using back in KDE 2.2 or to set the GUI up all over again. From here you just make selections in dialog boxes. See Figures 1 and 2 for the differences between the same account in KDE 2.2 and 3.0 with all of the default settings.

These are of course just the basic configuration issues. A trip through the K Control Center will certainly let you change any number of KDE's GUI characteristics, that's half the fun.

Of course, it won't do to just tell you about installing this new GUI. I use Konsole a lot when I'm in KDE since I like to work at the command line, and it's great to have access to History functions right there in the Konsole Edit menu. I could swear the colors are actually brighter in KDE 3.0 than in my KDE 2.2.2 install but maybe it's just a figment of my imagination or difference in settings.

The ability to monitor a Konsole shell for activity reminds me of the days of hanging out in the computer labs at Penn State and playing Nethack (no one ever accused me of being a study fiend) in one window while programming in another. Also fun are the Edutainment packages, especially the planetarium! Definitely check this section out whether you have kids or not.

There are a lot more changes, many of them are subtle such as window movement or specialized such as additional KMail features. Once again, check out the changes list mentioned earlier.

Wrapping Up

It would really make my day if there was a way to install KDE with a single command. It seems to me that we have the technology to do this in Linux with a smart enough RPM setup, but then I'm not a programmer and it's really easy and fun for non-programmers to dream up "simple" projects for programmers, so I bet it's not as easy as I think. My major, super, stupendously big beef here is that under SuSE 7.3, I end up with a system with a broken useradd command. Before installing KDE 3.0 I could create user accounts with no difficulty. Now (at the command line) I create a user account and the command doesn't make a home directory for that user! That's a pretty serious problem.

There's a workaround available, though. The account's created properly in /etc/password and so on, there's just no home directory. So, you can always create a "blank" account before installing KDE 3.0, then from inside /home after you create the user and add their password (in a system where all of the users are assigned to group users):

cp -a
chown -R

or on a system where all users get their own group:

cp -a
chown -R .

Whenever possible it's nice to be using software with less bugs, and KDE 3.0 certainly has a lot of bug fixes. It's also got quite a list of new features. However, my personal preference is to stick with the GUI version that my distribution came with, and update it when I update my distribution as a unit. Otherwise it gets just too fiddly (as you saw in the installation process) and some things invariably break, as I discovered with my ability to add users--still, I could fix the useradd problem with a quick shell script if this was my main machine. What I'd recommend is going through the list of features and seeing if any of them is something that you need. That makes it worth the hassle right there. Otherwise, only do it if you want to look at it as a learning experience, you enjoy a challenge, or you really really want to have the latest, greatest KDE GUI available--or if there's a piece of software you need that won't run without KDE 3.0.

Re:/.'ed : Review Text by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:21 · Score: 0

"Even if you use your distribution's packaging system (RPM or DEB, typically), the pieces are not collated together in one large install".

CRAP. DEB packages aren't even out yet, but you can guarantee that his wish for installing with 'one command' will almost definately be forfilled by the good old "apt-get install kde" mantra.

moron.

What I'd really like to see in a review by ChrisWong · 2002-04-09 02:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

Too many reviews focus on installation. This review contains less info than the KDE press release. How about a little hands-on insight? How does KDE 3 compare to its predecessor in terms of startup time (with/without prelink/objprelink)? Runtime performance? Memory footprint? Can we see some numbers? It's a pity that reviews geared towards techies are often lacking in quantitative information.

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by reaper20 · 2002-04-09 03:24 · Score: 3, Insightful

Agree 100% - I have no idea why people insist on KDE installation for varios *nix's to be KDE's responsibility.

The project publishes the source code - the distributions are responsible for packaging it. I've been reading on forums all over the place (and articles like this) with people having installation problems with KDE, GNOME, or some other large project.

Don't blame KDE people, blame your distro. Debian might be a little slow, but sometime soon "apt-get install kde3" will work - I mean Geez, some people are having to install the individual RPMs in a specific order, what madness is this?
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Glytch · 2002-04-09 03:25 · Score: 2

I only downloaded the Slack 8 packages, so I don't know if the prelink and objprelink trick was used, but KDE3 was very snappy on my poor old K6-400 w/384MB ram. When I turned on full effects, it lagged a bit and hogged memory, but was still useable. Startup time was about a minute. I imagine on modern hardware it would be much better. I would have kept KDE3 on, but I'm rather strapped for disk space. Very impressive work, and this is coming from an obsessive Windowmaker-loving efficiency nut. :)
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:33 · Score: 0

They don't have to, they just have no clue on
how to use RPM. One can give RPM all of the packages one needs to install, and it will get the order itself.

Of course, on Mandrake one can also add a source for the packages and just do urpmi kdeaddons3 or such to get everything installed.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Matts · 2002-04-09 04:14 · Score: 2, Informative

It uses memory. Lots of memory. What can I say. Here's top sorted by memory usage on my main machine running KDE3, mod_perl, and a bunch of other services:
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND 25910 matt 9 0 72448 28M 12724 S 0.0 5.6 12:20 kmail -caption KMail -icon kmail -miniico 9351 root 9 0 93852 27M 6532 S 0.0 5.5 697:25 /usr/X11R6/bin/X -auth /var/run/xauth/A:0 2910 matt 9 0 62600 20M 15068 S 0.0 4.0 0:29 kdeinit: noatun -icon noatun -miniicon no 11878 matt 9 0 61908 17M 13620 S 0.0 3.5 1:21 kdeinit: kate 9452 matt 9 0 58208 13M 10748 S 0.0 2.7 1:37 kdeinit: kicker 18392 matt 9 0 55504 13M 10344 S 0.0 2.7 0:13 kdeinit: konsole -icon konsole -miniicon 11025 matt 9 0 56880 12M 11748 S 0.0 2.4 0:22 kit 9446 matt 9 0 55800 12M 11184 S 0.0 2.4 1:51 kdeinit: kdesktop 9442 matt 12 0 55836 11M 9592 R 0.7 2.3 4:17 kdeinit: kwin 9456 matt 10 0 55900 11M 10044 S 0.1 2.3 1:54 kdeinit: konsole -icon konsole -miniicon 10553 matt 9 0 54516 10M 10068 S 0.0 2.1 0:05 kdeinit: kio_uiserver 31815 matt 9 0 51716 10M 7432 S 0.0 2.0 0:01 /usr/lib/kde3/bin/kdesktop_lock 17747 nobody 9 0 11960 10M 5032 S 0.0 2.0 0:02 /opt/apache/bin/httpd
So yeah, it uses gobs of memory. However I've also got it on my 128M laptop, and it's fairly kind to swap on that, and runs faster than KDE 2 did. That's just a gut feeling version of "fast", but it certainly feels that way. Though it's impossible for me to say it's all KDE3, since the upgrade also took me to kernel 2.4.18. So it could be a multitude of factors.

--

Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Rich · 2002-04-09 04:23 · Score: 5, Informative

These numbers are extremely misleading. You need to consider the fact that most of this memory is in fact shared. You can't actually measure memory usage of anything but the simplest application using top, as it takes no account of which pages are from shared libraries.

Rich.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Matts · 2002-04-09 04:44 · Score: 2

I know all about top's misleading figures.

That doesn't take away from the fact that it uses a lot of memory though. I could have showed the difference between a runlevel 3 session and an average runlevel 5 session, which would have shown more accurately how much memory it was using, but who has time to piss about doing that ;-)

KDE3 is awesome. RAM is cheap. Get both.

--

Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by kervel · 2002-04-09 04:48 · Score: 1

i can reproduce some severe memory leaks here,
especially with konqueror.
i reported them (and how to reproduce) as bugs.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Xerithane · 2002-04-09 06:08 · Score: 2

I had a problem building kdelibs from cvs and from the 3.0 tarballs. This problem is KDE's fault. They have an application (kimage_concat) that is segfaulting. I'm not about to dig through the kde code, I've never looked at it before and that's not a good way to debug.

I posted a bug report, and the guy closed the bug report without any change notes or anything. The day after I posted it. It doesn't even look like they checked into the problem. There is also another problem building kdebase which is a QT problem. They are passing a KDE object into a QT function and QT doesn't have a handler for that. I'm also utilizing their qt-copy from CVS.

My stance on it is, KDE-3.0 sucks ass clowns. I would probably be a lot more happy about it if they actually looked into the bug report I submitted without closing it instantly.

--
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by ChrisWong · 2002-04-09 07:06 · Score: 1

Those numbers are rather interesting. KDE has always shared a lot of memory, but previously we could have some idea of what each individual app used by subtracting the SHARE column from the SIZE column. Here, however, KDE apps' SIZE column is at least 50MB-ish, far exceeding the SHARE column. Something funny seems to have happened that affects KDE's memory accounting. Perhaps video memory is being mapped into every single KDE app.

One can compare memory footprint by looking at the free memory available immediately after loading each desktop. This would get around the difficult shared memory accounting.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 07:23 · Score: 0

Bug number? http://bugs.kde.org/cgi-bin/Bugs/htsearch-bugs?exc lude=%2Fix%2Ffull.html&words=kimage_concat doesn't show a closed bug-report about kimage_concat so unless you give the bug number I think you want to spread disinformation.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by MSG · 2002-04-09 08:16 · Score: 2

Those numbers are only misleading if you don't know how to read them. Top and ps have a reputation for misleading people stemming from users' confusion over what the different segments mean.

To clarify (I hope):
The SIZE of an application reflects the paging area that has been allocated to the application. This includes all of the text and data for the application, all of the mmap'd files, everything.

The SHAREd pages include all pages of the application's memory marked shared. This is independent of whether or not anything is actually sharing the pages. A program may be linked against Motif, for instance; it will show the size of Motif as shared space, although the memory may still be attributed entirely to that process.

The RSS reflects the RAM resident pages for the application's text and data segments. The difference between RSS and SHARED *at least* may be attributed entirly to the program. It's hard to tell if the difference between RSS and SIZE can, as well, since it could be swapped out shared pages.

As an unusual case, X also mmap's the video memory on your graphics card, which inflates its SIZE value.

I'd still say that KDE is *fucking huge*. Given the numbers from the poster, I wonder how much swap is being used. All of the processes listed have much larger paging areas (SIZE) than resident memory area (RSS), which probably means there's a lot of it out in swap. I wonder if these binaries were compiled with debugging symbols and not stripped, or something...

I hate to see the parent marked up at 5. Personally, I think it is far more misleading than the output of 'top'.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Matts · 2002-04-09 08:31 · Score: 2

Well I would have posted more, but getting around the stupid lameness filter is almost impossible. *shrug*.

Here's the top few lines (though obviously I'm not running the same stuff as I was before):
Mem: 514028K av, 492376K used, 21652K free, 0K shrd, 45232K buff 211052K actv, 0K in_d, 0K in_c, 0K target Swap: 401584K av, 81888K used, 319696K free 249912K cached
Remember though, this is also a public web server, so a lot of that ram is taken up by my 10M AxKit httpd processes, which aren't sharing much at the moment due to the way I have the server setup.

--

Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Arandir · 2002-04-09 10:04 · Score: 1

Yeah, he really dissed KDE over the install, when it was all his distro's doing. I did an install of KDE3 for Slackware and it took me all of five minutes to finish, with no problems other than a missing libfam because I was a silly luser who didn't read message on the FTP site that said in big bold letters that I needed libfam.

--
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Cardinal · 2002-04-09 17:29 · Score: 2

The notion that this comment rated as insightful speaks volumes as to the validity of Slashdot's moderating public.

My stance on it is, KDE-3.0 sucks ass clowns. I would probably be a lot more happy about it if they actually looked into the bug report I submitted without closing it instantly.

Give me a fucking break. Yeah. You don't like how your bug report was handled, so KDE really sucks. Man, go write your own desktop and see if you take the time to graciously answer every bug report you receive.
Re:What I'd really like to see in a review by Xerithane · 2002-04-10 06:33 · Score: 1

Here's my point: There is a critical segfault-type bug in code.

Someone reports it. You sweep it under the rug and hope nobody notices? Yeah, that really speaks highly of the quality. I will never run software on a box I myself write code and do other important things on when the developers do that when a bug happens. That's worse than most company's "Well, it doesn't do that for me." stance.

People yell at M$ when things don't work and M$ denies or ignores the problem. But it's ok for KDE to do it? Sorry.. why aren't you running Windows again?

--
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.

Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by wiredog · 2002-04-09 02:58 · Score: 2, Informative

Downloaded all the RPMS from kde.org and the README as well.
The instructions are to go to the directory you downloaded the KDE files into and do the following:

rpm -e `rpm -qa |egrep ^kde`

rpm -Uvh *rpm

This removes ALL the old qt/KDE stuff, and then installs the new stuff. The first part works, the second fails with many dependency errors. This is because RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them."

However, a quick check of "man rpm" reveals the "--nodeps" switch, which tells it to ignore dependencies.

Only two problems so far. One is that some programs (such as konqueror) are set R/W but not executable! (This is in the gui button thingy, they can run from the command line) . The other is that, for some reason, the default font for konqueror is greek. So I switched to helvetica.

--

Best Slashdot Co

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by PoiBoy · 2002-04-09 03:07 · Score: 1

How hard is it to install KDE 3 on an older system? Most of my libraries, etc. are still from RH 6.2. Will this compile (or will RPM's work) with older libraries and xfree86 3.3.6, or is this the ultimate reason to upgrade my whole computer?
P.S. Attn hackers: the kernel and all programs with known security flaws have been kept up to date. Don't bother trying.

--
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by wiredog · 2002-04-09 03:13 · Score: 2

Don't know if it's the ultimate reason to upgrade, but I think it requires a fairly recent libc/glibc.

Come to think of it, IIRc, there's a RH6.2 directory at kde.org. Check there.

--

Best Slashdot Co
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by GreenBugsBunny · 2002-04-09 03:22 · Score: 0

The RPMs appear to have been built on a machine running a rawhide version of redhat. That explains the dependency problem. It's never a good idea to use --nodeps. You can resolve the dependencies by grabbing the packages listed from redhat's rawhide ftp server (ftp://rawhide.redhat.com). It's been running pretty smoothly for me so far.
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by DragonWyatt · 2002-04-09 03:26 · Score: 1

This is because RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them.

