KDE 4.3 Released 432
Jos Poortvliet writes "After another 6 months of hard work by over 700 people, after fixing over 10,000 bugs and granting 2,000 wishes, KDE 4.3, or 'Caizen,' is here (the release takes its nickname from the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement). The KDE Desktop Workspace introduces, besides the usual stability and speed improvements, new widgets, the ability to 'peek' in a folder with folderview, and activities tied to virtual desktops. The KDE Application Suites feature improvements in the utilities like a more formats supported in Ark and the return of the Linux Infrared Remote Control system. Instant messenger Kopete introduces an improved contact list and KOrganizer can sync with Google Calendar. Kmail supports inserting inline images into email and the Alarm notifier has gained export functionality, drag and drop, and has an improved configuration. The KDE Application Development platform has seen work on integrating the Social Desktop and the new system tray protocol from Freedesktop.org. You can watch a screencast of the Desktop Workspace here."
Re:making progress (Score:5, Informative)
Your problem is not KDE, it's Kubuntu. One of the worst KDE distros I've every tried.
beauty is in the eye of the beholder... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:KDevelop4? (Score:4, Informative)
It's currently in Beta 4, and judging by the release times of the previous Betas, and assuming Beta 4 is the last before the final release, I would guess the somewhere between the end of this month, and the end of September.
I know that doesn't really help, but if you are really that interested, start playing with the beta.
Re:Per-desktop activities assignments (Score:5, Informative)
I still don't know what the hell plasma activities are supposed to do, except break things. They don't do anything that virtual desktops don't.
Anyway, now with KDE 4.3 you can have one activity for all your virtual desktops or have one activity per virtual desktop. If you do the former, you can have all your desktop widgets on all desktops (handy so you don't have to switch around to use that folder you put on your desktop or to check the weather) but loose the ability to have different wallpapers for those desks OR you can have different wallpapers by having a different activity on each virtual desktop and loose the ability to share widgets across all desktops. So if you want that folder or your weather widget on every desktop, you're going to launch a separate instance for each activity.
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K (Score:3, Informative)
Lately, a lot of bars and brands in Japan are trying to use the 'c' instead of the 'k'-
Why is that? What's wrong with 'k'? In languages using latin-based alphabets, 'k' is usually better because it's always a hard consonant, unlike 'c' which varies a lot depending on the language and the word. ... If you want to use a Latin alphabet to show non-native speakers how a word is pronounced, and the word has a hard 'k' sound, why not just use a 'k'?
The biggest reason is probably that it looks less "foreign." Docomo looks at least a bit more Anglicized than Dokomo, which for whatever reason may be more appealing to some people.
Plus, it's usually not that hard to figure out. A handful of exceptions aside, c (and g, for that matter) is generally hard except when proceeded by e or i (formerly the non-low front consonants of English, which they still were when this phonological change took place and which they still are in other languages that also do this, such as Spanish). The combination ch is usually a digraph representing /tS/ (XSAMPA, not IPA--apparently Slashdot doesn't play well with Unicode), sometimes /k/, but rarely, if ever (in English) /kh/. Plus, if you know that the word is Japanese...
But basically, I would guess that the use of c appeals to more people because it looks more like an English(-ish) word.
Re:making progress (Score:3, Informative)
Semi related to this, people using Fedora (which is probably packages and integrates KDE the best of any distro I've tried) can get 4.3 by enabling the Redhat KDE testing repos from http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
I just installed it about an hour ago and have been pretty impressed with the improvement from 4.2. In particular, the notifications are very improved and kopete is actually verging on usable again. General polish all around is certainly helping too.
Re:Karma burning for fun and profit (Score:3, Informative)
I'm no expert, but from what I was reading on the dot near the actual 4.0 release, the problems were the switch to Cmake, and where packages were located. From what I understand, the Kubuntu team had trouble properly compiling and packaging.
Re:making progress (Score:2, Informative)
Lots of people swear by Mandriva, others by Sidoux or something else. In the end it probably doesn't matter that much, since it can't possibly get any worse than Kubuntu. For me, opensuse with the kde factory repos (to get the 4.3 release that will be released in with 11.2 on 11.1) works just perfectly.
Re:making progress (Score:4, Informative)
Decent KDE distros
http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/
http://www2.mandriva.com/
http://chakra-project.org/
Re:That's cool and all. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K (Score:5, Informative)
"Spelt" is also the past-participle simple-past form of "to spell". It's a little more common in countries that use British English. "spelt" and "spelled" are equally correct.
