KDE 3.2.1 Released

TheSurfer writes "The KDE project today announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.2.1, a maintenance release for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for GNU/Linux and other UNIXes. KDE 3.2.1 ships with lot of bug fixes since KDE 3.2 and is available in 49 languages (now including Bengali, Icelandic, Japanese, Lithuanian, Low Saxon, Latin Serbian and Tajik). Sources and contributed packages are linked on the KDE 3.2.1 info page."

Comments

another link

[Anonymous Coward]

another lews link with coverage here

The Mandrake curse?

[Akai]

Poor Mandrake, seems like every time they go gold on a release one of the major components gets a major upgrade :)

Re:The Mandrake curse?

[Simon]

Except for the fact that 10.0 has heavily patched KDE 3.2.0 packages which are almost 3.2.1. My KDE here is at package version 3.2-70mdk, 70 meaning that it is the *70th* version of this package. i.e. it has been patched and rebuild roughly *70 times.

Try:

rpm -q -changelog libkdebase4 | less

Oh, Mandrake hasn't gone gold either. The boxed version will go gold in May as I understand it.

Mandrake's luck isn't _that_ bad. :) They're even coming out of Chapter 11 too.

--
Simon

Debian has it already

[Gandalfar]

And most of it is already in unstable branch. Great work KDE and Debian KDE team! :)

Re:Low Saxon

[kfg]

For the record, Low Saxon is an extant language used every day in parts of Germany and the Netherlands.

It may be a somewhat obscure language, in the sense that Icelandic is an obscure language, but just as is the case for Icelandlic it is not an obscure, dead language.

KFG

Re:Speaking of which

[chowells]

i18n.kde.org

Re:KDE 3.2 well worth the upgrade!

[trtmrt]

I use kde and really like it but the speed issue is not fixed yet. I was hoping to see this great speedup in 3.2 but to be honest for me it runs the same as 3.1. Startup on login takes the same time. There is some noticable improvement in startup times for some applications but nothing spectacular. Everything else though is great. The menus are cleaned up and there are many small usability improvements.

Re:Low Saxon

[Vlad_the_Inhaler]

You too can be a volunteer - you can add the language support. I am sure the KDE crew would welcome your input.

Re:Low Saxon

[kfg]

Bantu is a language group, not a language. Like Semetic. The most important of the Bantu languages is Swahili, which many people who have a great deal of use for KDE speak as their first language.

The clicking language of Namibia is not part of the Bantu group.

By the way, Zulu is already supported by KDE, and a Swahili translation project is underway.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that in the heavily industrialized, educated and rich portions of western Europe where Low Saxon is spoken they have a good deal of use for KDE as well.

KFG

bug flood

[Marco Krohn]

And with this new release a new flood of bugs coming in

KDE weekly bug report summary

Please double check when reporting a bug that it really isn't a duplicate. Also be sure to send in backtraces only if you have compiled with debug information. Every bad bug report just costs the developers valueable time which is badly needed for all the features coming with 3.3:

KDE 3.3 features
KDEPIM 3.3 features

If you want to help with an even better 3.3 your help in the KDE Quality team is welcome!

KDE, rock on :-)

Re:Most advanced and powerful?

[minus_273]

Having switched from linux over the summer i can say these are a small sample of things the things that make it great:
1. its a Unix clone.. comes with all the strengths
2. It has a very well designed, clean and consistent UI
3. Its so intuitive that your ganma can use it (try it..)
4. It allows you to run MS office, Photoshop , dreamweaver and tons of other commercial apps alongside your Unix apps like apache, smb, namp etc.
5. You can run X windows apps but turn it off when your dont need it and can run pretty much any (non hardware dependent)app linux can.
6. OSX boxes can emulate i386 very fast the reverse does not exist yet
7. All development tools are free (gcc) and very easy to use GUIs(Xcode)
8. The development API (cocoa) is open and cross platform (GNUstep, openstep)
9. Very good 3rd party hardware support.
10. Fantastic applications like ilife apps, itunes etc that make windows users gawk.

For an example of the last point, have granma install a digital camera and import pics on a PC (drivers, reboot, 3rd party apps etc) then do it on a mac (plug it in) or granma rip a cd, burn a cd burn picture cds etc. (get the point)

in the end my mac is rock solid, fast and i dont have to think about anything other than the task at hand when i am using it (saves lots of time)

in the end, calling it "the best of both worlds" (linux+win) is an understatement but close to what it is.

Re:Most advanced and powerful?

[mst76]

In a recent interview, Jef Raskin remarked that he thinks the one-button designe of the original Mac was a mistake.

As for the one-button mouse, I'd observed at Xerox Parc which had a 3-button mouse, that people were very confused as to its use and when I was designing the software for the Macintosh, in designing the interface, I figured that if there was only one button, there would never be any question on what you have to press the number of ways of using a one-button mouse. I think this was probably a mistake, in fact there is an appendix in my book which discusses why I think this was a mistake and what I think I should have done. One of the reasons I made the mistake is that there is a certain school of industrial design dating back to the Bauhaus which says that designs have to be simple, uncluttered, and clean. In particular, don't put writing on it except for brand names or logos. If we had had a multiple-button mouse with two keys, labeled something like "select" and "activate," it would have been much easier to use, but the idea of putting writing on keys did not occur to anybody, including me. So if I was designing one today, it would have two buttons and they would be labeled.

Motivate KDE developers!

[Marco Krohn]

Except helping in KDE Quality Team or supporting it in various other ways there is a simple thing you can do within a couple of minuts which really help: write an email!

Start one of the many good KDE applications, go to the "help menu" and click on the "about box"->"authors". Pick one or two of them and write them a short email telling them how much you like their application and that you really appreciate what they are doing for us, the open source community.

It's easy and makes them very happy to hear from satisfied users--normally they just hear about it when something is wrong and sending some nice words really keeps them motivated. Thanks.

For you Debian users

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

This worked for me.

apt-get -t unstable install kdebase

Re:Low Saxon

[vegetasaiyajin]

They're still waiting for biometric logon features, namely voiceprint-based passwords.

This security scheme would be very weak. Someone can record you while you say 'friend' and later use the recording to log on. Old-fashioned passwords are better.
Worse, you can change your password if someone steals it, but you can't change your voice, or fingerprints. If you want more security you have to consider three elements:
1. What the user knows. That is, the password. This is the most versatile.
2. What the user is. You use biometrics for this.
3. What the user has. You can use smart cards or RFID tags or similar.

If you can only afford one of these, you have to pick good old-fashioned passwords.
I think there are free PAM modules for smart-card authentication. Check MUSCLE for more info. Don't know about biometrics PAM modules. Since KDE login screen uses PAM for authentication, it shouldn't be too hard to support combined password, biometrics and smartcard authentication.