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KDE 3.2 Alpha 1 Finally on FTP
An anonymous reader cut-and-pastes from the announcement: "Stephan Kulow finally managed to get the last bits of the KDE 3.2 Alpha 1 codenamed 'Brokenboring' including KDevelop 3.0 Alpha 6 on the ftp server (the mirrors should soon pick it up). There won't be any binary packages for this release because the KDE 'P(a)i' release is coming out soon. Everyone using it is asked to compile it with --enable-debug, so we can get valuable feedback. There is a new unstable version of Konstruct to install it."
Both, all the boring parts are broken, and all the broken parts are boring.
It's trying to compete with XP for the desktop.
Building the alpha version with an unstable Konstruct... I opt for both.
The progress that these guys have made in 5 years and the sheer volume of quality code is simply amazing. What are these guys doing right as compared to all the other projects? They even stick to their development and release schedules better than most commercial companies. And despite everyone calling for the death of C++, KDE is the shining example of what can be accomplished in that language. I seriously doubt it could have been constructed in any other language and produce as quick and relatively error-free code as these guys have produced.
This is awsome, with a name like this how can it be anything other than... er... great, hmmm, what a name.
anyone know if someone is working on a native port of kde to osx?
The KDE team have done a fantastic job at providing the necessary tools for even a slightly tech savvy user to upgrade to the latest development release.
Checkout Konstruct to learn how to run a simple script to download, verify, compile and install the components to get KDE working on your machine.
I try to download it the other day, but my KBrowser was having KTrouble downloading the KFiles from the KFtp.
Man, and 3.1.3 finally finsihed compiling on my 233-MMX just yesterday...
O-well...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
I think it would be advantageous to provide a Live CD with the alpha/beta releases, so that people can get into debugging the code straight away (I for instance, cannot download, compile and use KDE easily due to disk space, bandwidth problems. I could however, use a Knoppix version with the alpha release to test around).
Searching around shows the DragOS Project, but I haven't had time to check it. Does anyone know of similar efforts?
Everyone who's going to post a lame joke based on the fact that many KDE apps start with "K", please post them under this thread.
Here, I'll start: "hey, didja ever notice how a lot of KDE apps start with 'K'?! What's the deal with that? Ha! Ha! Ha! Those KDE guys aren't very 'K-creative' Ha! Ha! Get it??" There, that's about the best one I've ever read, actually.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Yeah, good thing we do write decent well-documented code, huh?
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
Eric Laffoon recently made comments in his story about meeting Wil Wheaton statements about GUI capability in Quanta 3.2. If, so the 3.2 release could be a very important milestone for KDE, because it will mean that Dreamweaver finally has competition on Linux for those web developers still stuck on using WYSIWYG html editing tools.
My journal has hot
Kolab is looking interesting, and if you combine this with Kontact you could just have the real Lotus Notes killer. With MS Exchange support, the extensibility of Kontact would make it easy to integrate in a Lotus Notes environment as well.
Ostensibly these look to be part of KDE 3.2, has anyone done the download/compile/install yet that can confirm/deny this.
This is great stuff, btw. I'm excited that KDE is tackling these kinds of applications, I may just switch back from Moz once the kinks have been worked out.
Eric Sarjeant
eric[@]sarjeant.com
Quite the opposite opinion here. KDE is great for those who like to fiddle with settings, but I'm seeing here another release with yet more options to fiddle.
I like the ability to customise, but it has to be said some of the menus in konqueror and konsole and various other core parts of KDE are a bit messy at the moment. I see they're working to improve the situation in konqueror's file management mode but I still think a lot more could be done.
A lot of the options in kcontrol could be better grouped and so be more intuitive and obvious, without removing things completely. If the devs could do this, then I'd might switch, since for me KDE now looks good (with Plastik, hopefully the default in KDE4) and is much faster than it used to be.
Canopy doesnt fund Troll Tech.
Canopy owns some 6% or whatever of Troll Tech.
Maybe you are not familiar with how corporations work, but usually, the company pays dividends to the stockholders (or not), but the company doesnt send the stockholders the companys bills.
Canopy did finance Troll Tech once, when they bought the shares. Around 1998, IIRC. You know, when Caldera was still a Linux company.
I had a close look at post 3.0 KDE at the LinuxTag earlier this year. I'm still very much a windowmanager fan with E, Fluxbox and Windowmaker on my favorites list. But after I had a guy from the KDE booth show me all the stuff that I can change and activate to get KWin (KDEs WM) away from the default of emulating MS Windows crappines and closer to E/Windowmaker/Fluxbox usability features I thougt I'd give a pure KDE enviroment a chance on Debian Woody with KDE 3.1. It o\/\/nZ0Rz nearly every other desktop I've worked with.
The conlusion is that with a proper setup there is no doubt what so ever that KDE kicks MS Windows up and down the street usability wise in every possible detail. It takes me about 30 seconds to get any Windows desktop user conviced that MS days as a monopoly are counted.
Further on: Ralph Nolden showed previews of what brewing with the 3.2 version of KDevelop and some other goodies. Apart from built-in support of something like a dozen and more programming languages there is a lot of stuff that will cause me to migrate from 3.1 to 3.2 asap.
To me it's quite evident: If OSS is the hauting horde of MS executives sleepless nights, the current and future KDE is the chief Boogieman of them all.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
1. I love KDE - when we run Linux desktops, they are Mandrake/KDE desktops
2. The KDE project is a quality project, I never liked GNOME's politics. The KDE team had the "harmony" project to create a GPL'd Qt replacement, just in case, the GNOME team could have worked on that instead of going after KDE in a holy war.
3. We have one developer licensed on Qt (triple platform) and one other that is probably being added to Qt development.
HOWEVER
The KDE team was a bunch of Trolltech guys. At least in the beginning, those pushing KDE development were from Trolltech.
The Trolltech team was out to create a cross-platform API and push it. KDE was their way of creating a Unix desktop using their libraries. The whole plan was to make Unix desktops credible (this was in the days where engineers would have a Solaris Workstation for engineering, and a Windows desktop for Groupware/Productivity apps), so that they could sell Qt. This was also before MS Office completely owned the market (remember, Office 95 was their first big hit, and it wasn't until the time of Office 97 that MS had a defacto productivity monopoly b/c Wordperfect died).
The KDE team was formed by Trolltech to create a marketplace for a Unix/Win32 cross-platform toolkit.
In addition, Motif/CDE had an established market. Trolltech was pushing Qt/KDE as a replacement, going after the entrenched Unix market. The goal was to push to Engineering focused Motif/CDE out for a Qt/KDE environment that would do productivity AND Engineering. That would let corporations build their internal applications (where people spent a LOT of time) in a cross-platform manner, for the engineers to be able to use.
Alex
[This is an update of my earlier post on this subject, which I won't link to because this is much better. Mod me up if you want to protest against the gnaming kraziness; don't mod me down if you're humor-challenged.]
KDE Developers Anonymous
Hello group, my name is Klark and I'm addikted to the letter K... As is the kase with many of you, I've always been krazy about komputers and like many of my fellow komp sci students, I was looking forward to a suksessful kareer in the field of information and kommunikation teknology... but my troubles started when I diskovered open source software and the wonderful kommunity around it and got kwite seriously into KDE development... At first I didn't komprehend the effekt this would kome to have on my life as a koder - it wasn't really konspikuous initially when I started to spell more and more kommon words with a k, sometimes even with a kapital K... But then my kolleagues began to wonder why I kouldn't spell korrektly. They asked me, "Are you on krack? Kut the krap!"... some even went as far as kalling me kompletely krazy! What kould I do? I must admit, I'm a kolerik person, even kwick-tempered you might say... okkasionally I would get inkredibly angry and kuss and kurse at my ko-workers... People should judge me by the kontent of my karakter instead of just kriticizing what they konsider kurious spelling! Other times, I would just retreat into a korner and kry kwietly by myself... However, it wasn't until they kicked me out of my kalligraphy kourse at kommunity kollege and I lost my job on akkount of my unkooperative konduct that I finally realized I had to kome to terms with my problem... so here I am, this is my koming-out... I know my kase is a komplex one, but I do hope it is kurable...
Stop whining. It WON'T happen.
Windows has one GUI because it's made by one company with one central management. KDE and Gnome are different teams, that work in different ways, use different languages and have different ideas. To expect that just because you think one desktop is needed that they'll leave whatever they're doing and start coding your ideal desktop is foolish. Deal with it, most OSS developers work on things because they like working on them, not because they're working for the common good.
Besides, there can't be a perfect WM. I don't want KDE 3 on a P166, there I'd use IceWM or Enlightenment. I don't want IceWM on my dual Athlon either, where I can use that extra power for something useful. I also don't like Gnome, while many Gnome users probably hate KDE.
Heck, how does anybody expect that we can somehow get independent developers to agree on one unique project when the world still hasn't managed to agree on one unique measure system?
It's odd really. In the poll that's here right now the options are in kg, and half of the posts in it is whining: "But where Americans! Why isn't it in pounds?". Then go to a KDE discussion and somehow now half of the discussion is whining about that we need a single standard.
KDE is made by Trolltech, a Canopy Group company.
KDE is not made by Trolltech, but by a network of around 200 regular contributing individuals around the world. Two or three of these work on Qt for Trolltech, and contribute to KDE in their spare times.
(Yes, I've been trolled, so what)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Matthias Ettrich and Warwick Allison (just to name a couple of KDE developers) were open source KDE developers first and only after their great acheivements in KDE were they hired by TrollTech. The same is true for most of their other employees - they cut their teeth on the open source KDE platform first. The original KDE team was pretty indifferent to licensing issues and they only cared about using the best written GUI software platform available at the time, namely Qt.
TrollTech is not the self-serving evil company you make it out to be. They actually care about writing quality code - and it shows in their products.
And no, I'm not a TrollTech employee. I've just used their software in the past commercially and was very impressed by it.
For those like myself who can't program in C++, but who can install this alpha version, or any other versions before 3.2 final, there is a lot you can do to help KDE:
* Report bugs. If you find something crashes, doesn't work as you'd expect it to, or there's a feature you think is missing, report it at http://bugs.kde.org.
* Submit documentation. Lots of apps in KDE will have out of date documentation, or none at all. If you understand how to use just such an app, consider writing documentation for it and submitting it to KDE.
* Submit translations. If American English isn't your native language, consider translating the text in applications to languages you feel confident with.
More can be found at: http://www.kde.org/support
When did I call TrollTech evil? I am a happy customer, sending them thousands of dollars/year, and using Linux desktops based upon KDE?
They DO care about writing quality code. They also have HEAVILY supported KDE development to create a market for their API as cross-platform.
What about that is evil?
The fact that the resulting desktop is made available for free under the GPL makes it great. They provide for "free," albeit restricted for development, environemtn, to push their product.
What a great side effect of the invisible hand! In their creation of a market, everyone gets free benefits.
The only thing that I would like from Qt is a better RAD environment to work with. One of our project upgrades was going to be moved from Cocoa to Qt, which was cancelled because certain limitations in using Qt for RAD development. I look forward to new versions of Qt, they keep getting stronger.
BTW: as a commercial licensee of Qt, I am REALLY happy that a lot of the KDE core is on Trolltech's payroll. Each version of Qt incorporates more functionality that was handled at the KDE level, and KDE is upgraded to use the new Qt. That makes the features available to those of us wanting Qt's cross platform benefits.
The Qt/Mac GPL release was also great (although, obviously, with Panther including X11 in the OS, they had no choice, as Qt/X11 on Panther would hit the dreadful "good enough" level without Qt on board). I look forward to the Qt/Mac KDELIB port being in the main tree, and being able to install KDE apps under OS X for my power use.
Alex
Canopy owns 4.1% according to Trolltech. I hardly consider that a significant influence even with one guy on the board.
Just curious have you ever used Gentoo? I mean its not just the optimizations, that make gentoo great, its the fact that you can get up to date software faster than the mojority of distros. CVS and experimental software are a breeze. And the fact that you can just type a command and come back later with it working is great. I have a knoppix system install on my laptop and so I am familiar with the apt-get system. It is nice when you set it to use the ultra-unstable software so you can actually use something recent but _I_ still _think_ its a bit more of a pain to use apt than portage. Gentoo is actually faster installing small programs than most distros since I dont even have to know where to get it. And the large stuff like KDE well I just go to bed and at the latest its ready to roll when I get back from work. I am not trying to convince you to use Gentoo just trying to say your statement sounds quite ignorant. And if you use Debian the way it was designed you won't get KDE 3.2 for another 3-5 years.
"We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
Another route is Knoppix with KDE CVS. Never tried it though, YMMV, yada yada...
Btw I don't think KDE should take all the honour for Konstruct. After all it was "inspired by GARNOME" - good to see idea exchange across the major Free desktops.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Yes, it will be in there and Nicholas is working on VPL support. That is the WYSIWYG functionality that we're all awaiting. Both Quanta AND KDevelop have _drastically_ improved in 3.2.
Also, keep an eye out for Juk (KDE's answer to ITunes) in this new release. It is an incredibly cool jukebox program that has automatic tagging and vFolder playlists.
Well yeah, about the same time longhorn comes out you mean?
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Just visit the screenshot pages of the major/new applications: Kontact (2, 3, 4), JuK, Kgpg, KAddressbook, KBruch, Kig, Kopete, KVim, KCacheGrind, Umbrello, KDevelop, Plasktik,
I am not a Gentoo fanboy and your right I don't understand all of the cflags I use but I try. I don't push gentoo on everyone I meet. As a matter of fact to a newb I reccomend JAMD or SuSE. Gentoo is for those that want to learn but not go full bore with LFS. I personnally use Gentoo because its easy to install stuff without dependancy probs and I can get up to date stuff. Debian is cool like I said I use Knoppix (installed) on my laptop which is a Debian unstable easy to install and use distro. But at home I have bandwidth and horsepower to spare so I use gentoo which works for me. But please use what works for you. If interested in Gentoo try it but don't give up on it til you got it installed and functioning all the way just like any distro you want to try. But I got to say if you want to run Debian try out knoppix and install it to the harddrive its sweet fast and easy.
"We can no longer live as rats... we know too much." -Secret of NIMH
To tell you the truth, I don't really use KDE for it's amazingly straight-forward and simplistic user interface that most users (including non-technical) can really appriciate. I don't even use it for it's incredibly nice built-in tools like Kmail for email. Nor do I use it for the fast, lightweight, renounded KHTML engine you find in Konqueror -- the same engine used in Apple's Safari webrowser. Not only do I have KDE users making sure they can open their banking accounts online, but i have the 15 other mac users to do that for me to ( :D joke ppl ). I use Konqeror's KIO Slaves to get my work and play done faster, better and easier. I use karmera:// to get all my digital images, fish:// to get around nfs bullcrap, audiocd:// to rip my audioCDs to ogg quickly.
You know, you may not call me a "technical user", but I do a couple "technical" things. KDE enpowers me to write scripts that interact with my KDE programs using dcop. Quick and easy GUI automation -- even for the "non technical users". Oh and have you EVER programmed FOR KDE? it's simply amazing! Very easy to use and a robust toolkit to use. Much easier to learn than GTK(2) or MFC were.
Now you make call me names and tell me i sould use *box -- but you are missing an amazing featureset using tools that you just happen to pick up and add to your "desktop environment". It might be time for you, oh great master of GNU/Linux, to give KDE another try.
<sarcastic>
it's not that hard to install it, all you have to do is open a "command line thingie" on your uber-blackbox system and type in "sudo urpmi kde"... unless that's for the "real techies" -- in which case you can use Drake's control center
</sarcastic>
dont' call my Desktop n00b, n00b
love, standsolid
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?