Re:making progress (Score:5, Informative)
I'd recommend Pardus, Mandriva or Arch Linux.
Re:Karma burning for fun and profit (Score:3, Informative)
Amarok 2 now uses Plasma to display plugins in the middle portion of the window. If your graphics driver doesn't like Plasma, then you're likely to have issues here.
Sadly it seems Plasma, and other Qt 4 apps/libraries don't really like the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers.
Re:That's cool and all. (Score:2, Informative)
Me, too, but now that Arch is splitting the [extra] repo packages, I'm wondering if I should switch to vanilla kde, since the only reason I used the KdeMod packages was because I liked my packages split. The KdeMod forums seem to suggest that the packages won't be in [kdemod-core] until the end of the week.
Well, there's a great discussion [archlinux.org] of it on the Arch forums (great before it got bogged down with bickering, although I didn't see Godwin's law being invoked).
Frankly, I think I'll move to offical [extra]/KDE tonight. KDEmod has served me great, but I think I can handle to live without all the extra patching and branding they do if it means I get 4.3 goodness a week early.
Re:making progress (Score:3, Informative)
sidux [sidux.com] has a nice 4.2 release
Re:Folder Sneek?? (Score:4, Informative)
> I thought Dolphin was getting a tree view.
it did. system settings did too. just turn them on in the view options.
You can check it out on Windows too (Score:5, Informative)
Go to the website and grab the installer (kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe). Should download in seconds, then you can run it to start the REAL downloading and installation process.
Stick with all the default unless you have good reason not to. Apart from anything else, most servers don't seem to have the "unstable 4.2.95" package. I got mine from ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de
Skip all the language packs unless you really need them, install the rest. Let it get on with it. When it finishes, check the "run system settings after exit" box and finish.
It has some slightly odd choices for the defaults, so I went through and set everything to "Oxygen" to make it consistent & easy. But the main reason to run this thing is just to check that the QT apps work on your machine before you try and run the full KDE environment.
Assuming it works, try a few of the other KDE apps that will have appeared in your Start menu. It has games! :o)
To get KDE itself running, you need to run something which is, for some reason, not in the options in the KDE submenu in the Start menu. Go figure. Why would they want to make it easy to run KDE on Windows after you've downloaded KDE for Windows..?
To get the actual desktop environment, you need to run plasma-desktop.exe, which in a default install will be in C:\Program Files\KDE\bin
That should launch your KDE experience, and you can have a play from there. So far, it's a little unstable (Should be better once 4.3-proper is available) but otherwise performing fairly well.
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K (Score:4, Informative)
In languages using latin-based alphabets, the pronunciation of every letter can change completely from country to country, so there is no point in preferring a letter over another one in order to achieve an "international" transliteration.
If you want that, you'll have to either use IPA, or define a different transliteration scheme from Japanese to each language with a latin-based alphabet.
That quite ignores the fact that there's an official ISO standard [wikipedia.org], an addendum to the ISO standard endorsed by the Japanese government and taught in Japanese schools [wikipedia.org], and a widely used defacto standard system for transliteration used outside of Japan, and even inside.
All of which specify the transliteration of the word in dispute as 'kaizen'.
It's all the more ridiculous for being inconsistent with years of C-to-K swaps used throughout KDE.
Re:Too little, too late; I'm with Linus (Score:5, Informative)
*shrug*
a) You should check out 4.3. It's nice.
b) Xinerama is going away, dont'cha know? If you haven't tried xrandr, you might want to. If you have, and it doesn't work like you'd expect, see if the fixes are in the works.
c) When you try out 4.2 or 4.3, give the "Folder View" configuration a spin:
* Right-click on the desktop
* Click on "Appearance Settings"
* Change the "Desktop Activity" "Type" to "Folder View"
* Click "Okay" or "Apply"
Re:Per-desktop activities assignments (Score:2, Informative)
Also note that I am running a reasonably recent and highend nVidia card on this machine.
Re:Caizen is actually spelt with a K (Score:2, Informative)
The KDE team has been code-naming its releases with words starting with C for at least a little while, and this isn't the first time they forced a word's spelling to fit. For example: KDE 4.2.3 was called "Cuagmire [lwn.net]" instead of Quagmire.
It's strange, but that's how they roll, apparently.