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KDE 3.1 Released
Ashcrow writes "KDE 3.1 was released early this morning and boasts new usability enhancements, VNC-compatible desktop sharing, tabbed browsing, and a new download manager, among other enhancements.
You can read the release anouncement here and start downloading from the closest mirror. Kudos to the KDE Team!"
... the new drop down shadows for the menu's!
And a hefty decrease in startup and rendering time for konqueror, and a limit to the gif-animations allowed per second.
And a brand new splash screen!
Much compliments to the KDE-team!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
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Don't know how the lameness filter got involved, but here's what I'm doing about it.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
Well, VNC has supported X for ages. What this does is provides a KDE-based VNC viewing program as well as a very Windows-XP like application to send an invitation to someone else using KDE or VNC to allow them to connect to your desktop.
That's what the big news is. That, and if you're running OpenSLP, and you enable it, you can allow your shared desktop to be part of a browseable pool of desktops or you can browse through the pool and see desktops that are available from the SLP.
Here . It's amazing... Some people are complaining that they didn't use AA fonts for the screenshots, and that's a bad PR decision. More on Osnews
DVD Ripping, Divx, VCD, SVCD under Linux
Here's the thing (about Ctrl+T).
See, KDE 2.0 had support for embedding a Konsole frame into the Konqueror window. As I'm sure you noticed, if you hit Ctrl+T, 3.1 still embeds a Konsole frame in the Konqueror window.
Fact of the matter is that we had a binding for Ctrl+T first... and changing around things that our users are used to as far as keybindings go is obviously a no-no. (Believe it or not there are people who use the embedded Konsole stuff. And it is pretty nifty.)
However, if you go to Settings->Configure Keybindings, you can alter it to change it from Ctrl+Shift+N to Ctrl+T or add Ctrl+T so you can use both. KDE has really good keybinding support, and it's very configurable.
Hope this helps.
Well, if you know how, CVS has most of the Safari patches merged in, and the Safari guys are also integrating stuff from our branch into theirs. We're gradually moving towards a unified source tree for both projects (originally, they took a snapshot from the KDE 3.0.2 version of KHTML) but we're not quite there yet.
:)
(I'm using CVS HEAD and let me tell you, Konq is faster than ever. It's actually faster than Mozilla on my machine.)
I wonder if the 'save this process' trick is in 3.1. I've been using CVS for so long that I sort of forget which features make it into release and which don't.
(The 'save this process' trick is a way to have a set number of Konqueror processes stay alive after you quit the last Konqueror window. This way, the next time you click on the Konqueror icon, it re-uses the last process that was open, which is a nice little hack that makes Konq appear to launch faster when it's not actually launching at all.)
But they have included a KDE 3.1 snapshot in the latest beta ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/beta/phoebe/ .
Tagged as '3.1-0.11 Red Hat'.
No, this certainly isn't surprising. Redhat has always been bad about this, indeed in getting along well with KDE in general, the notable exception being Bero, who left Redhat full of sincere frustration over the worsening of the situation. He was the guy that typically produced the Redhat packages. I know that there's a new guy who's doing their KDE packaging, but I have no idea if he / Redhat intends to release updated KDE packages.
Actually this is pretty easy if your keyboard is configured properly in X. You need to have it set to using a pc104 keyboard instead of the standard pc101. After that, mapping the key in the KDE shortcuts menu works beautifully.
You include both themes in the same tarball, so that in the directory "MyTheme", you should have the directories "gtk" and "gtk-2.0".
The latest versions of the gnome theme-selector is supposed to change both gtk and gtk-2.0 themes based on this. If it does not, then it is a bug, and should be filed at http://bugzilla.gnome.org.
I know it works like this in Red Hat 8.0. Now, Red Hat did patch some things in 8.0 that was not in GNOME 2.0.x, but if so, then it should most definitely be in GNOME 2.2 scheduled to be out next week.
Do not worry about finding a list of mirrors. download.kde.org will automatically forward you to an open mirror.
For a direct link to the packages, here are:
Note that you need a version of Qt >= 3.1.0. There are additional requirementsfor 3.1 you may want to know.