No it isn't, it's because you don't understand shell metacharacters. Do this instead:

ls *.rpm |xargs rpm -Uvh

--
Don't sweat the petty things. But do pet the sweaty things.
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by DarrylM · 2002-04-09 03:34 · Score: 1

This removes ALL the old qt/KDE stuff, and then installs the new stuff. The first part works, the second fails with many dependency errors.

...Huh, weird. I had no problems once I downloaded all of the packages (minus devel ones I didn't need) from ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.0/Red Hat/i386. Did you make a note of exactly which packages rpm had a problem with? If you are indeed missing packages, you can go to a www.rpmfind.net to find most of the rpms in existence.

I hope you are able to get it installed and working properly - KDE3 is great!! Now to try and get Starcraft working in WINE so I don't need to reboot so often....... ;-)
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by manly · 2002-04-09 03:47 · Score: 1

According to the README that is found in the Red Hat directory accompanying the binary RPMs, they should work with Red Hat 7.0 or higher.
Since 6.2 is substantially different from 7.2, I'd say the new packages are very unlikely to work for you. Red Hat 6.2 was a great release. But this might give you the motivation to upgrade to 7.3 once it's out, assuming your system is up to the increased hardware requirements (offhand, I'd say 400 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM would do). Some software has gotten bigger.
One thing to note about the Red Hat packages is they replace KDE2 on a running system. From what I've seen of the Mandrake and SuSE packages, they preserve KDE2. However, my experience w/ Mandrake 8.2 is that the only way to choose KDE2 or KDE3 is from the console. From kdm, choosing KDE as the WM means KDE3; there are no separate options for the two major versions (which would have been nice for testing).
Also, the parent post that recommends installing the packages w/o dependency checking is not good advice. That defeats one of the major reasons for using RPM in the first place.
Instead, if you're installing what are essentially "foreign" packages, you need to determine what they require. RPM will somewhat tell you what shared libraries are prerequisite, but unfortunately, unlike .deb it doesn't say "You need to install the package named XYZ to support ABC". For the average user, rpm's error message that some arcane library is missing is unhelpful.
Mandrake's Software Manager (and SuSE's Yast2) will conveniently resolve necessary packages automatically for software that comes with the distro. Unfortunately, because of RPM's inherent weaknesses, they don't do so for "foreign" packages.
In general, I wouldn't recommend compiling unless you're a seasoned hacker. For one, your configuration will be quite different from the typical host used to build the other binaries. For two, KDE is a large suite of applications, and takes some times to build. Do you really want to build, integrate and test all of that yourself?
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:49 · Score: 1, Informative

> rpm -e `rpm -qa |egrep ^kde`
> This removes ALL the old qt/KDE stuff
It removes any package that starts with kde. I had to manually remove kde packages, like koffice, that don't start with kde.

> RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them.

Sure it can. The problem is that you don't have all the dependancies in your directory, or installed on your system. That is because all the dependancies are not in the KDE 3.0 ftp directory, and are not installed on RH 7.2. I removed the follwing files from my kde install directory:
gphoto2-2.0-2.i386.rpm
gphoto2-devel- 2.0-2.i386.rpm
hotplug-2002_04_01-1.i386.rpm
hwd ata-0.9-1.noarch.rpm
kamera-3.0.0-3.i386.rpm
kde admin-3.0.0-2.i386.rpm
kdebindings-kmozilla-3.0.0 -1.i386.rpm
kdepim-3.0.0-1.i386.rpm
kdepim-cellp hone-3.0.0-1.i386.rpm
kdepim-devel-3.0.0-1.i386.r pm
kdepim-pilot-3.0.0-1.i386.rpm
qt-MySQL-3.0.3- 5.i386.rpm
qt-ODBC-3.0.3-5.i386.rpm
qt-PostgreSQ L-3.0.3-5.i386.rpm
usbutils-0.9-5.i386.rpm

and then did a rpm -Uhv *rpm. It installed everything in the right order, and updates qt. I haven't had any of the problems you mentioned.
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by wiredog · 2002-04-09 03:55 · Score: 3, Informative

It wasn't missing packages. It was RPM's insistence that library A has to be installed before package B, where it is highly non-obvious where library A is. Nothing in the README about the install order, and I didn't want to spend time examining each package to see just what was in it.

--

Best Slashdot Co
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by ichimunki · 2002-04-09 03:59 · Score: 1

These directions probably won't work. :)

You're not removing the old QT. You're also missing a couple of key libraries: arts and libxml2, I believe. Finally, there are many packages in a standard RH7.2 w/KDE install that might depend on what this removes, so the process fails at that point. The only thing that you don't want to delete is the old libxslt library, which you can always take out and then replace after you've installed the new libxml2 library.

But other than fiddling with RPM a bit to sort out this stuff, the RPMs seemed to work pretty well on my RH7.2 system. My only complaint so far is some odd character stuff using KDE2 mail directories (messages in old folders show up in Kanji for some reason, but once I "read" them they turn normal again-- we'll see if the problem persists once I get around to doing a from-source compile).

--
I do not have a signature
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by saintlupus · 2002-04-09 04:45 · Score: 2

But this might give you the motivation to upgrade to 7.3 once it's out, assuming your system is up to the increased hardware requirements (offhand, I'd say 400 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM would do).

Ah. I was having speed issues running it on a P75 with 24M of memory. Glad to see it wasn't just a misconfiguration issue on my part.

--saint
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by spock123 · 2002-04-09 05:42 · Score: 1

Here's how I upgraded my KDE to 3.0:

rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps *.rpm

--
* Smash forehead on keyboard to continue... *
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:59 · Score: 1, Funny

> Here's how I upgraded my KDE to 3.0:
>
> rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps *.rpm

s/upgraded my KDE to 3.0/fucked up my system/
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:20 · Score: 0

Thanks for the info, good stuff for newbies like me. Works fine.
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by B'Trey · 2002-04-09 06:29 · Score: 2

And then what? You find X, but it depends on Y. So now you're searching for Y, etc.

It isn't a matter of not understanding metacharacters. It's a matter of published instructions which don't work and having to manually perform tasks which should be automated. Small, sharp tools are cool. But I'm not going to go out and cut my grass with a paring knife. The issue isn't whether or not I know how to pipe ls through xargs. It's whether or not I should HAVE to.

--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by MSG · 2002-04-09 08:28 · Score: 5, Informative

What a day to be without moderator points...

You should *never* use --nodeps to install packages. The only time that is reasonable is if you've built a particular dependency from source, yourself (which you should avoid).

Certainly, you should never advise new users, in a public forum, that --nodeps is the correct way to go. They *will* end up with non-functioning installations.

...because RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them."

That's total bull shit. rpm absolutely, positively does resolve dependencies against both the packages already installed in the system and the packages given to install.

New users should not follow these directions. Other replies to the parent post give proper installation instructions. Moderators should lay down the crack pipe, and decrease the score on the parent post.
Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 09:17 · Score: 0

or you can run freebsd and type "make install" and have it all done for you.

Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows plan by boltar · 2002-04-09 02:58 · Score: 0, Troll

Soon there'll be so much GUI gloop and eye candy
on top of the OS it'll need a 2Ghz P4 to run.
Congrats KDE team.

KMail by Satai · 2002-04-09 02:59 · Score: 1

KMail works much better now. I was able to get it to play nicely with Mutt with Maildirs and archiving with a minimum of fuss.

Article's Author... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 02:59 · Score: 0

Complains about the install, then when you look at his problems, what do you find? Why he didn't RTFM. How do I know? Well, the guy tries to install the kdebase package first thing.

Then is surprised when he needs kdelibs to install that.
Then he's surprised that he needs arts to install that.
Then he's surprised when he needs qt3 to install that.

Some of the other dependencies he complains about all depend on who built your package and whether they enabled all the optional features. But his main gripe seems to have been tracking down dependencies he wouldn't have had problems with if he had simply RTFM.

(Side Note: While arts may be a dependency that's new with kde3, kdebase has needed kdelibs for as long as I've used it, and it's ALWAYS needed Qt. What's more, it's all right there on the webpage)

It is always nice... by cnelzie · 2002-04-09 03:00 · Score: 0, Offtopic

To have one's girlfriend like the look of Linux when running a nice desktop, like KDE. Although, I have to say that it is even better when your lady just loves Linux for its UNIX roots. (kinda like my lady.) Well, actually she is really interested in learning UNIX, Linux and Networking. (She is finishing a masters in MIS, specifically SAP and in finds it not quite technical enough.)

--
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?

Re:It is always nice... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 13:34 · Score: 0

What abt a gf who can type with hands crossed ie left hand on right side and vice verse. U guessed right, she is a linux geek. Word processing is by latex and u r all set.

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:04 · Score: 0

Best X = No X

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:05 · Score: 0

running KDE3 on mandrake 8.2.

It runs fine on a VIA C3 800Mhz. With no fan. 512megs.

There is no lag; I can listen to MP3s, watch AVIs, etc.. while browsing.

The KDE team has outdone themselves. KDE3 feels much more "solid" than any previous desktop environment in linux (ie, Cut & paste actually works, programs don't randomly die, etc..)

Good job.

Changelog I was hoping for by bill_mcgonigle · 2002-04-09 03:05 · Score: 1, Insightful

Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
CD handling no longer breaks the automounter
Runs well on modest hardware
Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
KMail no longer corrupts its mail files
Default browser handling works all the time
K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing

--
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)

Re:Changelog I was hoping for by Vajsvarana · 2002-04-09 04:05 · Score: 1

> Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason

Working on KDE 8 hours a day... never seen that. Check your X installation.

> Runs well on modest hardware

K6-200 32Mb without a flaw.

> Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX

You aren't using KDE from a distro, are you? ...

> KMail no longer corrupts its mail files

... maybe some sort of pre-alpha CVS snapshot compile, in fact :-))

> Default browser handling works all the time

Guess what? It works all time.

> K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing

Like KOffice with OpenOffice/Abiword you mean? Or KWin with E? Or Arts with XMMS? Oh, well...

Doh!! Score:4 (Insightful SIC! ) for one of the worst troll ever? What were moderators thinking?
Re:Changelog I was hoping for by bill_mcgonigle · 2002-04-09 04:37 · Score: 2

>> Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
>Working on KDE 8 hours a day... never seen that. Check your X installation.

Works just fine with WindowMaker...

>> Runs well on modest hardware
> K6-200 32Mb without a flaw.

Wow, your system must be significantly better tuned than mine. If you have any tips, please share.

>> Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
> You aren't using KDE from a distro, are you? ...

Um, doesn't most everybody?

>> Default browser handling works all the time
> Guess what? It works all time.

Geez, that's good to hear. I must have been imagining that one.

--
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Re:Changelog I was hoping for by martinde · 2002-04-09 05:02 · Score: 1

> Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason

I see this problem on my Thinkpad 600E. I don't have it on my desktop though. I've spent a little time looking for info about it and I've never found anything about it. If anyone has any info about it, links would be appreciated.
Re:Changelog I was hoping for by badhack · 2002-04-09 05:48 · Score: 1

I have also had similar problems running KDE2.x (any revision) on Mandrake 7.2 compiled from source. The problem however, is that my taskbar would lock and none of the buttons would work. I tried KDE3 on Mandrake 8.2 for a couple of hours and it _was_ faster. However KDE apps are still unacceptably slow on my _well tuned_ P2-266 w/128mb. Under KDE2 and KDE3 the automounter that comes with Mandrake will lock ANY KDE app, as well as many others (like OpenOffice) so this is not a KDE specific problem. But I must say, KDE3 is well refined, and I'm looking forward to 3.1. By far the animated icon theme that comes with the Mandrake packages (others too?) is simply awesome.
Re:Changelog I was hoping for by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-10 04:07 · Score: 0

the great allah will consume you!

for a great time, call/emale

William McGonigle
William McGonigle
251 Croydon Tpk
Plainfield, NH 03781
US
Phone: 1-603-448-1668
Fax..: (419) 710-9745
Email: flowerpt@pobox.com

k thx bye

KDE 3.0 doesn't make my laptop hot. by marksthrak · 2002-04-09 03:06 · Score: 3, Interesting

I've been a fan of KDE since they moved to 2.0, but I couldn't ever stand to run it on my laptop because it made the cpu fan run all the time. Not only is the damn thing noisy, the whole machine was noticably hotter.

After running KDE 3.0 for a few days, it's my cpu fan has stayed quiet and the system is no warmer than it was when I ran Blackbox.

The Cervisia interface to Konqueror is great- I don't have to worry about the security issues of running CVSWeb for all my projects.

Re:KDE 3.0 doesn't make my laptop hot. by tdrury · 2002-04-09 08:01 · Score: 1

The same thing would happen on my laptop too. Since I run gkrellm I could tell when it happend. It was always a Konquerer browser going nuts. I quick run of top, then a kill would always fix it.

-tim

KMail usefulness by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:09 · Score: 0

After testing KMail I have to say that I still can't use KMail. All I want is to use KMail for reading some mail folders over IMAP-SSL. The problem is that there's checkbox in incoming mailserver preferences to show only subscribed folders, but when it's checked folders list shows subscribed folders, but no INBOX, that is obviously the most important one. I really couldn't find subscription/unsubscription place from KMail so it seems to be quite unfinished but really needed feature.

KDE is a monopoly by MikeD83 · 2002-04-09 03:10 · Score: 0

Everyone calls Microsoft a monopoly. Which it is, it squashes competition by bundling software that has nothing to do with the OS in the OS, such as Internet Explorer. KDE does the same thing to a greater level. They bundly much more extras with their GUI. You could make a good case that KDE stiffles projects, such as Mozilla by including Konquerer.

Let the flames begin.

Re:KDE is a monopoly by boltar · 2002-04-09 03:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

But the KDE team doesn't intend to lock you in to
their system by bundling konquerer because only their browser can access/run some given feature. Also mozilla dying would make no difference to them
because they make no money no matter how many people use KDE.
Re:KDE is a monopoly by richie · 2002-04-09 03:41 · Score: 0, Offtopic

You need to look up monopoly in the dictionary. (Hint: it has nothing to do with bundling).
Re:KDE is a monopoly by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:36 · Score: 0

He said that it's a monopoly because it stiffles other projects.

