LinuxPlanet Reviews KDE 3.0

fabiolrs writes "LinuxPlanet has a cool review on KDE 3.0. You can also view a changelog of version 3.0 here." Still no debs, but I'm looking forward to checking this thing out. I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out. Update: 04/09 16:58 GMT by M : EWeek also has their own review.

Comments

KDE's appearance

[Ween]

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.

Re:KDE's appearance

[Crypt0rchid]

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

[Khalid]

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

[lamont116]

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

[spitzak]

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

[spitzak]

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!

Change Log

[Epi-man]

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.

Didn't even check out the links eh?

[swagr]

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

I have used it for 3 days now

[hattig]

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.

What I'd really like to see in a review

[ChrisWong]

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

[reaper20]

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

[Rich]

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.

KDE 3.0 doesn't make my laptop hot.

[marksthrak]

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.

The point is: stick to your distro

[InodoroPereyra]

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 ;-)

That is not a review

[ltsmash]

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".

Very rough for us Noobs!

[Deacon Jones]

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).

Re:All I was able to see

[Linux Freak]

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.

My mini review...

[Matts]

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.

Re:My mini review...

[Rich]

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...

[Matts]

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.

KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[Zocalo]

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:

1. 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.
2. Run "rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm" - this will give you a list of all the dependency issues (if any) without actually touching your stuff.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Having sorted out the obvious dependency problems try another test install ("rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm")
6. 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.
7. 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!

Re:KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[electroniceric]

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

[Suppafly]

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.

Gentoo Linux

[omega9]

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.

Re:Gentoo Linux

[greenfly]

Heh, so is it done compiling yet?

My Experience on SuSE 7.3

[alistair]

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.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[wiredog]

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.

My two penn'orth...

[deepstephen]

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.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[MSG]

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.

Add apt-get support to KPackage

[Nailer]

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

Installing KDE3 on RH 7.2 (a correct way)

[Nailer]

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.