Actually, it is rather IE-like. :)
However, this is slightly different from kdeinit because kdeinit preloads the libraries into RAM so that process initialization takes less time, while this actually keeps the last Konq process open and the next time a 'start Konqueror' request is interpreted, it sends a message to the sleeping process saying "HEY! Open a new window!"
Since opening a new window takes exponentially less time than linking and loading a new Konqueror process (and since prelinking isn't quite finished yet) this makes Konqueror appear to launch much faster, but again, it's not really "launching" anymore.
Also, it's configurable so that you can say "Ok, instead of just one, I want you to keep at most 2 [3,4,x] of these processes alive." Of course, this means that the processes stay alive and continue to eat RAM while they are, but if you don't use Konq for a while they'll get swapped out to VM. It's still faster than launching a process cold, though.
No other project has accomplished so much in such a short time span. Most server-centric products are mostly finished, the big developments happen on the desktop in the Linux-world. And that's KDE.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
My main fear is that KMail and Konquerer won't be good Evolution/Galeon replacements.
Why do you have to replace Evolution/Galeon? They work normally in KDE. There is nothing that forces you to choose KDE version of each and every application.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
> 4. a real GUI for everything
That one still needs a bit more elaboration.
Basically it frees you of having to read a manual and to remember command line options... and it offers 'profiles' for different network environments, so you do not need to know all the VNC codecs to have optimal settings(did you know that a -encodings "copyrect hextile" results in dramatically better latency values on local LANs than the default TightVNC settings?). And you can switch modes (fullscreen, scaled) while you are connected.
Also... This is an application, OK? Does it really require a desktop upgrade?
Not really, it is more about convenience for both user and developer. The newer KDE and Qt version fix a number of bugs that caused problems though. I do not have the time tomaintain backports, I rather work on improvements. You are, of course, free to provide backports for older KDE versions.
Editorial comments aside, you can expect kde-3.1 packages (currently, for rh73 only) to appear soon at kde-redhat.sourceforge.net.
Better yet, does the KDE viewer buffer the graphics?
Yes.
Btw, whatever happened to Keystone?
Nothing, it never supported any of the compression encodings. Porting the TightVNC client was easier than adding all the stuff to keystone...
I don't see that at all.
It seems to me that I use virtually all of these features on a regular basis. Yes, some of them have been done before. Yes, a lot of the features are available via third party software in Windows. But this doesn't mean that KDE is copying Windows. It means that people using KDE and people using Windows need a lot of the same features.
There have been a number of interoperability improvements, for instance palm and exchange compatibility, but this isn't the same as copying windows. It simply means that KDE is trying to be as compatible with your other systems as possible.
There is a feature guide that details a lot of this.
In some ways, KDE is up to Windows XP (video previews in the file manager), but in others it is not even at Windows 95 yet (easy folder sharing).
"Rightclick, select Share" isn't easy enough for you ?!!
Guess you just want to be keeping an eye on: kde-cygwin then.
What a nice thing to do. Konsider it for your new kpolicy!
Wah!
Click the maximize button with the middle mouse button.
Since I'm not Dave Hyatt or Dirk Mueller, I really don't know how much of the communication going on is private mail and how much is on the mailing lists. However, I do keep tabs on what Dave says about Safari over at his blog.
As far as the KHTML side, I just keep watching CVS and I've lost count of how many messages I've seen marked with "merge from safari". It's amazing. Within two weeks of Apple's announcement, half of the code had already been imported back into the main tree and the Safari guys had picked up the new table rendering code on their end.
So subscribe to kde-cvs@kde.org and check Dave's blog, or check the kde-cvs digests (dot.kde.org links to them every time they come out) since kde-cvs is extremely heavy traffic-wise. That's the best way I know of to keep up to date on this info.
It'll take quite a while (fetches and builds everything from source), but it is just a single make command to build everything, so you can set it off and walk away.
Got a build running now, will let you know how well it goes. Halfway through kdebase, been running for a couple of hours on a 1GHz machine.