The point is: stick to your distro by InodoroPereyra · 2002-04-09 03:10 · Score: 3, Insightful

It seems that the review focuses more than anything on a side issue: if you are a newbie, or if you want an easy upgrade, stick to your distro . This is the best approach in general, and I wish geeks would give this advice to people who need help and are not willing to spend time tweaking. It is funny to see people trying to upgrade everything by themselves and then complain it is not easy. HELLO: this is exactly what a distro is supposed to be intended for.

By the way, the review itself seems to me rather weak. It is mostly a "hey folks, don't do this at home" warning for newbies. And no, this does not fit my definition of a good review ;-)

Re:The point is: stick to your distro by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 09:25 · Score: 0

Yea but the first thing people discover when they become a linux user is that eveyone else spends all day downloading the newest whatever.
What's the point of being a linux user if you don't get to fight with dependancy issues all day long and be on the bleeding edge.

I think you don't understand the linux desktop mindset which is in direct contrast to the linux server mindset. In the server arena people want to install once and only patch for security. In the desktop, so many apps are evolving at such a fast rate that they make the 6 month old version see like a pile of crap. Seriously, older linux desktop apps for the most part suck ass. Look at Koffice now and 1 year ago. Look at Moz 6 months ago versus today. It's widely accepted that although Linux now installs well, its still a bitch to get used to unless your REALLY know your OS. So when a new tool or app that comes out that has the potential to make a user's life easier, and make linux close a little of the gap in user friendlyness, they take the plunge and this is the result.

Rather then complain that linux is only for tweakers(which it is) why not actually work on linux usability for once. I'm still amazed that linux isn't as easy to use as windows 95 is after all these years.

What a maroon by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:10 · Score: 0

"Unable to connect to the database"??

Why do lame fucking webmasters continue to use crap so-called RDBMS servers like MySQL which fall over so easily under load, when they can use something like PostgreSQL which offers far superior read access under load, scales better, and is far more reliable?

If any so-called webmaster working for *me* tried to implement a MySQL-based solution, I'd ship his ass to the Israeli-Palestian front lines so god damn fast it'd make his head spin!

Stupid assholes need a royal cluebar handed to them.

Re:What a maroon by jdbc.geek · 2002-04-09 03:45 · Score: 1

If any so-called webmaster working for *me* tried to implement a MySQL-based solution, I'd ship his ass to the Israeli-Palestian front lines so god damn fast it'd make his head spin!

That's because you apparently have never managed a high-volume website which relies on dynamic content.

I work for an internet retailer with over 150 websites, all of which connect to an Oracle database to serve dynamic content (except for some nify product data caching stuff I came up with. I'm so cool. ;). Before we switched to Oracle, we used MySQL. The switch was mandated because management hired a 'DBA' expert whose only previous experience was with Oracle, and since he was being paid more than any of the other developers, obviously he knew more than we did. The problem with BOTH DBMSes wasn't with the DBs themselves, it was with hardware: most sites on the web, including some of the most popular ones, are not run on $1m Sun Fire servers, or even on $75000 Sun Enterprise servers, they're run on off-the-shelf, Intel-based, cheap rackmount machines with little RAM, and 2 or fewer CPUs. These machines are simply not capable of handling the amount of traffic in a /.'ing. So maybe if you want to donate a Compaq AlphaServer or a Sun Enterprise machine to KDE, don't bitch about their choice of DBMS, since their DMBS isn't the problem, their hardware is.
Re:What a maroon by mgkimsal2 · 2002-04-09 04:28 · Score: 2

How do you know what database they are using?

--
creation science book
Re:What a maroon by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 15:10 · Score: 0

Wrong, pal. I have plenty of experience and I know what I am talking about. (So go fuck yourself.) If your dynamic loads are that high there are things that can be done such as static content caching. Plus, switch to a more reliable back-end. If anybody tries to tell me that MySQL is more stable and more scalable than PostgreSQL, I might just have to smack them in the chops.

That is not a review by ltsmash · 2002-04-09 03:10 · Score: 3, Interesting

That article is not a review. A review is a critical report of something. The reviewer should tell us everything good and bad about the product.

That article was 20% advertisement and 80% technical support on installation. The article belongs in a README.TXT, not in a "review".

Re:That is not a review by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:51 · Score: 0

That article was 20% advertisement and 80% technical support on installation.

That's not a surprise seeing that Linuxtoday (as well as Slashdot) are Linux propoganda (or if you prefer the 'gentler' term, advocacy) sites.

Very rough for us Noobs! by Deacon+Jones · 2002-04-09 03:11 · Score: 3, Interesting

I purchased Suse 7.3 as it seemed to be a good distro. for those of us who are oppposed to M$ and want to use another OS, but don't want to have to spend hours upon hours learning that OS.In other words, a typical "dumb end user" when it comes to operating systems.

For the most part, its pretty intuitive--I can browse, send emails, e.t.c.

But I hate the fonts as opposed to Windows rendering of fonts. KDE is the default GUI, so I thought I would try this KDE 3.0. Here's where the newbie to Linux definitely loses out. I knew that these "RPM thingies" where what I needed to download.

I then used KRPM (?) or something like that which promised to take care of dependencies and all. So, I "installed" (don't know if that's the right term or not) all the RPMS, and boom! Crash.

Boot the computer, and I get some kind of kernel fault thing. Luckily, no serious data on the 'puter, so I reboot and install the distro all over again. No biggie, but makes me sad that I can't "see" the new KDE.

I know to all of you its a piece of cake, but (as has been noted before) if the Linux community really wants us desktop end users en masse, then it should make something like this as simple as it is in windows. In windows, if I want the latest version of something, I download an install file and double click, and I'm done.

It should be that easy for dummies like me. (as an aside, I was hoping Suse's online update would do it automagically for me, but no such luck).

--
I pulled a jack move to cop this sig

Re:Very rough for us Noobs! by knownzero · 2002-04-09 04:00 · Score: 1

I didn't think it was all that rough to install, even though it took a little time to figure out which rpm's needed to have which ones loaded before it. I think one of the big drawbacks of open source is that a lot of the time, it is assumed that you know how to make dependencies and such. But if your new to it, it might as well be written in Greek on goats skin with ox blood. I'll take the time to read about how to do it, but i have to be able to get in the damn system to learn how to use it first!

--
quod me nutrit me destruit
Re:Very rough for us Noobs! by spitzak · 2002-04-09 05:35 · Score: 2

I think if you read the comments here more carefully you would see that even experts do not consider the installation a "piece of cake".

It sounds quite scary, in fact, scary enough that I am not even going to attempt it. Sigh.
Re:Very rough for us Noobs! by Rogerborg · 2002-04-09 06:03 · Score: 2
- I then used KRPM (?) or something like that which promised to take care of dependencies and all. So, I "installed" (don't know if that's the right term or not) all the RPMS, and boom! Crash.
Not just hard on the noobs. I'm an applications developer who builds my own machines and has been using *nix in one form or another for 12 years, and I still had problems moving to KDE3 (on SuSE 7.3 as well).

For example: there's no README in the mirror that I got my SuSE rpms from that explains about the WINDOWMANAGER or KDEDIR settings, although in fact for SuSE, it's actually the default DISPLAYMANAGER in /etc/init.d/xdm that needs changed (yes, I know, this is SuSE's responsibility to tell me, not kde). No /opt/kde3/shared/config/xdm directory was installed and I had to copy over the kde2 version, and no ~/.kde3 directory was created or populated. I got it all sorted eventually, except that my menu bar is missing some icons, and the menu items shown under kmenuedit bear no relationship to the ones actually shown on the desktop menu.

Because I'm a developer, I won't make the mistake of wailing "Why can't someone make it better?", because I hate it when lusers say that about my software. I'll just gently point out that I don't ship apps, under Windows or Linux, to external customers or internal ones, that require any more than a double click or a single command to install. And I do this out of pure pragmatism, because I hate dealing with support issues. Hint, hint, SuSE et al.
--
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.

Easy to install for mandrake.. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:14 · Score: 1, Informative

for people using mandrake 8.2, you can use the official RPMs, or try the texstar RPMs.

They work like a charm, and it took all of about 1 minute to install.

A helpful hint: by Thud457 · 2002-04-09 03:14 · Score: 1, Redundant

It would really make my day if there was a way to install KDE with a single command. It seems to me that we have the technology to do this in Linux with a smart enough RPM setup, but then I'm not a programmer and it's really easy and fun for non-programmers to dream up "simple" projects for programmers, so I bet it's not as easy as I think. My major, super, stupendously big beef here is that under SuSE 7.3, I end up with a system with a broken useradd command. Before installing KDE 3.0 I could create user accounts with no difficulty. Now (at the command line) I create a user account and the command doesn't make a home directory for that user! That's a pretty serious problem.

There's a workaround available, though. The account's created properly in /etc/password and so on, there's just no home directory. So, you can always create a "blank" account before installing KDE 3.0, then from inside /home after you create the user and add their password (in a system where all of the users are assigned to group users):

cp -a <blankdirectory> <newusername> chown -R <newusername> <newusername>

or on a system where all users get their own group:

cp -a <blankdirectory> <newusername> chown -R <newusername>.<newusername> <newusername>

Whenever possible it's nice to be using software with less bugs, and KDE 3.0 certainly has a lot of bug fixes. It's also got quite a list of new features. However, my personal preference is to stick with the GUI version that my distribution came with, and update it when I update my distribution as a unit. Otherwise it gets just too fiddly (as you saw in the installation process) and some things invariably break, as I discovered with my ability to add users--still, I could fix the useradd problem with a quick shell script if this was my main machine. What I'd recommend is going through the list of features and seeing if any of them is something that you need. That makes it worth the hassle right there. Otherwise, only do it if you want to look at it as a learning experience, you enjoy a challenge, or you really really want to have the latest, greatest KDE GUI available--or if there's a piece of software you need that won't run without KDE 3.0.

--

the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Re:A helpful hint: by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:47 · Score: 0

there is.
emerge kde
Re:A helpful hint: by gazbo · 2002-04-09 03:59 · Score: 2, Interesting

It does have a lot of bugfixes, and IMHO the beautiful look and feel really proves wrong all of the FUD about GNU/Linux not being ready for the desktop.
As you say, it was bound to break something (in your case useradd) but that's a small trade-off. Also as another poster pointed out, the only problems the author had were because he hadn't followed the installation instructions exactly, and so had dependency problems - of course you need to install the packages in the right order, any idiot could tell him that

An even better point though is that though useradd was broken, because it is Linux you are able to take a template copy of a home directory, and write a script so that when you want add a user you can replicate the functionality. I'd love to see you try that when the new user on Windoze breaks after an update.

Every day Linux just gets so much easier for newby desktop use - surely we've now reached the same level of ease of use as Windoze?

My own "benchmark"/review by fabiolrs · 2002-04-09 03:16 · Score: 2, Informative

I installed KDE3 on my box right now, I configured it so it would be just like my old kde 2.2, installation ran with no problems at all. First login was no so fast but after I configured it it became little faster than my previous 2.2 instalation. Konqueror is much much much better! Overall performance seems to be much higher, the system looks much smoother and applications like Konqueror seems to be loading a little faster. Its also really pretty. I dont know if anyone realised that memory usage with KDE 3 opened and system idle is much lower... I frequently had like 40% of memory usage with only kde 2.2 opened now im experiencing "only" 18%... dont know if it is my poor system or a normal kde stuff... ok, ill write more when i discovery anything else...

--
Fabio - Sumare/Sao Paulo/Brazil/South America/Earth/Solar System/Milky Way/Universe
http://www.morroida.com.br

the next parts.... by XRayX · 2002-04-09 03:17 · Score: 1

Installing KDE 3.0

What you have to do to install KDE depends on what distribution you're running, what software you already have installed, and what packaging system your distribution favors. Many people would rather have their toenails pulled out one by one than deal with installing such a complex package with so many separate components. Why? Even if you use your distribution's packaging system (RPM or DEB, typically) the individual pieces are not all collated together in one large install. I'm working on SuSE 7.3 with RPM, my own comments will be biased toward this setup. However, I'll try to keep them pretty general, since I have no way of knowing what packages you've installed on your system. You might have a lot more dependencies to satisfy before you can proceed than I do. In my case, I started by trying to install the kdebase3 package, since if I can't install that there's no point bothering adding any of the special KDE 3 widgets to go along with it.

Trying to install this package of course gave me a pile of dependencies from RPM. So, I looked through the list and noticed that one of the items was straightforward: ksysguardd. I tried to install that using rpm -ivh but got a conflict, so tried rpm -Uvh instead, and that did the trick. So, back I went to trying kdebase3 again. The list was shorter but I still had a way to go.

The first item on the list now was a package containing the string DCOP, so I typed the following to see if this item is in one of the packages I downloaded:

rpm -qlp * | grep DCOP

Turns out that it is, so from there it's just a matter of figuring out which package. After playing for a while with regular expressions I found that the file was in kdelibs3, so I went to install that package, but got caught up in yet another dependency issue. This time I ran the same command as before but grepped for libartsflow, which turned out to be in the arts package. Of course arts needed yet another dependency (are you starting to see why so many people don't like to do this manually?), which I found in qt3. No surprise there, qt3 is the programming library used to build KDE.

From there part of it was like dominos. Installed qt3, arts, and tried kdelibs3 but I still needed another dependency for that one. Tracked it to libxslt, which needed libxml2, so I installed libxml2 (had to use another update there), libxslt, kdelibs3, and then kdebase3.

Now that I had the base package installed, I went for the relatively painless bells and whistles: kdeaddons3, kdegames3, kdeadmin3, kdeartwork3, and so on.

Configuring and Running KDE 3.0

There is much to the configuration part of the process as far as the basics go. The most important step is typing at the command line: WINDOWMANAGER=kde3. The KDE 3.0 installation doesn't overwrite your KDE 2.2 install, so this action ensures that you'll be opening the right GUI. You have to do this for every account that you want to utilize KDE 3.0 within.

Even better, add this environment variable setting to your .bash_profile or .profile (depending on what distribution you're using) so it will be set properly at boot time. To accomplish this, be sure to add the following line to one of those files:

WINDOWMANAGER=kde3

Then, ensure that you either add WINDOWMANAGER to the end of the export line, or create this line at the end of the file:

export WINDOWMANAGER

After this, type startx or init 5 or whichever your preference is to enter KDE 3.0. When the GUI opens you'll have the opportunity to choose the settings you were using back in KDE 2.2 or to set the GUI up all over again. From here you just make selections in dialog boxes. See Figures 1 and 2 for the differences between the same account in KDE 2.2 and 3.0 with all of the default settings.

These are of course just the basic configuration issues. A trip through the K Control Center will certainly let you change any number of KDE's GUI characteristics, that's half the fun.

Of course, it won't do to just tell you about installing this new GUI. I use Konsole a lot when I'm in KDE since I like to work at the command line, and it's great to have access to History functions right there in the Konsole Edit menu. I could swear the colors are actually brighter in KDE 3.0 than in my KDE 2.2.2 install but maybe it's just a figment of my imagination or difference in settings.

The ability to monitor a Konsole shell for activity reminds me of the days of hanging out in the computer labs at Penn State and playing Nethack (no one ever accused me of being a study fiend) in one window while programming in another. Also fun are the Edutainment packages, especially the planetarium! Definitely check this section out whether you have kids or not.

There are a lot more changes, many of them are subtle such as window movement or specialized such as additional KMail features. Once again, check out the changes list mentioned earlier.

Wrapping Up

It would really make my day if there was a way to install KDE with a single command. It seems to me that we have the technology to do this in Linux with a smart enough RPM setup, but then I'm not a programmer and it's really easy and fun for non-programmers to dream up "simple" projects for programmers, so I bet it's not as easy as I think. My major, super, stupendously big beef here is that under SuSE 7.3, I end up with a system with a broken useradd command. Before installing KDE 3.0 I could create user accounts with no difficulty. Now (at the command line) I create a user account and the command doesn't make a home directory for that user! That's a pretty serious problem.

There's a workaround available, though. The account's created properly in /etc/password and so on, there's just no home directory. So, you can always create a "blank" account before installing KDE 3.0, then from inside /home after you create the user and add their password (in a system where all of the users are assigned to group users):

cp -a
chown -R
or on a system where all users get their own group:
cp -a
chown -R .

Whenever possible it's nice to be using software with less bugs, and KDE 3.0 certainly has a lot of bug fixes. It's also got quite a list of new features. However, my personal preference is to stick with the GUI version that my distribution came with, and update it when I update my distribution as a unit. Otherwise it gets just too fiddly (as you saw in the installation process) and some things invariably break, as I discovered with my ability to add users--still, I could fix the useradd problem with a quick shell script if this was my main machine. What I'd recommend is going through the list of features and seeing if any of them is something that you need. That makes it worth the hassle right there. Otherwise, only do it if you want to look at it as a learning experience, you enjoy a challenge, or you really really want to have the latest, greatest KDE GUI available--or if there's a piece of software you need that won't run without KDE 3.0.

--
Boycot? Blackout? Subscriptions?
I don't care!

I agree and disagree... by gfxguy · 2002-04-09 03:18 · Score: 1

Appearance is certainly important, but not just because of marketing or because "clueless masses" think it is...

Imagine your desktop... not on your computer, your actualy physical desktop, and the surrounding room... For a lot of people, me included, if there is clutter or mess it is simply hard for me to concentrate and work. I enjoy listening to music more when my living room is clean and uncluttered. Same thing when I want to enjoy a movie.

It's Feng Shui - while I don't really agree that having the toilet be in a certain corner of my house will bring prosperity, I do believe that your environment certainly has an effect on how well you work, and if you work mostly on computers, as most of us do, the computer desktop should have an appearance that adds harmony to your work flow.

It's one of the reasons I like Unix and X11 so much - all the choice you have for how your work environment is configured - you configure it to fit your flow, and it's why I dislike the windows GUI. Windows is actually quite good, but there are a certain few minor irritations that really bother me, and that disrupts my flow and often my concentration. I can get a bunch of third party applications to overcome this, but I prefer a windowing system that simply let's me configure it the way I want (sloppy focus, just as an example!).

--
Stupid sexy Flanders.

Re:I agree and disagree... by friedmud · 2002-04-09 04:06 · Score: 1

"(sloppy focus, just as an example!)."

I would have to say that this is the single greatest creation in the history of time.

I started out with Enlightenment in Linux - which defaults to this sort of behavior. And nowadays I use KDE3 with this behavior.

Ever since I started using WM's with Sloppy Focus it is just painful to use anything else! Windows focusing irritates the shit out of me. I hate how every window seems to think it needs to be maximized and that overlapping windows so that you can see more than one bit of infromation at once is totally out of the question.

It is good to see that there are others who appreciate this!

Derek

My personal review :) by daserver · 2002-04-09 03:19 · Score: 1

Installed it. No problem. Tried it. Liked it. Definetly better than kde 2.2 but still for my needs blackbox does it (I still use console email and console filemanager ;-). So recommended for newbies not for people who know Linux. But then again some like to point and click instead of typing...

KONCD ? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:19 · Score: 0

Anyone know if this is part of KDE 3?

It was supposed to be added to KDE, but I don't see anything in the changelog.

Although a cool program, this thing has a shitload of dependencies (one of which is misspelled and can't even be met)The binaries from the koncd site are useless to me.

I was able to install it with the build on mandrake 8.2

Re:KONCD ? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-10 04:02 · Score: 0

no, koncd is dead.. try cdbakeoven (most people's fav), kreatecd, or k3b.

My mini review... by Matts · 2002-04-09 03:20 · Score: 5, Informative

A few days into using KDE3. Here's my opinions.

Overall this desktop kicks ass. It's really really sweet.

Kmail - a lot better than earlier attempts. IMAP actually works, and works well. There are a few wierd bugs - like their filters don't allow you to filter to IMAP server folders. And there is no LDAP support, so I have to use mozilla mail for sending internal emails to people I don't know yet.

Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks home page is one of those). Doesn't support tabbed browsing. But it's nice to have a browser properly integrated with KDE, so I'm giving up hope on tabbed browsing for a little while - so far it's the only real thing I miss from Mozilla.

Noatun - sorry, but this MP3/Ogg player is still far inferior to XMMS. And it crashes a lot for me.

Kate - this is a really nice editor. With great syntax highlighting, and now has all the features I missed from TextPad, bar one (macros).

Ksirc - still sucks compared to xchat, but better than last time.

Korganizer - nice. Keeps me organised, and integrates nicely with the desktop, alerting me of appointments. Haven't tried the shared appointments stuff, but it looks kinda cool (if a little clunky being ftp based).

Konq (file manager) - as a file manager Konqueror is actually really nice. The auto-previews are great (but can be turned off) - I find them really useful when searching for source files. Cervisia integration is just incredible - I can totally manage a CVS project from konqueror now, including doing visual merges and diffs, checkins, tagging, etc. Wow.

Styles, themes, look and feel - Awesome. Red Hat's latest rawhide comes with Keramik, which makes KDE look absolutely gorgeous. This desktop even makes my windows using buddies jealous :-)

All in all so far I'm very happy. It's a bit crash happy, but I expect that from this early release, and because of the fact that I'm running a snapshot. Anyway - I recommend it. Try it if you can.

--

Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.

Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:37 · Score: 0

Does the aRts sound server actually work for you? I always end up turning it off and using something else because it's pretty much broken. It works for a few apps but for games like descent or myth II and video players like MTV I get notihng. Yet when I shut it down and use the eSound drivers everything works fine. I'm hoping they will fix it as it's a nice idea.
Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:38 · Score: 0

>Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to >correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks >home page is one of those). Doesn't support >tabbed browsing.

Planned feature for 3.1

> Red Hat's latest rawhide comes with Keramik, > which makes KDE look absolutely gorgeous.

Which it *shouldn't*, Keramik is only 60% or so finished and is NOT part of KDE3.0
Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:41 · Score: 0

It's not, your sound drivers are.
aRts in KDE2.x uses them very differently from just about everything.

In aRts that ships with KDE3., you can choose a "Threaded OSS" aRts driver which should work with many more (broken) OSS drivers.
Re:My mini review... by RoLi · 2002-04-09 03:54 · Score: 2, Informative

Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks home page is one of those). Doesn't support tabbed browsing. But it's nice to have a browser properly integrated with KDE, so I'm giving up hope on tabbed browsing for a little while - so far it's the only real thing I miss from Mozilla.
Tabbed browsing is on the KDE 3.1 feature list, so it won't be a long while until you can have tabbed browsing in Konqui. Probably 3 or 4 months, but definitely still in this year.
Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:57 · Score: 0

I hate Noatun! Piece of crap!
Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:14 · Score: 0

>Kmail - And there is no LDAP support
> and because of the fact that I'm running a snapshot.

What snapshot are you running!? HEAD's kaddressbook has LDAP support.
Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:19 · Score: 0

I don't understand. When I have aRts turned on I can't get sound from a lot of different apps, but when I turn it off and choose the eSound driver everything works. So, your telling me that this has nothing to do with aRts and that my drivers are broken??????

I won't argue that there are likely some problems with any of the sound drivers out there but I really don't understand what you are telling me.
Re:My mini review... by chchchain · 2002-04-09 04:27 · Score: 1

Cervisia integration is just incredible - I can totally manage a CVS project from konqueror now, including doing visual merges and diffs, checkins, tagging, etc. Wow.

Can someone tell me how to use this? I have cervisia installed. How do I enable it as a konq plugin?
Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:29 · Score: 0

Just install KDE 3.0's kdesdk package.
Re:My mini review... by Rich · 2002-04-09 04:42 · Score: 3, Informative

It's automatic. Go to a directory that contains a cvs checkout then click on the cervisia button in the extras toolbar. You find the cvs view embeds itself in konq, and the menu options/toolbars appear.

Rich.
Re:My mini review... by gid · 2002-04-09 05:13 · Score: 2

Thanks for the mini review, after all it's all about the apps and the ease of use. I can easily justify a complex install process if I know the end result is going to be worth it. So install doesn't really matter to me, (as long as I know it's gonna work :)

I do kinda wish there was KDE with mozilla integrated, I suppose it's kinda like Windows now, you get IE (Konq) by default, but you're welcome to switch, but when you switch, it won't be as nicely integrated. It would be nice if the browser wasn't as tied to the OS and allowed you to easily swap it out with another one. (or is this possible now? I dunno, I haven't used it yet)

It's just that as a web developer, I've noticed most things that mozilla can do, IE can do, so if it works under mozilla, it's almost definitely gonna work under IE, so I use mozilla. At least with the type of code I write, mostly html with a little javascript to help it out and give additional features. This could be true in konq also, but I just don't have as much faith in it (yet).
Re:My mini review... by IamTheRealMike · 2002-04-09 05:46 · Score: 2

Now this is what that review should have been like. Instead of lots of fluff about his specific problems, the review should have had what this post has - direct opinions, facts and advice in equal measure about actually USING the product, as opposed to simply installing it.
I suppose it just goes to show that reviewing something is actually a skill, not something that just anybody can do.
Thanks for a great mini review!
Re:My mini review... by Matts · 2002-04-09 06:06 · Score: 3, Informative

I do kinda wish there was KDE with mozilla integrated, I suppose it's kinda like Windows now, you get IE (Konq) by default, but you're welcome to switch, but when you switch, it won't be as nicely integrated. It would be nice if the browser wasn't as tied to the OS and allowed you to easily swap it out with another one. (or is this possible now? I dunno, I haven't used it yet)

Yes, this is possible. If you have all the right extensions installed, you can just tell konqueror to use kmozilla. I'm not sure if this has been ported to KDE3 yet, but it worked under KDE2 - I can't find the option now.

--

Matt. Want XML + Apache + Stylesheets? Get AxKit.
Re:My mini review... by Moritz+Moeller+-+Her · 2002-04-09 06:40 · Score: 2

Try View->View Mode->KMOZILLA in konqueror.

Of course kmozilla does not work as good as khtml in konqueror, but it's nice to see that you could switch if you want to.

--
Moritz
Re:My mini review... by ThatComputerGuy · 2002-04-09 06:51 · Score: 1

Konqueror - ... Doesn't support tabbed browsing.

In case anyone's curious, this is in the works for Konqueror in KDE 3.1, as mentioned in the KDE 3.1 Feature Plan.

--
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Re:My mini review... by David+Greene · 2002-04-09 11:22 · Score: 1

IMAP actually works, and works well. There are a few wierd bugs - like their filters don't allow you to filter to IMAP server folders.

Is that actually true? Dang, I was hoping to switch over to KMail with KDE3. This deficiency kills that idea completely.

--
Re:My mini review... by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 12:57 · Score: 0

Can you not read.

He said that arts uses the sound drivers in a different way than esound. So if your driver does work, it may affect arts, but not esound.

Sorry, just in a bad mood, better you than a coworker.

platform wars by entheon · 2002-04-09 03:26 · Score: 1

looks like this version of KDE may finally get me to switch over from gnome... we'll see.

--
I'm too lame for sigs

KDE with Liquid theme by ViXX0r · 2002-04-09 03:26 · Score: 0

Just last night I found a link to Mosfet's High Performance Liquid style theme for KDE3. I installed it and it looks amazing! I went to work trying to find themes for everything else I use frequently to make it match (xmms, licq, etc...).

My desktop looks awesome (who says MacOS can only have such a beautiful desktop?)

I recommend trying this out!

--
University - a box of academia nuts.

KDE and RPM installation dependencies by Zocalo · 2002-04-09 03:29 · Score: 5, Informative

I for one am not surprised that the installer and reviewer had such a bumpy ride - what an ugly way of resolving RPM dependencies, and judging by the comments elsewhere other people must be using a similar approach. The simplest way I've found so far to upgrade or install a package such as KDE that is packaging into lots of individual RPMs is as follows:

Get all your downloaded .RPMs into a directory together and sort them out - do you really need all that stuff installed? Fewer RPMs = fewer dependencies.
Run "rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm" - this will give you a list of all the dependency issues (if any) without actually touching your stuff.
There are two types types of dependency to resolve - the first to deal with is packages you need but do not have installed, usually libraries and so on. Generally I go to RPMFind and find out what I need and then grab and install it.
Next up is stuff that is incompatible with the new software - in this case, if you are removing KDE2x then anything that specifically requires KDE2x is probably broken and is best uninstalled, at least until the new version is up and running. Uninstall these packages with the command "rpm --erase <package>" and either get updated versions later or add them to your install directory now.
Having sorted out the obvious dependency problems try another test install ("rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm")
You should now have a much smaller dependency list (or even none). Simply repeat the last two steps a few more times and the test install command should eventually return you to the prompt with no errors after a lot of disk thrashing.
Time to install! Make sure you are root, or can at least update the files, the run "rpm -Uvh *.rpm"

It's slightly oversimplified (but functional), and there are other cases and tricks not covered, such as the "--nodeps" and "--replacefiles" switches for example, but this will resolve most dependency issues with the minimum of fuss. Hope that helps!

--
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!

Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies by electroniceric · 2002-04-09 03:46 · Score: 3, Informative

Good general summary, I thought I'd add the following:
On both RedHat and Mandrake, KDE RPMS have to be installed in order:
arts, then kdelibs, then the rest, with kdeaddons last.
I found the Mandrake 8.1 packages for this release to be so buggy that I went back to building from source - worked MUCH better.
Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:17 · Score: 0

> I found the Mandrake 8.1 packages for this release to be so buggy that I went back to building from source

Several SuSE and Mandrake packages were updated during the last days. Never use 0 day-warez ;-)...
Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies by Suppafly · 2002-04-09 06:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

and redhat people wonder why debian people are just waiting for the .deb files. "apt-get install kde3" is going to be so much easier and it'll work.
Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies by mickwd · 2002-04-09 07:15 · Score: 2

For anyone running Mandrake 8.1, note that the original, buggy packages available via the KDE web site (and mirrors) have now been replaced by updated packages. Many of the bugs have been fixed and they are also *considerably smaller*.
Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies by MSG · 2002-04-09 08:33 · Score: 2

Red Hat Linux users can get apt from freshrpms.net, and use that, as well.

I've been using apt to update my systems for a while now, and it *rocks*.
Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 09:18 · Score: 1, Informative

For linux users that have problems installing kde3, apt4rpm in combination with apt may come to resque. Check out the following website http://aptrpm.sourceforge.net to read which rpm based distributions have an apt repository available. Or how you create your own apt repository.

I just installed and already upgraded my kde3 packages at my SuSE-7.3 system, using the apt-get install/upgrade command sequences. All the dependencies were sorted by apt!

test by TheAnonymousCoward · 2002-04-09 03:29 · Score: 0, Offtopic

test

--
Boycott AfterSlash 'cause it sucks!

Question for K users: are virtual desktops back? by xod · 2002-04-09 03:31 · Score: 1

Multiple desktops, virtual desktops, perhaps K calls them active desktops...I'm talking about the feature where you can slide your mouse pointer to the right edge of the desktop, and a new desktop slides in, and your mouse pointer intuitively appears on the left of the screen. Does K3 have this? Clicking numbered boxes in my wharf is too clumsy for me to consider. In the most recent versions of K that I saw, the feature was disabled because it was being re-written, and for whatever reason they decided to yank the existing implementation, forcing me to switch to crashy GNOME only because it runs nicely with Enlightenment which supports virtual desktops very nicely.

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by DavesError · 2002-04-09 03:31 · Score: 1

More like another milestone in Making Linux Better. I am currently running KDE3 on a Dell Inspiron 3200 (PII 266). And I have to say that it runs faster than KDE 2.2.2 ever did, not to mention it looks a lot nicer (Especially with Mosfet's Liquid).
Congrats KDE Team.

[OT] Slashdot uses MySQL by Hektor_Troy · 2002-04-09 03:33 · Score: 1, Offtopic

Slashdot uses MySQL and yet it fails to become slashdotted - they even managed to keep it up and running, well - going, on September 11.

How can that be, when MySQL is obviously a piece of crap, as you so intelligently pointed out?

--
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.

Re:[OT] Slashdot uses MySQL by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:34 · Score: 0

And your mother is an astronaut!
Re:[OT] Slashdot uses MySQL by Hektor_Troy · 2002-04-09 08:45 · Score: 1

At least your argument is impeccable ... :-)

--
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Re:[OT] Slashdot uses MySQL by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 15:08 · Score: 0

Funny, I've seen slashdot fall down on countless occasions. (You know this when, instead of pages customized by the preferences of your logged in account, you see "Login/Password" fields, and if you try to adjust thresholds or reply to articles, you are taken back to the main page.

What wasit you were saying about MySQL's so-called stability?

Gentoo Linux by omega9 · 2002-04-09 03:36 · Score: 5, Funny

For all you Debian users waiting around for debs, I'm in Gentoo. So your apt-get can bite my emerge kde.

Compiled from source w/ all dependencies all in one command. Suck it.

Now be a predictable Debian user and mod me down for bashing your golden cow.

--
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.

Re:Gentoo Linux by volsung · 2002-04-09 04:01 · Score: 2, Funny

Now be a predictable Debian user and mod me down for bashing your golden cow.

Ha! Your Jedi reverse-psychology tricks have no effect on me.
Re:Gentoo Linux by greenfly · 2002-04-09 04:21 · Score: 3, Funny

Heh, so is it done compiling yet?
Re:Gentoo Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:22 · Score: 0

Okay. I always make it a point to mod people down who ask for it. And yes, I do use debian :-)

(see: the -1, troll mod)
Re:Gentoo Linux by xZAQx · 2002-04-09 04:22 · Score: 1

I really need to get this gentoo fellow.
Can anyone give me input as far as hardware compatibility? I've got an OLD 486 laptop that has a hacked version of deb on it now. Doesn't run xwindows (probably my laziness), but still...gentoo seems to be 'all the rage'

--

We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Re:Gentoo Linux by ivars · 2002-04-09 04:51 · Score: 1

Took something less than 7 hours for me to download AND compile BOTH X and KDE3 with just one command - this is a new install of Gentoo:

emerge kde

( I typed that in before going to sleep, and it was all done in the morning )
Re:Gentoo Linux by be-fan · 2002-04-09 05:06 · Score: 2

In that time, I could install and configure a dozen debian setups... Gentoo is a great distro, but there is no way in hell I'd ever survive the compile times. I'm a "install tools as I need them" kind of guy.

--
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Re:Gentoo Linux by NYCEE · 2002-04-09 05:23 · Score: 1

I have to admit, the only thing i dont like about gentoo is the compiles. I have an old machine which is a PII 333, and it took me a day to compile KDE 3. Overnight to compile gnome 1.4 and xwindows4. I guess this is the sacrifice we get for a truly customised system.
Re:Gentoo Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:26 · Score: 0

What's "customised" about it? You're using canned scripts, fool.
Re:Gentoo Linux by gid · 2002-04-09 05:27 · Score: 1

Yeah, I've been one of those Debian fanatics, but unfortunately with the woody release imminent, sid/unstable has been slacking and holding off on newer things, gnome2 betas, kde3, xfree86 4.2.0, etc. It's damn frustrating, I do have an extra machine lying around, just needs an HD, I should start being more open minded and try new things when my current methods don't satisfy my desires. What's the upgrade path on gentoo like anyway? I really don't want to rebuild my machine every year or so when a new release comes out.

The main reason I use debian is because of ease of upgrades, not only between major versions, but minor versions, I can grab new bugfixed packages after the major release very easily. And also because of ease of installing new packages.

I guess I'll just have to try out gentoo to see for myself. :)
Re:Gentoo Linux by NYCEE · 2002-04-09 05:34 · Score: 1

I guess to you customised mean, gentoo had to select the array of choices given to me by kernelconfig then compiling the kernel. Let me rephrase, I said customised because literally, every packages i emerged was compiled for my own platform, no dependency errors, not missing libs and no bloat!
Re:Gentoo Linux by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:21 · Score: 0

>> I've got an OLD 486 laptop that has a hacked version of deb on it now.

You figured out how to disable the product activation? Please share, so we can take those Debian nazis down!!!
Re:Gentoo Linux by Quok · 2002-04-09 06:24 · Score: 2, Informative

Let me just point out that there's no reason you HAVE to "survive" the compile. Gentoo's install comes in three stages. You can compile everything from scratch (as I did, which is stage 1), or you can download binaries and immediately have a usable barebones system, and compile everything else (stage 2), or you can just download binaries for everything (Stage 3). Even once Gentoo is installed, you don't have to compile everything from source. Just use "emerge --usepkg kde" instead of "emerge kde" to download and install available binaries. The auto-dependency stuff is nice, too. RPM support is in there, but not by default. If you really want/need it, just go ahead and emerge it in. Really doesn't take all that long, you know.
Re:Gentoo Linux by be-fan · 2002-04-09 06:47 · Score: 2

The problem is that binaries on Gentoo aren't released nearly as often as on other systems, and aren't as comprehensive. Gentoo is a source-based distro at heart.

--
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Re:Gentoo Linux by xZAQx · 2002-04-09 08:56 · Score: 1

Idiot.

I meant that the box is fux0red.

--

We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
Re:Gentoo Linux by Daniel+Stone · 2002-04-09 11:15 · Score: 2, Funny

As soon as calc and I finish sorting out things like how the KDM session-setting stuff works, you can leave my bloody cow alone. :)
Re:Gentoo Linux by omega9 · 2002-04-09 12:52 · Score: 2

What's the upgrade path on gentoo like anyway?

emerge --update world

Does it all.

--
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.

New Fix by Anonymous+DWord · 2002-04-09 03:37 · Score: 2

Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens.

I'll tell you, that's the single biggest thing that's been pissing me off lately. Sounds like it's time for an upgrade...

--
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Tower · 2002-04-09 03:37 · Score: 1

As long as you can turn that feature off, I wouldn't mind them including it :) That has got to be one of the single most annoying features for me... I routinely slam my mouse off to the side when I need to read a large chunk of text, and if things started moving, that's not so nice... maybe once you are at the end, being able to switch to the next desktop with a specific mouse button would be nice (especially with a 4+ button trackball). I never use the desktop selector on the KPanel (minimize 99% of the time), but I usually have the pager up, and I often switch desktops with Ctrl-F#...

It's all just personal preference. Auto-window raise drives me insane, too... working at someone else's login when they have auto-raise makes me want to throw the mouse through the screen :-)

--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."

Mirror by pknut · 2002-04-09 03:40 · Score: 2, Interesting

i've put up a mirror of the article at www.dovehouse.fsworld.co.uk/linuxplanet/1.html.

KDE is a waste of computing cycles by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:43 · Score: 0

you heard it here first folks

Re:RC3 is nice It doesn't log you out by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:43 · Score: 0

Try hitting ALT F7, you'll find it starts up anouther X session so other people can log in while your away.

My Experience on SuSE 7.3 by alistair · 2002-04-09 03:44 · Score: 3, Informative

I have been running the KDE RC2 and RC3 releases on SuSE for some time and the final release for over a week now. I had to say I have had no problem installing any of them using YAST (yet another set-up tool, SuSEs config manager). All that was required is download the packages, select "Add Packages" in YAST, tick the required packages and hit F10 to install, YAST took care of the rest. After this all I had to change were the KDEDIR and WINDOWMANAGER attributes and startx booted directly into KD3.

The package does then ask you if you want to use your old KDE settings. I chose yes but I wonder if this was the right thing to do, if you do you will notice almost no changes visually, you may be better ajusting your setting to a more KDE3 look and feel.

The only problems I encountered were that a number of desktop icons (applinks) no longer worked. I haven't worked out a pattern to this, Netscpe 4.7 continued to run but 6.2 would not start. In every case manually recreating the link worked.

The main improvements for me have been;

The Konqueror Web Browser now has superb Javascript support and very good control on pop-up windows. It feels very fast, in many cases (but not all) faster than Mozilla 0.99 at page rendering.
KMail is now an excellent mail client, and much, much faster than Mozilla at reading IMAP mailboxes and messages. I haven't managed to corrupt any of my mailboxes yet, it seems to handle nested folders without the problems that older versions suffered from. The only think I found missing is support for LDAP autocomplete of mail addresses.
Support for dual screens / dual head graphics cards, this was good in KDE 2.22 but has been further improved in KDE3, I haven't found any prompt / dialogue boxes which are displayed across both screens.
The Konsole Terminal Emulator is much nicer, and works happily with anti aliased fonts. Font support is much better generally, and the Kate Editor XML extension is much appreciated.

I haven't managed to crash KDE3 yet, and spent 26 hours this weekend using it to upgrade 7 Solaris servers worldwide using about 20 terminal sessions plus several Java / X applications on 8 virtual desktops. As the main point of this release was the upgrade to Version 3 of the QT toolkit, I suspect we won't see all the benefits until 3.1 / 3.2, but all credit to the KDE team and testers for an excellent desktop management system and set of applications.

Defining moment for Linux on the desktop? by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 03:48 · Score: 0

Let me add to the chorus of people who are actually using KDE3 --

It is great. With Keramik, it looks fantastic. More importantly, it is stable.

It doesn't behave strangely (cut & paste works, the applications it comes bundled with are genuinely useful).

And it runs just fine on a less-than-stellar machine (ancient Celeron, with a PCI video card).

I am impressed; It will be interesting to see if Gnome keeps pace.

kde is dead. by carm$y$ · 2002-04-09 03:53 · Score: 1

At least 2.2.2, that is.

--
-- No sig today

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:03 · Score: 2, Informative

> I'm talking about the feature where you can slide your mouse pointer to the right edge of the desktop, and a new desktop slides in, and your mouse pointer intuitively appears on the left of the screen. Does K3 have this?

Yes, Control Center/Look & Feel/Window Behaviour/Advanced/Active Desktop Borders

nice desktop by mrm677 · 2002-04-09 04:03 · Score: 2

Too bad I get consistent KDE application crashes (Control Panel, etc.). Is KDE3.0 less stable than KDE2.2.2?

Re:nice desktop by shadow303 · 2002-04-09 07:35 · Score: 1

I think the problems are more likely part of the qt libraries. I have a couple of Qt applications that I had to port when I upgraded. After making the simple changes to get it to compile, it suddenly had a new feature - seg faults. I hope things will be better when Qt gets to 3.0.4.

--
I've got a mind like a steel trap - it's got an animal's foot stuck in it.

Ximian seems to do a good job by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:04 · Score: 0

Ximian's installer is fantastic IMO. lynx://go-gnome | sh or something similar. If they can do it, can't the KDE team? This may not be the greatest thing for from scratch installs, but for upgrades it would be sweet.

BTW, I've been using Gentoo for a while now, and emerge kde was painless...Time consuming, but painless.

*This* shit is "insightful?" by Lethyos · 2002-04-09 04:08 · Score: 2

Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason

Check your system. Sounds like you have a problem. I've used KDE 2.x.x for, well, as long as it's been around. Very appropriately, the "bug free*" wallpaper is almost correct.

CD handling no longer breaks the automounter

Again, *you* have a configuration problem. Check the mailing lists.

Runs well on modest hardware

Uh, it's always done that since version 1. If you want to run KDE on a low-end hardware, use lightweight themes. Same goes for ANY desktop environment or window manager.

Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX

That's an original artwork. And if you're going to bitch like this, why not say "concept of object oriented desktop no longer ripped off of Mac OS."

KMail no longer corrupts its mail files

I have this complaint about mailers other than KMail.

Default browser handling works all the time

Try elaborating.

K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing

Oh, this is a problem unique to the KDE project, eh? Go out and blame the GTK people if you REALLY want to throw stones like these.

Go get a clue and stop you bitching. If you don't like it, go use something else. The rest of us will greatly enjoy our KDE 3 experience.

--
Why bother.

Welcome to the edge by xeno-cat · 2002-04-09 04:08 · Score: 1

First of all, you must have known that straying from the "blessed" rpm's of your distro is atkin to waiding out into the deep end of the pool. ;) SuSE 8.0 will include the 3.0 desktop and is due to ship April 22. For a new user, it's safest just to have a little patience, but not as educational, of course.

I have used SuSE since the 5.3 release and have been generaly pleased. 7.3 was a big disapointment however and I only hope that the 8.0 release solves the install problems I've encountered.

I am in the process of installing a Gentoo ( www.gentoo.org ) distro on a new computer and so far have been very pleased with how they handle things. I'm compiling X and KDE3 now, from source, which their distro makes very easy to do with the command:

emerge kde

Wiz bange all the X dependencies are resolved, source is downloaded and compiled and... well... it's still compiling so I'm not really sure.

Debian has aptget which I have never used but have heard will resolve dependencies and download and install software packages in one fell swoop. SuSE does have their software manager in YaST that will do similiar things. Ximian has Red Carpet, a very nice gnome based software manager that will also manage the entire SuSE software library for you.

You just need to wait for the distros to get their packgaes updated.

Kind Regards

--
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w

Re:Welcome to the edge by Deacon+Jones · 2002-04-09 04:52 · Score: 1

You just need to wait for the distros to get their packgaes updated. I appreciate you not slamming me, and you make very good points. However, can you imagine if I wanted to get ad-aware 5.7 for windows, or updated my anti-virus program, or even get an SP for Windows and was told "wait till the next distro release, which by the way you'll pay for?"
Well, OK, maybe Windows is a bad example. I just think that the next great Linux leap for us who are not experienced Linux users will be to be able to click on something and have the update done for you. IMVHO.

--
I pulled a jack move to cop this sig

question on konqueror :) by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:09 · Score: 0

Can I change the font for a particular charset? I want to use my TT font for big5. All I can find is to change the general font(for all charset) to my font.
Actually, there is something seems to be a "by charset" setting in 2.2, but I never figure out how it works. Is it removed in 3.0? How does this thing work actually?

Arts w/ esound? by Dr.+Sp0ng · 2002-04-09 04:10 · Score: 2

Am I just missing something here, or is there still really no way to have artsd use esound as its output device? I have no sound card in my Linux box, and I run esound on my Win2k box for sound output over the network from Linux... but artsd doesn't seem to be able to output to esound! This seems like it would be a pretty obvious feature to me.

Or, failing that, is there any arts-compatible sound daemon for win32?

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by MindStalker · 2002-04-09 04:10 · Score: 1

You know this feature can be set to a timmer so you have to press against the wall for a while not just touch it.

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by friedmud · 2002-04-09 04:11 · Score: 1

Holy shit really???

I used to use enlightenment(only) and got very used to this behavior then about 6 months ago I switched to KDE and sorely missed this option.

Now I have KDE3 and you say I can do it! That is awesome - thanks for the info.

Derek

KDE 3.0 on Debian by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:13 · Score: 0

For those of you who dont want to compile KDE 3.0 from source, or don't have the patience to wait for the deb's in Debian Sid, some guy posted a howto on KDE-Look.org explains setting up KDE 3.0 on Debian GNU/Linux. It involves fetching the Slack binaries and recompiling qt 3. (however I don't think recompiling qt is necessary) Personally, I'll stick with GNOME for a while, and get KDE 3 when the packages are ready.

Kmail vs Evolution by GdoL · 2002-04-09 04:13 · Score: 1

I'm a big fan of kde and i8n contributor but I would like to have a kmail more pro, just like the evolution. I use kde with evolution, even paid the guys, because the evolution is so simple and powerfull to the lazy but demanding user like me.

--

------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------

My two penn'orth... by deepstephen · 2002-04-09 04:13 · Score: 3, Insightful

I've been using KDE 3.0 since the day after it came out, and here's my review of it.

Konqueror - much improved. It really is nice to have a web browser tightly integrated into the OS (unless you're an illegal monopolist, that is) and this version of Konq is way better than the last one. JavaScript support is much better, it certainly seems to work on all the sites I frequent now, and the weird layout problems with form elements have been cured. Oh, and its rendering engine is a lot faster. Sweet. Now all I'd like is tabbed browsing and it's damn near perfect.

KMail - not hugely different, just tightened up here and there. Seems to be a bit faster if anything, especially on big folders and messages with huge attachments, and the look and feel's been tweaked a bit.

Cervisia - this is the killer function for me. We make extensive use of CVS and now Cervisia, which was an awesome CVS client anyway, is integrated into Konqueror. You can choose to switch into CVS view in any directory containing CVS information, as smoothly as switching between icon view and list view. Unimaginably useful.

Kicker/Panel - one of my biggest bugbears is gone, namely that quickbrowsers can update themselves without requiring a restart. There's a bug in them, though, that causes them to freeze the whole Panel if they get stuck viewing a folder (e.g. if an smbmount-ed folder has been disconnected). Looks like a fix exists and will be in a forthcoming release, so I'll survive.

Desktop switching - Fantastic to have this back, I had missed it so much. You can now set it to switch desktops when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen.

Incompatibility with KDE 2 apps is really the only serious issue I can think of. Not all third-party KDE apps have been ported yet and they won't work. I mostly use Java apps and KDE's own apps (like Konq and KMail) so it doesn't really affect me, but it's something to watch out for.

--

--
Karma: Chameleon (you come and go)

Re:My two penn'orth... by Rich · 2002-04-09 04:19 · Score: 2

- Tabbed browsing is scheduled for 3.1 (see the release plan).

- KDE 2 apps *will* work. You need to keep your old kdelibs and unset your KDEDIRS env variable (so it finds the correct info from the compiled in default).

BTW Glad you like the Cervisia integration stuff. I was wondering how many people would find it useful, looks like the answer is quite a lot. :-)

Rich.

Wow, I am so blinded by technical detail by ader · 2002-04-09 04:18 · Score: 1

Pah, any monkey can install a few RPMs and then say, "Dude, this new
desktop totally ROCKS! Awesome!" ten seconds after starting it without
crashes.

Wait until my SO uses it for a month or two, then I'll be able to tell you
just how much ass it sucks. Particularly if using KDE's (usually severely
borked) Red Hat RPMs ("Hey guys, let's build the arts package with NO
AUDIO DEVICE SUPPORT! And let's overwrite the installed XDM config with the
standard X11R6 one!" - 2.x maintainer).

Ade_
/
(Happy OLVWM user)

--
Big Bubbles (no troubles) - what sucks, who sucks and you suck

Re:Wow, I am so blinded by technical detail by gid · 2002-04-09 06:46 · Score: 1

Screw all those user space software audio mixers. They all sound like shit and cause nothing but problems, especially since if you have a real sound card and some half ass audio drivers installed (like alsa or the oss/pay drivers, since most oss/free kernel drivers suck ass) then your card will do hardware mixing on it's own, no esd/artd userspace daemon required. Last time I ran kde my sound was all garbled and couldn't figure it out until I found out about artsd which i promptly disabled.

I have a $10 card that does it, ymf724 card with the alsa drivers, I never run esd or artsd or whatever, I can run 10 copies of mpg123 if I want and they all output sound just fine mixing done in hardware.

Whoa, slow down Tex by bill_mcgonigle · 2002-04-09 04:28 · Score: 2

Some people get so upset about a little light-hearted jibing. I expected Funny points, if any for this post. If someone thinks it's insightful, well, geez, that's not my doing.

To be fair, I have had these problems under KDE as shipped with RedHat 7.2, no special configuration done here, and these problems haven't surfaced under WindowMaker/X, my daily desktop. But you might notice that these are also a very small number of problems, overall. A system with 5 problems is pretty swell.

But, c'mon, you don't expect me to believe that the default desktop picture on KDE (2) wasn't at least 'heavily inspired' by Mac OS X's, do you? Everyone I know that's seen them has noticed the 'strong similarity'.

--
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)

Just FYI... by gfxguy · 2002-04-09 04:31 · Score: 1

As I mentioned, these things can be overcome, it should just be part of standard preferences...

If you are stuck with windows, the latest TweakUI works with 95/98/ME/NT/2K, and has this option.

--
Stupid sexy Flanders.

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by austad · 2002-04-09 04:33 · Score: 2

Even though support is there, it still doesn't have everything. You can only switch desktops horizontally, not vertically. Back in the day, I used fvwm, and grew quite fond of having a 3x3 desktop. If only this was configurable...

--
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum

The Kompany's Athedra by cies · 2002-04-09 04:35 · Score: 1

(is Athedra correctly spelled? i hope so)

Such a thing is currently in development

http://www.thekompany.com/projects/aethera/?PHPS ES SID=19c1920d67c4471b8801c7b03cb57f44

here you go...
cies.

(nope it was spelled *wrong*)

Gentoo makes it easy by sunset · 2002-04-09 04:35 · Score: 1

It would really make my day if there was a way to install KDE with a single command.

Gentoo is great if you want to stay on top of new releases. To install the latest KDE you just type "emerge kde". It takes a while since everything is compiled from source, so you'll want to do this right before bedtime. :-)

KDE Solves World Hunger by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:39 · Score: 1, Funny

Before I even worked through all of the RPM dependencies, KDE 3.0 had all ready come up with an alternate (and much more understandable, I might add) solution to Fermat's Last Theorem. By the time that I actually was able to use the GUI, KDE had all ready given my car a tune up, made my weekly call to my mother and baked me a pizza. Now that I've become a regular KDE 3.0 user, I've been able to double my salary, play the piano, and speak fluent French.

Thank you KDE team!

On Windows? by secondsun · 2002-04-09 04:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

Since the QT toolkit is "free" as in beer for windows, what are the chances of having some one port KDE3 to windows to replace explorer.exe like litestep does?

Summers

--
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.

Re:On Windows? by jilles · 2002-04-09 05:59 · Score: 2

Kde 2.2.1 is in the works for cygwin. It's been taking a while already so I gather it's a non trivial effort that requires quite a bit of patching. Personally, I'd love having KDE on my windows box coexisting with all the window apps I need to run, but beyond the coolness factor I have no use for it really :-).

--

Jilles
Re:On Windows? by madenosine · 2002-04-09 15:09 · Score: 1

yeah, but what about without a cygwin layer? I don't see why kde can't be easily ported if qt is cross-platform (if porting a few other libs is not a problem)
Re:On Windows? by RelliK · 2002-04-09 18:10 · Score: 2

QT is *not* free on windows. You might be able to compile it under cygwin though.

--
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.

Stupid newbie question by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 04:47 · Score: 0

I am rather new to Linux and are using SuSE 7.3. I understand that I need that "RPM" files to install KDE 3.0. How do I now tell Linux to install that files? I cannot execute that RPM files.

Any help will be greatfully appreciated!

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by xod · 2002-04-09 04:51 · Score: 1

Well if I can only go horizontally I'll have to stick with GNOME+E until K gets it right. I too need a 3x3, and a bunch of windows all in a row just isn't good enough. Of course, I would try K+E but I've been told not even to bother trying to get them to play nicely together!

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by ta2025 · 2002-04-09 05:03 · Score: 1

I am running it great on a 400 MHz AMD K6. It Rocks!

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:06 · Score: 0

I second that! I absolutlely need a 3x3 - and I want it HUGE and autohiding, not in the panel. I like to throw the mouse over to the right side, and this monstrous pager that takes up like 1/8 of the screen un-autohides. Gives me something big to aim for :)

I can't believe that this somehow got missed by KDE in all this time, even GNOME had X by Y configuration. Even on Win2K, I use Vern, which is an excellent, excellent pager.

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by tom.allender · 2002-04-09 05:07 · Score: 1

As long as you can turn that feature off, I wouldn't mind them including it :) That has got to be one of the single most annoying features for me... I routinely slam my mouse off to the side when I need to read a large chunk of text

You can set it to change only when you're dragging a window. Which is nice.

Kmail by The+AtomicPunk · 2002-04-09 05:08 · Score: 1

Kmail has improved ten-fold in usability.

The only problem is, it's the Titanic of memory leaks and also hangs/crashes fairly regularly. A quick review of their bug list shows the issues were reported over a month ago. Hopefully it'll get fixed, I've had to switch back to Evolution - at least it just hangs regularly, and doesn't leak much memory. :)

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:10 · Score: 0

On my machine, a PII 333, 496 RAM, KDE 3.0 runs decently. I'm using gentoo 1.0, with --march=i686 -O3 optimization. This could be the reason why it runs decently. But one thing I hate about kde and it's apps is that it is very unresponsive. Might as well compare KDE to XP. I've installed 98 on my machine before and everything is responsive. Granted I 've used blackbox, it's just not a replacement for kde or gnome. no troll here, just stating that fact that I would need a faster proccessor for me to get the same responsiveness as in windows 98. But in the end I would rather settle with unresponsive, rather than going back to unstable...

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by be-fan · 2002-04-09 05:11 · Score: 2

Wow! You can browse and watch AVI's at the same time on a 500Mhz processor! Windows can do that on an old P90. On anything above a 500Mhz machine, NO desktop should have ANY lag. On my 1.5Ghz machine, KDE 2.x is still agonizingly slow (so much so that I switched to GNOME, which is as slow, but at least apps start quickly) to the point where using it is irritating.

--
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by tom.allender · 2002-04-09 05:14 · Score: 1

Even though support is there, it still doesn't have everything. You can only switch desktops horizontally, not vertically. Back in the day, I used fvwm, and grew quite fond of having a 3x3 desktop. If only this was configurable...

You can switch vertically.

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:15 · Score: 0

> You can only switch desktops horizontally, not vertically.

Nonsense, you can switch vertically too.

My first day with KDE 3 by nosferatu-man · 2002-04-09 05:17 · Score: 2, Interesting

I finally broke down, and while reinstalling Gentoo on my main desktop, went ahead and merged KDE 3. I haven't ever used a "desktop environment" other than ion and zsh before, except to briefly install and then immediately uninstall in a tooth-chattering rage, so this will be the longest (about 6 hours) that I've used either KDE or Gnome so far.

It's technically very impressive, although by dfault it is certainly a HCI trainwreck of epic proportions. Given a relatively small amount of fiddling, though, it can be rendered very usable.

Things that I like so far:

kcontrol is amazing. It hasn't crashed yet, it's very well organized, and almost everything that I could possibly want to control is in one location, using a single UI. This might be the best thing about the system.

konqueror is also very good, although I have a couple of beefs with the web operation.

konsole is a competent xterm replacement.

The panel is very easy to manage, as far as things like that go. I'm used to starting programs either the old-school way (emacs &), or via ion keybindings, so I tend to ignore kicker, but in the interests of maybe learning something useful, I horsed around with it a bit last night.

Things that bug me:

konqueror apparently doesn't allow you to really, seriously, no, I'm not kidding force a single set of fonts for all web pages to use, or to disable popup windows. I tried the CSS/customize panel, but I'm not interested in changing the rendering of pages except for disallowing font size and style changes, and enabling custom CSS pretty seriously b0rks colors. And even after disabling all popups in the Javascript panel, stopping and restarting konq, I would get the occasional popup.

I also dislike having konq's toolbars shared across the wildly different tasks of file management and web browsing. I like the previews and the ability to do some file stuff via a nice click 'n drag interface, but forcing the very nice web browsing pig into the file manager prom dress was dirt stupid when Windows did it, and it's even more dirt stupid in KDE, as at least Windows can present you with a different interface to folders and web pages. I know about the View Settings; but they don't extend to the toolbars. Is it possible to define new toolbars? I want different choices, different layouts, and different interfaces on my toolbars when I'm doing very different things. This ought to be the default.

There's way too much clutter. Too many menus, too many choices on the root level of those menus, too many redundant window decorations -- for instance, why do I need to be able to click in the upper left to get the same exact menu as right clicking on the title bar?

I DON'T WANT THE WINDOWS KEY-BINDINGS. Why can't I get emacs keybindings for text editing, without changing the "shortcuts" en masse? And why isn't the shortcut editor smarter? If I enter a key binding that's already taken, instead of refusing with the unhelpful message that that binding is already taken, why not change it (after all, that's more likely to be the behavior that people want) with a warning that my new choice overrides the old one?

The splash screen SEGFAULTs on launch. That's not really a problem, it's just sort of funny, the way that an exploitable buffer overrun in kbiff would be funny. Which is to say, sort of sad.

Overall, from someone who has used twm far more than either kde or gnome, I have to admit to being very impressed. I don't know if I'll stick to it, but it certainly Doesn't Suck That Much Hardly At All, which, given the dismal state of pretty much every computer program written, ever, is more than I could have expected.

Best,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.

Re:My first day with KDE 3 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:23 · Score: 0

> The splash screen SEGFAULTs on launch. That's not really a problem, it's just sort of funny,

This is a bug in Qt 3.0.3 and doesn't happen with all styles, apply http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/qt-copy/s rc/styles/qcommonstyle.cpp.diff?r1=1.18&r2=1.19
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by nosferatu-man · 2002-04-09 05:38 · Score: 2

Thanks! I'll check that out when I get home tonight.

Best,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:50 · Score: 0

Use the Unix/Emacs key scheme! Isn't it there in the Key control panel?
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:08 · Score: 0

Yes, font handling in konqueror is driving me nuts. I can't
get it not to use aliased fonts and I can't get it to consistently
use fonts big enough.

Also, the address book is in bad shape.
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by G00F · 2002-04-09 06:17 · Score: 1

" but forcing the very nice web browsing pig into the file manager prom dress was dirt stupid when Windows did it, and it's even more dirt stupid in KDE"

"There's way too much clutter."

Here here!!! These two things is why linux gui SUCKS. (well that, and to many layers)

I don't want a web interface to my computer, I want a slitc and fast one. And there is to much garbarge. To many things on the "taskbar", and to many to complicated trees of menus.

I mean ya, kde is neat, but damn is the user interface garbage, it does a terriable job of what MS did. (web+ computer interface in one) and its cluttered.

If they fixed those two things, it would be on my desktop, and the desktop of many others.

--
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by PhoenixFlare · 2002-04-09 06:26 · Score: 0

The splash screen SEGFAULTs on launch. That's not really a problem, it's just sort of funny, the way that an exploitable buffer overrun in kbiff would be funny. Which is to say, sort of sad.

Updating your version of Qt3 from CVS should fix this problem....I had the same problem using it under Mandrake 8.2, tried everything up to a reformat and reinstall, worked fine once I found a post with the Qt suggestion though.
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by nosferatu-man · 2002-04-09 06:29 · Score: 2

I could easily have missed it. I'll check it out tonight.

Thanks,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by Moritz+Moeller+-+Her · 2002-04-09 06:34 · Score: 2

Things that bug you:
* Setting fonts
Should be possible, with a custom (manual - read vim/emacs) stylesheet

* custom toolbars for different tasks
See Window-> administrate view Profiles

* too much clutter in window decoration
Just remove all buttons you don't need as an experienced user in the settings for your windows decoration.

* Starting apps without kicker:
ALT+F2 opens the best part of KDE: krun

* Windows key bindings bother you
Choose unix scheme in kcontrol->LooknFeel->key shortcuts to get emacs like key bindings

I am glad you like KDE. Use bugs.kde.org to report any bugs or usability issues. Also check out dcop and kdcop if you are a hardcore user.
Try e.g. dcop $(dcop|grep kate)

--
Moritz
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by nosferatu-man · 2002-04-09 06:39 · Score: 2

Good stuff, thanks. I forgot to mention that I'm very impressed with krun as well. Good call.

Best,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by nosferatu-man · 2002-04-09 07:30 · Score: 2

> See Window-> administrate view Profiles

But what I want is to have, say, the main toolbar be text only, with a Location widget, when I'm looking at HTML, and when I'm browsing the filesystem, have a totally different set of options. Possible?

> (fonts) Should be possible, with a custom
> (manual - read vim/emacs) stylesheet

emacs doesn't scare me off, but oughtn't this be an option in, say, the accessibility panel? Not everyone who's font needs are different is going to want to write their own CSS. Both Mozilla and IE make this a simple one check-box operation.

Thanks for the reply, and I'll be sure to try some of this stuff out later.

Best,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by entrigant · 2002-04-09 07:54 · Score: 1

I think you are viewing konqueror in the wrong light. Konqueror is best thought of as a general system interface that happens to be able to view web pages more than a web browser that happens to happen to be able to act as a system interface.

I.E. Konqueror just loads the appropriate kio slave for whatever task it is doing at the moment. If it is loading a web page it starts up the http kio slave. If that kio slave did not exist then konqueror would no longer be a web browser, but chances are with litle to no modification it'd still be fully functional. Konqueror has kio slaves for many many things.. such as sftp, audiocd, imap, smtp, pop, man, info, etc. The list is quite large and you can get a complete one in the control center.

I can understand the "this is way to windowsish" feeling when konqueror appears to be a straight copy of i.e. an dit's annoying integration into windows. However when viewed from a technical standpoint konqueror is a very well designed and very well done system interface that is very different in spirit than IE integration in windows.
Re:My first day with KDE 3 by nosferatu-man · 2002-04-09 09:49 · Score: 2

Right, I understand this, and it's very impressive *to a developer*. But from a user experience standpoint, it's pretty much just broken. Admittedly, the dysfunction of a unified file/&c browser is an argument that I've lost, but on my personal workstation, darn it, I WILL retain control.

Ironically, this problem arises because the http rendering control is so well done, that to load mozilla on top of the already large and in charge KDE environment seems pointless.

Best,
(jfb)

--
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.

Memory?? by big_groo · 2002-04-09 05:25 · Score: 2

I'm running Redhat 7.3 (or 7.29543994999999 1/2) whichever you prefer). I also have running gkrellm. I have a p3 533, w 655MB ram. No matter how many apps I have open my mem usage stays constant, with virtually *no* paging. Mind you, the system is using about 250 MB at all times...

Plus, it boots faster.
I know these aren't hard numbers, but it is faster.

"It would really make my day..." by matvei · 2002-04-09 05:27 · Score: 1

"It would really make my day if there was a way to install KDE with a single command."

`apt-get install kde` ;-)

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by xod · 2002-04-09 05:31 · Score: 1

Weird, I wonder why he said that then...it's Sawfish that only lets you switch horizontally, I think. Or perhaps you can switch vertically too but it's the same windows; up = right. Yuck.

Info for the Debian heads by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:34 · Score: 0

I have been following the development of the official Debian packages. The maintainer hangs out in #debian-kde on irc.openprojects.net. His nick is "calc". KDE3 will not go into Debian (Sid) until XFree86 4.2.0 does. You can see how XFree86 4.2.0 packages are coming along at http://people.debian.org/~branden/. The Debian XFree86 maintainer (Branden Robinson) can be found in #debian-devel as Overfiend.

Asking Branden for release dates on 4.2.0 is suicide. You have been warned.

Why linux will never make it as a desktop by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:39 · Score: 0

The above is a perfect example why linux is not a suitable desktop for the average user. This user followed the instructions and got crapped on. I've seen this same problem several places now.
Now the interesting part is not that open source developers can't write proper instructions, its that the average user aka me, would never in a million years figure out the "work arounds" eveyone here tosses around like there common knowledge. Still in 2002 the linux community continues to force the user to become experts to use the OS. FYI people just want to sit down and get their work done, not learn package install routines. Anything more than a double click is asking too much.

Re:Why linux will never make it as a desktop by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:46 · Score: 0

"urpmi kde-3.0"
(Mandrake Linux)

how difficult is that?

Install mandrake. no worries.
(and if you are not an expert, for heaven's sake, -don't- install a bleeding edge version of anything; wait until its in an official release.)
Re:Why linux will never make it as a desktop by KjetilK · 2002-04-10 23:43 · Score: 2

Well, many people have some choices made for them, for example, I'm stuck with RH. Not that I would want Mandrake anyway, it couldn't identify my video card correctly.
I just tried to install KDE on RH 7.1 and descended pretty quickly into dependency hell. This is really, really bad. I bet I broke many things in the attempt, and I really have no clue what I broke.
Yes, it is a valid argument that you should wait for your distro makers, but often, that is not an option.
For example, there are lots of scientific software that never make it into a distro, and making it easy to install stuff that isn't in the distro is very, very important. If distro makers think that they can always tell their customers to wait untill they get a new release out, they will fail.
And my current experience with KDE3 makes me think that RH has a very long way to go. But that doesn't necesssarily mean that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. It is ready for me, anyway.

--
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 05:47 · Score: 0

Wow! You state that so confidently that it obviously must be easy to fix. So, why don't you submit a patch to KDE making it uber-fast? Thanks.

kmail had problems? by captredballs · 2002-04-09 05:56 · Score: 1

I'm really surprised to hear people talk about previous problems with kmail. I've been using it exclusively at work for over 2 years and its by far the best email client I've used. It never crashes, never corrupts, and it's simple, fast and easy.

Jeez, maybe I'm not the power user that I though I was ;-)

I'm actually waiting to use kde3.0 until the second release. 2.2(.2?) is so stable at work that I don't want to risk mucking anything up.

--

I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus

KDE 3 Packages for FreeBSD by Ragica · 2002-04-09 06:04 · Score: 0

There are easy to install binary packages available for FreeBSD. It's recommended you pkg_delete all your old kde2* and qt* ports first. I have had aboslutely no problems.

Simply...

export PACKAGESITE="http://freebsd.kde.org/packages/3.0/L atest/"

Then "pkg_add -r kde3base" (and whatever other packages you want).

See freebsd.kde.org maling list for details.

Serious KMail problem with IMAP by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:05 · Score: 0

There's a problem that can corrupt your mail when moving IMAP messages, see kmail homepage. The problem will be fixed in 3.0.1 (and it's already fixed in KDE_3_0_BRANCH if you're using CVS).

Kmail's look & feel changed quite a bit as wel by joeflies · 2002-04-09 06:15 · Score: 2, Interesting

Most of the new features are quite nice in kmail, notably they've made the PGP integration probably one of the best that I've ever seen in a mail client. The body markings now show PGP-info formatting when kmail's in a secure style, and the key fingerprints show up in the pop up box.

Other look & feel differences - they took out the k-gear in the Fancy headers! I liked it, I wish I could have that put back in.

Also missing - the delete Trash messages older than X days. I liked that feature too. I haven't got around to learning the expired messages feature yet.

Also - the colors and font settings are a little TOO customizeable now, it takes a bit of time to set all the colors and the fonts because there are so many different places they can be configured.

The identity features are much improved over the 2.2.2 version, everything is laid out much more clearly.

All in all, it remains my favorite client, however I do miss some of the look & feel options of the old one.

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Nadir · 2002-04-09 06:16 · Score: 1

You're getting it wrong. Sawfish supports both Workspaces and Virtual Desktops which are different beasts. Sawfish is infact the best implementation of these features with tons of configurability.

--
--
The world is divided in two categories:
those with a loaded gun and those who dig. You dig.

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:25 · Score: 0

Yep, kde3 has this.. right click on a window (to bring up the menu), goto settings, and click on the advanced tab (you might have to click on one of the icons on the side to see it).

This was probably the biggest feature from kde1 and kde2 was missing. Well, kde3 has it again! :-)

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 06:27 · Score: 0

nah, kde3 also has a option to switch while dragging a window.. I've already gotten really used to this in the last week. I'm sure sawfish didn't have this, but I haven't run it in a while. (btw, E also has Workspaces and Virtual Desktops, as did fvwm(1 and 2)-- they just call it something different).

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by be-fan · 2002-04-09 06:30 · Score: 2

I never said it was easy to fix. I simply pointed out that it has been done before many times, so it can't be all that hard. If OSS software is so great, why can't they beat MS in performance (one of their weak areas!)?

--
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...

Virtual desktop vs. Workspace by xod · 2002-04-09 06:31 · Score: 1

So, what's the difference between a workspace and a virtual desktop?

Hmm, no different by xeno-cat · 2002-04-09 06:39 · Score: 1

Think about it, you have to wait for the SP's from MS don't you? As for having to pay, that is not true. You can download the update from SuSE's servers or update your system through YaST without having to purchase a new boxxed set of CD's. Now try updating from Win98 -> XP and tell me who makes it easier and cheaper. ;)

As for the next big Linux leap... it already lept. People just need to know about it. There are many tools that accomplish what you are looking for, some are enumerated in my previous post.

My point about waiting for a distro to catch up is not equteable to MS SP's. KDE3 is not released yet, it's still in RC status. SuSE will have it April 22, not to long to wait if you ask me. Gentoo Linux has it now ( still compiling btw ).

Kind Regards

--
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Suppafly · 2002-04-09 06:40 · Score: 2

Sawfish supports both Workspaces and Virtual Desktops which are different beasts

Why make a distinction between workspaces and virtual desktops? Why not just call them all the same thing and let you be able to arrange them up down and over or just over or just up and down?

The Linux Planet review is not very well done. by entrigant · 2002-04-09 07:45 · Score: 2, Insightful

The author lost a lot of credibility when he mentions the ability to disallow javascript popups in konqueror and "Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens." in th elist of what's new. It's painfully obvious the author has little experience with what he is reviewing. I will give him credi tint hat he's partially right for both. A new METHOD for blocking popups was introduced (smart), and focus code has changed somewhat.

Also I'm not an expert with rpm as I rarely use it but his method for installing kde3 is insane. I use SuSE rpm's to try out rc2 simply because I didn't feel like compilin git at the time, and the installed to /opt. He's talking about grepping through the rpm's looking for certain files. It's not so tough. Simply install the arts rpm, the kdelibs rpm, and th ekdebase rpm and you got yourself a very basic installed kde. I'm not exactly sure what it is he was trying to do.

Beyond the install process there's only a couple of paragraphs dedicated to the actual use and performance of kde. Nowhere are aditional things such as new kio slaves like sftp, performance enhancements to konq, the much improved css/js handling, etc. I think he covers the new features of kmail (which btw filtering does not work with imap folders yet which is bothersome). Also kde3 comes with a very impressive new theme called keramik and a couple of new icon sets (these icon sets were previously available as seperate packages).

This review could have been a lot more informative than it was and really is a waste of space. Putting a little more time into something called a review should be required. This is more of a dumbed down installation guide.

Re:The Linux Planet review is not very well done. by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 07:52 · Score: 1, Informative

> Also kde3 comes with a very impressive new theme called keramik

It does not, Keramik was not released with KDE 3.0.
Re:The Linux Planet review is not very well done. by entrigant · 2002-04-18 06:32 · Score: 1

It was in KDE CVS long before the 3.0 release, and it is included with the 3.0 release. Just check for it yourself it's there.

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 07:49 · Score: 0

Because programming -- like just about any form of construction -- involves trade offs.

You trade off speed for stability, or speed for maintainability, or speed for easier to comprehend, or runtime speed for development speed, or...

Without meaning to speak for them, I believe that since KDE is such a small project with few developers (relative to Microsoft Windows), they likely have to trade off speed for maintainability and comprehension. It is simply the nature of the beast.

On the other hand, since Microsoft has more resources, they can afford to trade off massive amounts of development time and maintenance problems for a faster user experience.

BTW, it may be your setup. On my P2 450, I find KDE 2.2 faster than Windows 98 on the same machine. Same with my P3 600 laptop. However, I have heard many people with the same complaint as you, so if it is a setup problem, it is a common one. It may be on a distro-by-distro basis. I know that I haven't done anything fancy with my machines; I just use Debian testing.

Tabbed Browsing - one word - OPERA by gosand · 2002-04-09 08:21 · Score: 2

Although it can't render some of the sites that Mozilla is capable of, I love Opera. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, ability to stop popups, and speed! Sweet. I use Moz as my backup, then Konqueror, in case some page won't render with Opera. And if those fail, I just launch my Linux version of IE.

Just kidding - I have to boot up the Win box for that. :-)

--

My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.

KDE3 Too hard to install by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 08:32 · Score: 0

If they want more people to use it, they have to make it much easier to install. Why don't they make one big 100+ meg installer for those who don't want to rip their hair out resolving dependencies? I guess I will have to wait until the next redhat comes out and download 2 600+ meg discs just to run kde3.

I just installed... by bjt062659 · 2002-04-09 08:48 · Score: 1

and as the article suggests, installing over an existing KDE is a pain, for two reasons:

1) lots of packages needed to be upgraded before it would install correctly (e.g. rpm ... who would have guessed?)

2) some packages had to be removed because of incompatibilities (e.g. switchdesk-kde), because there is no existing upgrade (that I know of).

RPM hell, but it's avoidable by mmusn · 2002-04-09 09:28 · Score: 2

Yes, dependencies with RPMs can be kind of a pain, but there are a bunch of scripts and tools that help you resolve them automatically. The per-file dependencies in RPM also have their good sides compared to the alternatives. For ready-made distributions like RedHat, they work fine.

In any case, if you just download a bunch of RPMs, it is the supplier's responsibility to make sure you get a complete set. The KDE distributors should either put up all the RPMs in a single directory, or they should at least supply a script that tells you what packages you are still missing. So, in that sense, it perhaps belongs into the review, though it probably shouldn't take up most of a KDE3 review. After all, once this is part of distributions, the install will simply not be a problem anymore.

Add apt-get support to KPackage by Nailer · 2002-04-09 10:17 · Score: 3, Interesting

Too many reviews focus on installation.

Damn straight. KDE could do a lot for its users by adding apt-get for RPM support to KPackage. Debian's nice, but there's a lot more Red Hat users as well as many other major distro's that are more popular, and most of these use the standard packaging format RPM (currently 3.0 is standard, 4.0 is likely to be when Maximum RPM is updated, which is likely later this year).

Already RH users are starting to get a lot of software avaliable via APT-get, including all of RH install CDs, the excellent Freshrpms archive (everything you wish you had but didn't) and Havoc Pennington's Gnomehide. Having this available through kpackage (rather than the apt-get command line, or an ugly tool like Synaptic) and creating APT archioves for KDE (I have one for my workplace - they're not difficult to create) would significantly enhance the install process.

Mike

Re:Add apt-get support to KPackage by elaias · 2002-04-09 22:16 · Score: 1

Hmmm... is it just me, or is anyone else having a hard time extrapolating the inferred relationship between apt-get, KPackage and installing KDE3?
It would seem to me that KPackage depends on KDE being installed in the first place, and that the existance of apt-get integration in KPackage is about as related to installing KDE3 as the existance of a Bluetooth stack would be to building a new kernel.
Re:Add apt-get support to KPackage by Nailer · 2002-04-10 00:42 · Score: 2

Its just you :).

Add apt-get support to kpackage for 3.1, and when it comes time to install 3.11, or 3.2, or any of the apps from apps.kde.org, you'll appreciate its advantages.

Installing KDE3 on RH 7.2 (a correct way) by Nailer · 2002-04-09 10:22 · Score: 3, Insightful

rpm -Uvh http://enigma.freshrpms.net/pub/apt/apt-0.3.19cnc5 5-fr7.i386.rpm

Put the RPMs in an apt repository, make it avaliable by http, and run `apt-get install kdebase' on all your machines. Dependencies are automatically resolved as necessary to install the package. I do this for about 25 Linux workstations, all off one repository.

There is never any reason, ever, to use --nodeps. Luckily apt-get has `apt-get install -f' which performs a `fix' install to correct this kind of bad administration.

The point is: we need package frontends by Nailer · 2002-04-09 10:30 · Score: 2

Nobody starts their day expecting to use an Operating System. They expect to do work, and the most bearing on how they do that work is the application they use to do it.

Why can't I be able to install a piece of software if it doesn't come with my system? Windows can do it, Linux should be able to as well. And it can: I do it all the time, on about 25 Linux machines.

The moral of the story isn't `don't ever install anything but your distro' the moral is `we need an easier way to install packages on most Linux distros'. On RH, usign apt-get from www.freshrpms.net serves this purpose well, and if the RH KDE packages were avaliable from such a source there would be few problems with installation.

Ouch! by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 10:57 · Score: 1, Informative

just did the upgrade - not for the faint of heart.

I took the SuSE 7.3 build from the KDE site, and
it created a hell of a mess.

Problems include:
- /usr/X11R6/bin/kde still points to /opt/kde2/..
- Desktop icons and panel entries disappearing
(the automatic upgrade of the settings didn't
work)
- KDE unstartable through kdm, till I copied over
the share/xdm directory
- all the SuSE customisations are not there,
I copied them over, both from /opt/kde2
and /etc/opt/kde2
- the kdmrc file complains about several unknown
options and the kdm config was garbled.
- KDE cannot find default configs
- rpm hell avoided using --nodeps, there were
several packages missing.

Much of this has to do with SuSE's attempt to install into /opt/kde3, I don't know whether other distros get themselves into the same kind
of trouble. The other half has to do with the
customizations SuSE makes to the desktop.

Still, I cannot confirm what others wrote:
1) There are extensive changes in the programs,
it's more than a 1-1 qt 3 upgrade. Just read
the release notes.
2) It's not a shoot and forget installation
at all, at least not on SuSE systems.

Use at your own risk. A properly distro-installed
2.2.1 or 2.2.2 should be good enough for 98%
of the users.

...horrible review by huinya · 2002-04-09 11:40 · Score: 1

This guy from LinuxPlanet must be using Linux for about two days, what a tool - not only did he list "new" features of KDE3 like disabling pop-up windows in Konqueror [cough], but please inform me how replacing the KDE_HOME and QT_HOME dirs affects useradd?? To all those perplexed slashdoters: [whispering] it's useradd -m which will copy /etc/skel, and, as always, use /etc/default/useradd for, well, your preferred default settings when creating an account. Be careful whom you take advice from.

KDE 3 - A Review RH 7.2 RPMS by digitaltraveller · 2002-04-09 11:53 · Score: 1

Another impressive release from the KDE folks. KDE continues to be the best deskop environment for those of us who like dark themes. To briefly digress, I am suprised at how many people use the default color scheme that Windows popularized [bright background, with black foreground text]. To me this is like staring into a lightbulb. I find a black background with grey/whitish foreground text to be much easier on the eyes after you get used to it.
So I was initially horrified when I booted up KMail and noticed the columned list widget had every second line with a white background! However after checking with a KDE developer, I found out there is a switch in KControl:Look and Feel to shut this off. It's the "Alternate background colour in lists" attribute, and it's the only one that can't be modified by clicking on the preview above, because there isn't a columned list widget in the picture. You need to set it by clicking on it manually in KControl.
KMail has had alot of bugfixes. All the bugs I have found previously have now been fixed. Konqueror continues to break stuff that was working before, and fix stuff that was not working. Actually, my "customized accessibility stylesheet" is the only thing that stopped working. I also had to adjust to changes to the Sidebar. It required modifying my use of Konqueror, but the design changes are in general evolutionary and well thought out. Konqueror seems alot faster now too. Other then that, there is alot more eye candy such as moving icons in Konqueror. Fortunately all this can be turned off. Overall, a great release!

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by free!arrow · 2002-04-09 15:41 · Score: 1

As already noted, KWin does have this capability now. However, you could always have run a different window manager (instead of KWin) with KDE, and things should work properly (as long as your replacement window manager is NetWM compliant).

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Anonymous Coward · 2002-04-09 16:04 · Score: 0

KWin supports any rectangular arrangement of desktops actually.

It's the pager (a kicker applet) that determines the actual layout and the pager is currently limited to at most 2 rows or 2 columns. The pager informs kwin via DCOP about the current layout.

It shouldn't be hard to make another pager that allows 3x3 arrangements.

Cheers,
Waldo Bastian

Re:The Kompany's Aethera by GdoL · 2002-04-09 22:10 · Score: 1

Do you have coded for this? What is your experience with that?

Should I switch to that now?

--

------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Tower · 2002-04-10 01:43 · Score: 1

A timer doesn't really solve the problem... if one were to push one's mouse to the edge and leave it there (as I mentioned, just slam it to one side to get the pointer out of the way) the mouse stays there for a fairly long time... I'm just pointing out a (known) basic flaw.

--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."

Re:Question for K users: are virtual desktops back by Tower · 2002-04-10 01:53 · Score: 1

Now that seems a lot more useful - things that guess too much at the user's intent are quite annoying... my Wife started typing on her laptop yesterday, and all of a sudden "Hey Skipper! It looks like you are typing a letter!!! Want some help?!!! I can *write this for you *copy one of your old, unrelated notes into this one *correct anything I don't understand as a word (includes most of the known English language) or *pester you until you manage to disable this option (option removed with Nifty Doorways service pack 17"

(apologies to www.ubersoft.net)

--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."

Re:Another milestone in Turn Linux Into Windows pl by be-fan · 2002-04-11 10:35 · Score: 2

I don't know what kind of trade-offs they are making. KDE 3.0 has so many features that I'd guess they're trading speed for features. The difference probably is that Microsoft can implement lots of features and keep them fast while KDE (with less resources) can implement lots of features and make them slow. In that case, is that the kind of trade-off they should be making? It's not just an efficiency thing. There is NO machine that will run KDE 3.0 at an acceptable speed for me. I'm not asking them to make it usable on a Pentium 90, but at least make it usable on my 1.5 GHz Athlon. It is probably *your* setup. Win98 is a good deal slower than Win2k/XP. BTW, I'm on a debian box as well.

--
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...

Slackware 8.0 by haplo21112 · 2002-04-11 16:29 · Score: 2

Anyone got 3.0 working from the tgz's for slackware 8.0.....
I did the install changed the KDEDIR to /opt/kde3....but it never gets past setting up inter process communication....and kdeinit fails to startup....?

--
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.

310 comments