Go to the Mandrake cooker website:
3
:)
http://www.mandrakelinux.com/en/cookerdevel.php
and download the rpm's from the primary mirror. Most of the release candidate.x packages have now been replaced with the release versions.
These are cooker packages, I have no idea about dependencies on other cooker packages, use at your own risk.
Tabbed browsing is a UI feature. Safari is only using the KHTML rendering engine. The rendering engine shouldn't care whether it is drawing into a tab or window. This means that features added to Konqueror don't necessary become part of Safari or vice versa. Both browers have lots of code apart from the rendering engine. Improvements to the rendering engine will come to both sooner or later. Their interfaces are independent though.
> But there is no way to specify this for each directory.
In KDE 3.1, settings menu->view properties saved in directory..
Anything changed with the view menu will be saved with the directory (such as icon mode, icon size, sorting, background image, background color, file previews, whether hidden files are shown, whether directory icons reflect contents)
This has been available in KDE for a very long time, and in windows as well (since ~98SE or so).
The only thing that can't be done through this is showing the sidebar (I think!), and saving window size.. but both of these can be done with KDE's excellent scripting facility, dcop.
He's got a pretty good rant^H^H^H^H essay on the subject.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
> 1.- I feel that both gnome and kde are getting very bloated.. does kde packages allow me an easy selection of what I want to install?
The KDE project only releases source tarballs. It's up to the distros to decide how they want to package it. Debian, for example, splits the packages into every app.
> 2.- Does kde have something like the graphical greeter in gnome (2.x only I belive)??
You mean gdm? yeah, kde has had kdm for a very long time.
In case you're not familiar with the KDE binary packaging policy, let me make it more familiar to you.
KDE provides source packages. That's it. We give source to users and developers and everyone else in the world. But the way that we do it, we give the source packages to the distribution maintainers first, and we let them know loud and clear that it is 100% their responsibility to package KDE properly for their distro. SuSE understands this; Mandrake understands this; Slackware understands this, Debian understands this; hell, even Gentoo understands this, and Gentoo hasn't even been a real distro for a year yet.
RedHat does NOT do their users the service of providing binary packages. That's fine, but YOU don't have to listen to all of the RedHat users bitching and complaining that they don't get to run the latest KDE, and their friends running SuSE and Mandrake do, and that's not fair, and KDE is anti-RedHat.
If RedHat would do the same for KDE as any one of the other distros does, that would please me to no end. Instead, they take our source code, they strip out the information about the project that provides it, they ruin our desktop by adding hacks to Qt that make it more unstable, they ship pre-release versions of the base libraries and applications that comprise the entire system, and I'm supposed to be happy with that? Please.
I was only responding in kind to Black Parrot's post where he claimed that KDE developers are a bunch of "fucking crybabies" when in fact RedHat does everyone a disservice and you people can't climb over eachother fast enough to kiss their ass when they do.
This is part of Klipper. Its icon is probably in your system tray as a clipboard with a K on it. Right click on that icon, choose Configure, and uncheck "Popup menu at mouse-cursor position".
-- Fester
"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."
Hmm nobody seems to have posted the apt sources for debian.
Woody:
deb http://ktown.kde.org/~nolden/kde stable main
deb-src http://ktown.kde.org/~nolden/kde stable main
Sid:
deb http://ktown.kde.org/~nolden/kde unstable main
These will be going into unstable soon but if you're impatient then use these. If you're using sid (unstable) include both the woody and sid lines as there is stuff in woody that's not in sid but they co-exist quite happily.
That can't be fixed in Konqueror (or Safari) because they've made an architectural decision to use native widgets (Qt in Konqueror, Cocoa in Safari). Mozilla and IE use their own widgets and this problem is one reason why.
There are a lot of advantages to using native widgets, of course. It's a tradeoff.
If you like to vertically maximize a lot, just go ahead and configure that as your double-click on the titlebar behaviour:
;-)
In KDE 3.0.x: Control Center->Look & Feel->Window Behaviour->Actions->Title bar double-click
In KDE 3.1: I'm not sure since I haven't finished compiling 3.1 and I wiped the release candidate already
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence