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KDE GUI

KDE 2.0 Final Release Candidate Is Out 135

Posted by HeUnique from the impressive-work dept.
As the title says - The final Release Candidate (RC2) of KDE 2.0 is out. Announcement is here, Red Hat RPM's available here (for Red Hat 6.2 and 7.0). SuSE and other distributions RPM's available through the mirrors. Solaris 8 packages will be out soon. Please test this release and if you'll find any showstopper bug, then please report it.
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KDE 2.0 Final Release Candidate is out More

KDE 2.0 Final Release Candidate is out

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  • Re:There can be only one! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Personally, I believe MAC OS X will be a dog - I just dont think anyone can retrofit a good gui onto UNIX without a warehouse full of kludges. I believe I am not alone in this position. See, for example, Miguel Says Unix Sucks! [slashdot.org] Miguel is quite wrong, Unix does not suck, it simply sucks for what he's trying to have it accomplish. Well, I really dont need that big an OS. I prefer a tight, fast system that doesnt fall all over itself or is a nightmare to maintain.

    If I need to get work done, I start blackbox and fire up half a dozen xterms. For development this cannot be beat. If I need to putz around, I roll my chair over to the W2K machine. No point in settling for second best in either scenario.

    With all due respect to the KDE and gnome teams as well as to duct tape, KDE and Gnome are both useless to me and my systems is the better off because of it. There are a lot of ways UNIX could be improved but Windows look and feel is not one of them.

    I realize not everyone is fortunate enough to have two computers but for those people there is always VMWare.

  • Re:Solaris 2.6? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > The chances are that your Solaris box only has an 8 bit display driver - this is bad enough when using CDE, but KDE and gnome really enjoy eating the colourmap...

    KDE 1.1.1 and KDE 1.1.2 (for the latter you have to install the included locolor-tarball) addresses this issue perfectly.

    KDE2 also delivers a special icon-theme for 8-bit-graphics-adapters. If there are any problems with these contact icons@kde.org

  • Re:Solaris 2.6? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...unless you just call xinit with the option
    -dev /dev/fb defclass TrueColor defdepth 24
    to get TrueColor on your Solaris box (works fine on my UltraSparc 10 & KDE 1.1.x)
  • The last comment on the thread page says this, and no one's replied to that, or bought it up here, so I'm posting it - Does compiling KDE without exception handling mean that any exception will cause a crash? This is what would happen in any C++ prog like KDE. If so, then the speed might well be improved but at the cost of stability/reliability, or is KDE just so well coded that no errors occur :)

  • Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ask E's or sawmill authors to support the standard they agreed to support, and kdesktop will work just fine.

    It should already work well with latest blackbox.

  • Weird definition of "Release Candidate" (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Anybody that schedules a specific number of release candidates obviously doesn't understand the concept. If they know this one is good enough, why not just call it the release? If they don't know that for sure, how can they be sure this is the last one?

    A release candidate is supposed to be a version you think is good enough to release, but aren't sure about.

  • Re:There can be only one! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I prefer a tight, fast system that doesnt fall all over itself or is a nightmare to maintain.

    I dumped one last week, you want her number?
  • Does anyone know whether the Mandrake RPMS are the cooker ones (like previous ones have been) or are they actually compiled for 7.1? Using cooker RPMS on 7.1 for KDE totally f**ks up my system... (kdm loses all of my window manager choices, for example)

    :wq!

  • I had installed mandrake_desk, and things still went whacky. Guess I'll have to try 7.2. :)

    :wq!

  • Back to the good old days - pay for expensive hardware, pay for expensive Unix. No thanks. The micro revoloution freed us from expensive hardware, the Open Source revoloution from expensive OS's, and now Apple wish to become a belated workstation vendor?

    I'll take my Unix free, thank you. And I like my hardware without a profit premium for branding and translucent plastic.

  • I think the term "Release Candidate" is more of a wake up call to the community, in effect saying "unless there's something REALLY bad in this code, this will be officially 2.0". So in essence, you are correct, and so are they. :)
  • The file manager (konqueror) and the desktop icons (kdesktop) are separate

    yeah. too bad you can't (or couldn't in 1.93) use kdesktop with any wm other than kwin. kwin isn't bad if you're coming from a windows camp, (or a NeXt-like platform, they seem to have a good neXt-alike theme) but it's downright distressing to somebody used to the configurability of sawmill or enlightenment. i personally don't see why they had to make the desktop icons depend on kdesktop, which in turn depends on kwin (meaning there was no good way to run it and get reasonable results in any other window manager i tried it with).

    the thing i liked best about kde1 was that you could run any one piece of it without any other piece. so whenever there was a big flamewar between kde and gnome, you could just tell the newbies "try both, and use the parts you like". for a long time i mixed gnome panel with kfm with e, and i was happy (mostly).

    now kde has pretty much taken an all or nothing approach. and, to be fair, gnome is moving that way too. i only use gnome right now because i prefer gnome's 'all' to kde's 'all'. but i really wish that you could still mix and match the two. i would much rather use kde's file manager than gnome's (and konqueror, which, thank goodness, can still be run independently of the rest of the kde environment) but i won't use the kde windowmanager (i even tried hacking all my key bindings into the code, only to find out that several of the commands i wanted to bind weren't available.) and i can't stand kde's root menu, nor can i find an acceptable way to configure them. (and before somebody says it, their menu editor is not acceptable. it doesn't allow you to specify the order of items, and it doesn't allow you to put items before folders. this is, of course, because they use the same method of defining their menus as win95 used for the start menu, which suffers the same limitations. at least microsoft fixed that in win98)

    anyway, i applaud the work of the kde team. they have done a tremendous job on this release. i know pretty much all of my complaints here are personal preference, and i don't expect everybody's personal preference to be the same as mine (in fact i usually expect it not to be. that's why i've always liked raster's approach: everything should be user configurable. whether i agree with his method's is an entirely different post, though) in that light, i really wish that these projects would allow their programs to be run independently of other. quite honestly, the kde team might as well have made kicker (the panel) kwin and kdesktop all one program. i see no good reason why they should make them separate programs when they can't be run separately (other than keeping people from crying "bloat" when they realize that their environemnt really does use more memory/cpu than enlightenment once you add everything up.)
  • Thanks for this info.

    I have been regularly trying beta versions of KDE2 (precompiled binaries) and my impression up until now was that it was fast but extremely buggy. KDE1 seemed to much more solid prior to it's release.

    I just loaded up KDE2-RC2 and it seems to be very slow to launch apps on my underpowered test box(P133, 128MB) but looks a lot more stable in the hour or so I've been able to play with it. Once a program gets launched it runs fine.

    Can't wait to try this out on my other machine (P3-500, 256MB)
  • I put RC2 on a RH7 box today and did not need any extra.

    My box was originally installed using a workstation install, selecting only GNOME, no KDE1 and no GAMES.

    The only adjustment I made was to set DESKTOP="KDE" in /etc/sysconfig/desktop
  • It is rock stable. DO NOT POST BUG REPORTS FOR CRASHES UNLESS YOU HAVE RECOMPILED WITH ./configure --enable-debug (and I mean all of KDE and qt) and can reproduce the crash.

    Most of the time you didn't install it correctly or the packager made a mistake.

    I mean look at http://bugs.kde.org [kde.org] more than 10000 bugs. There are some developers busy just closing STUPID bugreports.

    Concerning the stability: Konqueror crashes (once a day under hard testing -js, java, pushing buttons like crazy). That_'s it I haven't managed to crash anything else in a while.

  • As for switching from Gnome to KDE 2.x or vice versa, my recommendation has always been to try out both and check which you like better.

    My recommendation has always been to check out both and then use KDE. :-)

  • I couldn't agree more with this eulogy to KDE. Very civilized nice project, no bullies, no flaming of systematic flaming of other projects.

    Concerning company influence, TrollTech just makes the toolkit. That's it. Thjey don't mess with the desktop. They try to help it of course, but I can't recall a single design proposal by TrollTech.

    The Gnome using moderators must be afraid.... But come on folks, you can't expect other people to make the switch from Windows to Linux if you are afraid of switching from Gnome to KDE.

  • Installing on stock Redhat 7 box (Score:3)

    by Genom ( 3868 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @02:46AM (#712788)
    Just a note - if you've got a stock RH7 box that you're planning on installing this on, you'll want to make a trip over to http://www.rpmfind.net [rpmfind.net] and pick up the RH7 rpms for zip and unzip (just do a search and look for the green highlight) as the KDE rpms complained about not having them (why they didn't install by default is beyond me - I'm just passing the info on.)
  • Hi.

    I've gotten it to work, though I've used the available binary packages (and then I recompile QT2.2 for GIF support.

    That was 1.94, though. I haven't tried recompiling for RC2, adn I'm pretty sure there are no binaries for it (yet)

    Hope that helps, I'd be happy to help explain how to instal the packages if you need it,

    Ben
  • Would you mind quoting the link that makes reference to this?

    MDK 7.1 got to shelves pretty quickly after release, and KDE2 Final will ship in a week, I can't see them not holding off, but I've read users posting this info before.
  • I did.

    There were prebuilt binaries of the ports
    (made by doing make package) also. As KDE2 takes a while to compile, the binary packages are a better option for some people.
  • Hi.

    I've noticed, and complained before, that GIF support isn't compiled in by default on FreeBSD. Upon inspecting the Makefile of the QT port, I noticed that they seem to check for a Unisys license before allowing the GIF support to be compiled in.

    Does anyone know if this is necessary? Am I allowed to build and distribute a package that has GIF support built in, or could I face the wrath of Unisys?

    Also, I know that Mandrake ships QT with GIF support, does this mean that they paid Unisys, or that they are breaking the law?

    Finally, if compiling in GIF support is illegal in the US, what about Canada and internationally?

    The reason I ask is that I have bult a FreeBSD package of QT 2.2.1 with GIF support, but before I put it up on my website I wanted to make sure that I (as a Canadian citizen) am not going to get into trouble.

    Thanks for the clarification,

    Ben

  • Re:There can be only one! (Score:3)

    by scrytch ( 9198 ) <chuck@myrealbox.com> on Thursday October 12, 2000 @04:34AM (#712793)
    Score 2 Interesting?

    What rot. "Mac OS X will conquer all, you will kneel, it was designed by EXPERTS with LETTERS after their name who KNOW this stuff"...

    Go buy a Mac, troll boy. Be sure to get the matching curtains too.

  • It is Sun who support GNOME only and not Solaris:)
    BWT, I know the story and I don't care of it. What I want to know if KDE2 runs on Solaris well. And if so, is there anyone who makes binary packages.
  • >>the article states that the Solaris port will follow soon.<<
    Where exactly?

  • I wonder if there's a stable port of the current KDE2 to Solaris (note that for DEC Alpha/Tru64 there exists a _pretty_fine_, well maintained port!). I searched on the net for this port and only found a lot of complains - _recent_ones_ - that KDE2 is not Solaris friendly at all.
    If you still know about an existing Solaris port, please post its accessibility (URL, etc.).
  • Then change the File Hierarchy Standard [pathname.com] first.

    Redhat has been critized for not following the standard. They have also been critized for following the standard.

  • But with IBM doing so much work for the linux community lately, maybe we'll get lucky and see a WPS on linux. One can only dream.

    You can't really port WPS over without losing most of its power, or do significant changes to ext2. HPFS has built-in 'knowledge' of the file, which made much of the WPS stuff possible. Linux' magic files/mime.types is a poor approximation of the capabilities of hpfs.

  • Which packages...? (Score:4)

    by Parity ( 12797 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @06:33AM (#712799)
    The -only- package I've seen this with is the gimp, which was only half-working until I installed gnome-apt; with all those gnome parts installed, suddenly the gimp worked great. D'oh.
    However, I was -very- suprised at this behaviour; normally, Debian is very good with this. Well. Caveat there: There are bugs in 'non-free' that are deadly and have lurked for years. Debian focus is on liberated software almost to the exclusion of contrib on non-free.

    I -will- admit, as happy a Debian user as I am, that Debian is not 'scaling' well; as it grows in size, it is becoming a bit tangled, some packages are not well debugged (eyeballs are spread thinner, I guess, with so many packages) and the isolation of non-free and contrib does create some technical problems in favor of political correctness. All that said though... even if I have some theoretical complaints about Debian's scaling, a) nobody else is doing as well, and b) this is being addressed with the no-files metapackages that simplify installation of certain complex systems.

    Oh, and a final point about Debian-thinking... if you're a Debian user, you're part -of- Debian. It's not 'Debian' as a whole that messed up package X, it's the package maintainer for package X and the users that didn't report the bug. Unlike Redhat, Debian isn't a company, it's just an offshoot of the liberated software process.


    --Parity
  • Although I agree with you that /. != Freshmeat, the announcement here on /. is OTOH a good thing. It is the final release candidate, and this will get more people testing it. Maybe one of those people testing it, finds a "showstopper" which then will get fixed before the final release.

    I will certainly be downloading it ASAP and test it to see if I can find any bugs.
  • Personally, I'd like to see a KDE2 port to IRIX, built with the MipsPro compiler. Frankly, the compiler is friendly to pretty much all code, and the only problems I run into are configure scripts, and occasional gcc'isms.

    (Qt is designed to compile on everything, BTW)

    Actually, the biggest problem compiling these things under IRIX is not the compiler, but the configure scripts. configure just loves to slap a "-L/usr/lib" in front of cc during it's compile tests. First of all, this is stupid (that's a default path), and second of all it breaks the compile under IRIX. You see, IRIX has 3 library versions (o32, n32, 64), with "n32" as the recommended binary format (except for math stuff). So, the libraries I want are in "/usr/lib32". If it didn't do those stupid things ("-L/usr/lib"), it would configure perfectly! Besides, I still have beefs with configure assuming you should have gcc unless you explicitly say otherwise.

    (Frankly, on non-x86, the commercial compilers are far better than gcc)
  • Yes, but it seems to me there should never be a release candidate that is labeled "final." It just doesn't make sense. The whole point of a release candidate is that you think it's ready but aren't sure. If the release candidate is pounded on and turns up no showstoppers then you release the actual release which isn't a "candidate" at all.
    ----

  • Re:Hurray for KDE (Score:3)

    by Skeezix ( 14602 ) <jamin@pubcrawler.org> on Thursday October 12, 2000 @09:51AM (#712803) Homepage
    I must commend KDE for not only putting out a terrific product, but in staying free of big-money influences. While Miguel de Icaza wallows in his corporate GNOME Foundation and does everything in his power to turn GNOME into Windows Linux Edition, KDE continues to be volunteer-designed, volunteer-coded, and volunteer-driven.

    I think you're slightly out of touch with what drives the Gnome project and what the foundation is based on. I suggest you go to The Gnome Foundation site [gnome.org] and browse. In particular, read the mission and charter [gnome.org]. The Gnome Foundation is not driven by "big-money influences" in the sense you are implying. I'll also mention that Gnome also relies heavily on its volunteers, of which I am one. There are those who are paid for hacking on Gnome (what on earth is wrong with that? sounds like a dream job to me...do something you love and get paid for it!). Most of those hackers started out as unpaid volunteers working because they love what they do. Now they have the opportunity to devote much more time to the project because their income comes from doing what they love to do--promote, hack, design in the Gnome world. As for the corporate backing which you so heavily criticize, I fail to see the reason it is a bad thing. Again I suggest you read the charter so you fully understand the role that companies such as Sun, HP, IBM and others will play. The Gnome Foundation Elections are coming up, so register now [gnome.org] if you've contributed in any way to Gnome (advocacy, documentation, code, debugging, artwork, etc.) Cheerio!
    ----

  • Please be aware that, last I checked, there is no kde1-compat rpm available yet. This means that unless you manually install the old libraries again, you will not be able to run KDE 1.x applications. Bero is working on this last I heard.

    However I've been running RC2 since it came out and it works really nicely!
  • Wow, thanks for bringing that to my attention! I just tried it (on a Celeron 300A->450 with 196MB of RAM), and it seems considerably quicker loading apps and the UI reacts noticeably quicker. Memory useage is drastically reduced too - right now I have three Konquerors and KMail running, and memory is about 20MB less than usual!
  • On my machine, libqt.so was about 7.5MB before, and 5MB after. And it is definitely worthwhile doing the recompile if you have the fatter version of the binary, in terms of speed and memory useage.
  • Sure it will compile no problems... However I don't think you'll enjoy using it (or Gnome for that matter).

    The chances are that your Solaris box only has an 8 bit display driver - this is bad enough when using CDE, but KDE and gnome really enjoy eating the colourmap...
  • You should be able to set the color depth on your display driver as an arg to your X server. I can't remember the syntax, but it should be available on the web somewhere. I discovered this (not sure why it's not easier to find) last year.
  • What ever happened to releasing software when it was ready. Is Debian the only distribution that does this?

    Debian may claim to do this, but my wife has been using 2.2 for a bit, and there are scads of broken dependencies (by which I mean packages that don't install other packages that they need previously to installing themselves: something we were led to believe was Debian's biggest advantage over RPM-based systems). In most cases, an attempted install of something we haven't had the dependencies for resulted only in error messages.

    I think I'll stick with Mandrake, for now.

    Randall.

  • Gimp is one, yes. However, looking at your post, I did notice that all of the other packages we've had issues with were not in free. Of course, non-free and non-us are where many of the most useful packages are. :(

    Oh, well, maybe with the expiration of the RSA patent, some of that can move into the free section and maintainers will then care...

    Randall.

  • Please read (concerning performance) (Score:5)

    by platypus ( 18156 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @10:40PM (#712811) Homepage
    I think I should post a link to an informative thread I found on dot.kde.org. It's about possible causes for relativly slow performance of kde and how to avoid them. [kde.org]

    Don't know how the binaries of this KDE2-RC packed though, but anyway, people thinking of KDE2 as slow should at least check if their install is built with QT-exceptions. The post of fura in the above thread explains how to do that with your installation.
  • This morning when I got up, and sourceforge and others had yet to update, this UK site (gotta love timezones) already had everything up. Not only that, I got 75 kilobytes/sec download. Twelve minutes and done.
  • Remember the announcement of the Gnome foundation?

    Let's see. I was there. I distinctly remember talks that KDE was dead. All the media picked up on it. Reporters were going up to KDE folk and asking them what project they would now be moving to. Even though he denies it, I distinctly recall Miguel announcing the imminent demise of KDE, as he has done since the first day he took the reigns of the GNOME project.

    The "rants and flames" you mention were merely loud reminders that KDE was alive and well, and no announcements from TGF could do anything to stop it. If the KDE core developers made a public announcement, complete with press releases to all the media, the GNOME was one of the walking dead, don't you think the GNOME users would rant and rave as well?
  • Okay, I spoke too quick. Although I recall Miguel dissing KDE at the recent LWCE, I cannot distinctly recall it. I may possibly be confused with someone else. I retract my comments about Miguel.
  • I believe that if you turn off exception support, then use exceptions in your code, you will get a compile-time error. So if Qt compiles with -fno-exceptions, then it's okay. Qt is a cross-platform toolkit, and some compilers (including older g++) don't do exceptions.

    You could have exceptions in your own code and still use exception-less Qt. I like exceptions. It gives you clarity of code with robust error handling. With a decent compiler, it won't cause any more bloat than other error handling methods.
  • I would wait until the ports get updated. Should be only a couple of days at the most. This instant gratification stuff is only for the wussies. Believe me, the KDE and Qt maintainers will have no sleep tonight. You are using cvsup to keep up to date on ports, aren't you?
  • You can compile in GIF support for your own use, no problemo. But FreeBSD didn't want to take the risk of shipping GIF enabled code. The way I look at it, I personally am not dealing with any Unisys owned information, Trolltech is. I'm certain that they already have an arrangement with Unisys, so I have no worries.

    The fix is easy. For Qt, just set the unisys license environment variable (look in the Makefile to see what it is) and "make install". This is what I did and it works fine.

    Also, I know that Mandrake ships QT with GIF support, does this mean that they paid Unisys, or that they are breaking the law?

    I don't believe that they paid Unisys, but they are not breaking the law. Unisys is just too jealous in its IP, and often oversteps its bounds. If Unisys came after Mandrake they would be making the PR disaster of the decade, and they would lose the case.

    but before I put it up on my website I wanted to make sure that I (as a Canadian citizen) am not going to get into trouble.

    I wouldn't. I think as a Canadian citizen you are in the clear, but IANAL. It's easy enough to post the "fixed" port, and let the users automatically build it themselves.

  • Re:Is an RC a beta? (Score:3)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @11:26AM (#712818) Homepage Journal
    It should have had feature freeze and most of the bad bugs fixed.

    It's been in feature freeze for quite a while now. No new features. During the freeze all commits (besides art) were to be bug fixes. RC1 had no known serious bugs. But some were found so now there is a second RC. If serious bugs are again found, expect a third.

    For every bug fixed, expect three new ones to be introduced. So only the showstoppers get fixed in the release candidates. The less serious bugs and annoyances have to wait for 2.0.1

    Can somone more knowledgable than I (can't be hard) post a summary of "why you should upgrade?"

    I can speak about upgrading from 1.1.2, but not GNOME, since I haven't used that for quite a while. konqueror is a replacement for kfm. It is now a full fledged web browser. It ROX. Component based so you can trim off the stuff you don't want to run. A lot of the stuff have been put on a high-protein, low-fat diet. DCOP/kparts. Themable widgets, including GTK themes. KOffice. The first 100% free (as in RMS) and open (as in ESR) integrated office suite. Most of the core applications, such as kmail, have been revamped for increased functionality and usability.

    It's like KDE-1 was a caterpillar, and for the last year or so was stuck in a chrysalis. Now it's hatching into what it was meant to be. "Look at me! I'm a butterfly!"

    And finally, but not least, Shisen-Go now has gravity mode! Woohoo!

  • Re:Huh? (Score:4)

    by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @11:36PM (#712819) Homepage Journal
    KDE is a lowsy example for the free software community. Thier decision to use a proprietary widget set shows that they have no regard whatsoever for free software.

    I respect the KDE developers for going with what they feel is the best solution using the best technology available (in their opinion). Rather than politicise the programming process, they built a desktop environment for themselves.

    Don't forget that a project (Harmony) existed until recently to create a LGPL clone of Qt. By the time Qt was QPL'ed (an Open Source certified license), the writing was on the wall that TrollTech was going to open Qt, when Qt was GPL'ed, there was no reason to pursue the project any longer.

    I think KDE is a great example of the fact that Open Source and Free Software can work with traditional business, and wind up with a "Free as in Speech" solution. In the end, both motivation and results in the KDE and TrollTech groups have consistantly worked towards greater Freedom in the use of their work. This is the kind of case study that validates that the Free Software Model can exist and succeed in the real world, interacting with traditional corporate models.

    Disclaim: I currently use the BlackBox WM with KDE2 apps.

    --
    Evan

  • Just in time to give my SunSparc the fresh look it wants! :)

  • Re:Does this mean Mandrake 7.2 will follow soon? (Score:4)

    by RPoet ( 20693 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @12:33AM (#712821) Journal
    Actually, Linux-Mandrake 7.2 will ship with a pre-Final KDE2, because they need to get their boxes out for the Christmas sales. Each box will include a voucher to have a Mandrake 7.2.1 CD sent to you for free, and this CD is the one that will feature KDE2 Final.

    So for anyone looking forward to Mandrake 7.2 -- don't. Wait for 7.2.1, which of course not only will have KDE2-Final, but also the fixes for the usual "gotcha's" that always follow a point release.
    --
  • PDF is the best format to use. If your still worried about sparing cpu cycles then you definatly can't justify your comment with X.

    MacOSX will be the pioneering Unix OS.

    Solaris has had its days

    Linux has had its days as well

    MacOSX will have its days soon.

  • Havn't you ever wondered what the point of one thing running under everything is?

    Apple isn't trying to make MacOSX run under everything under the sun. Therefore the kernel will be tighter, system will be easier to maintain and everything else that goes along with a signle architecture.

    Sun doesn't make it a point to sell Solaris for Alpha, SGI, IBM RISC (which is powerpc based).

    And yes, MacOSX or OSX is portable to x86.

  • Hahaha your funny.

    Do you realise how much money is handed over between all the true unix licensees for Open Look, API's, Posix compliance, CDE and everything else?

    When you login to an hpux machine you see

    Please wait...checking for disk quotas
    (c)Copyright 1983-1997 Hewlett-Packard Co., All Rights Reserved.
    (c)Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1985-1993 The Regents of the Univ. of California
    (c)Copyright 1980, 1984, 1986 Novell, Inc.
    (c)Copyright 1986-1992 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
    (c)Copyright 1985, 1986, 1988 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
    (c)Copyright 1989-1993 The Open Software Foundation, Inc.
    (c)Copyright 1986 Digital Equipment Corp.
    (c)Copyright 1990 Motorola, Inc.
    (c)Copyright 1990, 1991, 1992 Cornell University
    (c)Copyright 1989-1991 The University of Maryland
    (c)Copyright 1988 Carnegie Mellon University
    (c)Copyright 1991-1997 Mentat, Inc.
    (c)Copyright 1996 Morning Star Technologies, Inc.
    (c)Copyright 1996 Progressive Systems, Inc.
    (c)Copyright 1997 Isogon Corporation
    RESTRICTED RIGHTS LEGEND
    Use, duplication, or disclosure by the U.S. Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in sub-paragraph (c)(1)(ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause in DFARS 252.227-7013.

    Hewlett-Packard Company
    3000 Hanover Street
    Palo Alto, CA 94304 U.S.A.

    Rights for non-DOD U.S. Government Departments and Agencies are as set forth in FAR 52.227-19(c)(1,2).

    Maybe linux people forget that linux is linux and not unix :)

    Not all of those are free. Look at how much people pay to license thinks from guis to the famouse motif libraries and all sorts of source code.

    Login to a sun box and you will see many of the same copyrights, rights to use, licensing and such.

  • I'm not sure why Debian 2.2 is acting that way for you but I've been using it for some time on 2 i386 boxes and an Alpha and have had none of the problems you mention.

    The only issue I had was not having the non-US entries in my sources.list file, which was my fault anyway, so certain things like ssh wouldn't apt-get at all, after adding that line everything was hunky-dory.
    --
  • Does anyone know id KDE2 will run on Solaris 2.6? We use that at work, and I'd love to be free at last of crappy OpenLook.
  • I use the KDE port on Tru64 at work, and it is pretty fine. Except for an issue with cut and paste in Konsole, and some minor problems with Control Center, it has worked very well.

    I wish someone had ported the Mozilla source to Tru64 this well. The Mozilla port just dies for me after a few seconds. But then again, I'm using Konqerer more often anyway.

  • It means.. (Score:4)

    by GauteL ( 29207 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @10:51PM (#712828)
    .. that is SHOULD be stable enough to be used.
    But this decision is taken throughout the next weeks. There needs to be _real_ showstoppers for it not to be released now.

    You can put it this way; neither a beta or this is released, but while the beta is expected to have plenty of bugs, this one is not.

    It will become stable October 23.
  • I couldn't agree more. Every now and then, I think back to the power of the WPS. Sure, if you came from another GUI, it took a bit of learning to understand its power, but once understood....If only it could be migrated, it would be one of IBMs best gifts to the Linux world

    Rename or move a program or file, and the icon/shortcut still worked!
  • Of course, windows is just a poor imitation of MacOS, so see where this argument ends up?
    yes, I see that this argument ends up at Xerox PARC.
    Everyone likes to talk about how Microsoft stole the windows GUI from Apple, but nobody says anything about how Apple stole the Mac GUI from Xerox
  • It really shouldn't use up that much CPU power. According to the benchmarks, MacOS X is memory hungry, but just as fast as other UNIXes in terms of graphics (dismal I know.) The main thing is that most of the GUI is still bitmapped, its just that the engine has the capability to add all this stuff to it. Plus, if any bright person ever accelerates PDF in hardware, then graphics designers would be in hog heaven.
  • Umm, sorry to point this out, but Mach is anything BUT tight. As if FreeBSD on TOP of Mach. The core of OSX is actuall quite bulky. And whoever thought of the stupid "system-server" idea should be shot. On BeOS if the net_server crashes (which happens about once a day, and don't worry, its being replaced) I can just kill it and restart. Under OSX, even though networking is in usermode, a crash of the networking will crash the entire system. In fact, I can crash just about every server except the app server (even the input server if you have a script kill it and bring it back) without locking the system. The NeXT approach totally loses the advantages of having a microkernel design.
  • Ahem, attributes? BeOS has 'em! (Everyone else should too!)
  • According to their site, the code will be frozen on October 16. So I would surmise that this can be considered stable enough. Just make sure you have Qt 2.2.1 before installing it.

  • Does anyone know when Mandrake 7.2 will ship? Is it just waiting on a final release of KDE 2.0, or are there other factors?

    --
  • What is it with this stock options crap?

    Did *nobody* do a decent job before they got a slice of the pie?

    How many firms (especially .com firms) who dish out stock options have gone belly up?

  • You should try oput KDE2. I haved use GNOME a bit and just installed KDE2. I am pretty impressed with its 'look and feel' and generally how it behaves (Time will tell how it holds up in the long run). Of course it is going to be personal opinion (As the Gnome vs KDE flame wars will attest) but I say you should definately give it a try.
  • MDK 7.1 got to shelves pretty quickly after release, and KDE2 Final will ship in a week

    It can hit the shelves fairly quickly after release BUT, you have to allow time for testing. You can't expect them to say, well it worked with KDE pre-final so this should work fine and just ship it. They would have to have another (fourth) beta before they could make this move (which would actually be a good idea.

  • What ever happened to releasing software when it was ready. Is Debian the only distribution that does this?

    The alternative approach is to keep your software in a constant state of near readiness, so you can easily meet any release dates you care to set. OpenBSD [openbsd.org] does this. Although I wouldn't do it for a server, I consistently run my workstation at the current state of the CVS tree, and encounter hardly any problems. The OpenBSD team can comfortably commit to releases every 6 months, and meet those dates.

    Of course, the OpenBSD team isn't hellbent on prying money out of the hands of consumers.


    --
  • >the good job...

    Yes. They *DO* a good job. And for this post a good job will be defined as PORTABLE source code. (as opposed to UI design)

    The KDE port has no patches to change the code to run on BSD.

    GNOME, on the other hand has many patches to make the code work. Changes that would not be needed if they wrote portable code. An example: BSD needs to patch where the shutdown command is because the GNOME authors can't be bothered to write portable code.

    To be fair, the GNOME code has improved, but old-school pride of writting portable code has went out the window in this new 'GNU/Linux only' world.

    (Come to think of it, writing portable code isn't done in the Microsoft Windows world either)

  • Release Candidate should mean "well, I think it's ready to go, but just to make sure" It should have had feature freeze and most of the bad bugs fixed. Can somone more knowledgable than I (can't be hard) post a summary of "why you should upgrade?" Better still, as I'm currently a Gnome user, why should/shouldn't I switch? (Not an RFF - request for flames - but a genuine query!)

  • Well, personally I can't stand KDE as a "Desktop Environment" (or Gnome either, for that matter, I use WindowMaker) but both projects have produced some nice applications that I find useful. It's a bloody huge download for the odd app, and some of them have (at least in previous releases) had some major issues with unwanted "features" that you can't turn off (like the so-called "desktop handlers" built into the file managers - gmc at least will voluntarily exit completely, kfm in the past has required an explicit kill) and upgrading all the libraries can be painfull too - so I'll probably wait until the actual release to get it myself. But, if you have the storage space to spare, I do recommend getting it eventually - if only to see what they've been doing all this time. Not knowing what all has changed, comparing the earlier release to Gnome, some of the apps were definately better done - kpackage, ark, and ktop in particular. Having two sets of libraries is annoying and resource eating, but most X-boxen have the resources for it available.

  • Note that the RH7 rpm's are actually installing KDE2 in /usr as the KDEDIR root. This is very different from the preview set of RPMs of KDE2pre which comes with RH7 on the second CD (they go into /usr/lib/kde2 as the KDEDIR root dir).

    This also means that the following file needs to be edited to allow switchdesk to work properly:

    /usr/share/apps/switchdesk/Xclients.kde2

    I've edited it to look like:

    #!/bin/sh
    # Created by Red Hat Desktop Switcher
    export KDEDIR=/usr
    exec /usr/bin/startkde

    and then you'll have to run switchdesk kde2 to get your account configured properly.

    Also if you are running devfs in 2.4.0, you will need to create /dev/cdrom (link it to the correct device in /dev/ide or whatever) for kscd to work.

    I'm sure there are more gotchas, but that's what I've found so far.
  • RC1 was rejected, so the schedule slipped a week to make room for an RC2

  • Patch to disable Qt exceptions (Score:4)

    by puetzk ( 98046 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @04:08AM (#712845) Homepage
    KDE2 gets built with them off - however, Qt seems to enable them by default, even though it doesn't use them.

    The info about how bug of improvement is very real - Qt shed about 3.2 megs on my system, and kde2 as a whole over 15 megs (apparently the exception table is per-process and is not shared memory)

    Here is a patch against qt2.2.1 to disable the exception code on linux/g++

    diff -ru qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-shared qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-shared
    --- qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-shared Tue Oct 10 21:28:49 2000
    +++ qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-shared Tue Oct 10 21:33:10 2000
    @@ -76,7 +76,7 @@
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_STATIC = rm -f $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC) ; \
    $(SYSCONF_AR) $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC) $(OBJECTS) $(OBJMOC)
    # Compiling application source
    -SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -O2
    +SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -O2 -fno-exceptions
    SYSCONF_CFLAGS = -pipe -O2
    # Default link type (static linking is still be used where required)
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB = $(SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_SHARED)
    diff -ru qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-shared-debug qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-shared-debug
    --- qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-shared-debug Wed Oct 4 04:55:22 2000+++ qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-shared-debug Tue Oct 10 21:34:49 2000
    @@ -76,7 +76,7 @@
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_STATIC = rm -f $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC) ; \
    $(SYSCONF_AR) $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC) $(OBJECTS) $(OBJMOC)
    # Compiling application source
    -SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -g
    +SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -g -fno-exceptions
    SYSCONF_CFLAGS = -pipe -g
    # Default link type (static linking is still be used where required)
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB = $(SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_SHARED)
    diff -ru qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-static qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-static
    --- qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-static Tue Oct 10 21:28:49 2000
    +++ qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-static Tue Oct 10 21:34:06 2000
    @@ -76,7 +76,7 @@
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_STATIC = rm -f $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC) ; \
    $(SYSCONF_AR) $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC) $(OBJECTS) $(OBJMOC)
    # Compiling application source
    -SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -O2
    +SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -O2 -fno-exceptions
    SYSCONF_CFLAGS = -pipe -O2
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB = $(SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_STATIC)
    SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET = $(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC)
    diff -ru qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-static-debug qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-static-debug
    --- qt2.2-2.2.1.orig/configs/linux-g++-static-debug Wed Oct 4 04:55:21 2000+++ qt2.2-2.2.1/configs/linux-g++-static-debug Tue Oct 10 21:34:32 2000
    @@ -76,7 +76,7 @@
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_STATIC = rm -f $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC)
    ; \
    $(SYSCONF_AR) $(DESTDIR)$(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC) $(OBJECTS) $(OBJMOC)
    # Compiling application source
    -SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -g
    +SYSCONF_CXXFLAGS = -pipe -g -fno-exceptions
    SYSCONF_CFLAGS = -pipe -g
    SYSCONF_LINK_LIB = $(SYSCONF_LINK_LIB_STATIC)
    SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET = $(SYSCONF_LINK_TARGET_STATIC)
  • Qt depends on Mesa if you want the OpenGL functionality, and many people need that (at least according to the number of "bug" reports we got when we shipped Qt without OpenGL support).
  • They aren't installed by default because zip is not exactly a standard format on Linux.

    The kdeutils package wants them because it includes a frontend.

  • Re:RH7 preview? (Score:3)

    by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero@reCOMMAdhat.com minus punct> on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @11:24PM (#712848) Homepage
    Yes, they're going straight to /usr - that's because I don't see a need to keep KDE 1.x around now that 2.0 is stable.
    It's an update, and should be handled as such. (I'll be putting together a kde1-compat package to keep old KDE 1.x apps running in a while, though updating to KDE 2.x versions is of course preferred).

  • Re:Is an RC a beta? (Score:3)

    by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero@reCOMMAdhat.com minus punct> on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @11:31PM (#712849) Homepage
    Upgrading depends on what you've used before.
    If you've used a previous 2.0 beta, you want to update because of tons of bugfixes.
    If you've used 1.x, check the KDE-2 launchpad [kde.org].

    As for switching from Gnome to KDE 2.x or vice versa, my recommendation has always been to try out both and check which you like better.

    Since you can run KDE applications inside gnome and vice versa, you may like Konqueror and a couple of other new tools even if you decide not to switch.

  • Re:Gnome vs. KDE (Score:3)

    by bero-rh ( 98815 ) <bero@reCOMMAdhat.com minus punct> on Thursday October 12, 2000 @04:49AM (#712850) Homepage
    KDE2 fixes the issue you're complaining about - The file manager (konqueror) and the desktop icons (kdesktop) are separate.
  • I know I'm probably nitpicking, but I honestly don't know. Is a "Final Release Candidate" still considered beta? Or is it typically considered stable enough to use in most distros?

  • Comment removed (Score:3)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @04:56AM (#712852)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I've been trying for the last 2 days to get it or Beta5 working on FreeBSD 4.1.1, has anyone successfully gotten it working? I get errors compiling the kdeutils and DCOP.
  • I've been something of a GNOME fanatic for a while, but over the past two months i've been using KDE (having overcome the urge to replace it with GNOME on my SuSE boxen), and have come to appreciate it. I just downloaded the KDE2 RC, and this is my first time using it.

    one word - awesome!

    if only for konquerer (i love the site-selectable java and javascript settings!), i'd switch to KDE2! i'm sure i'm going to enjoy discovering the other applications under KDE2.

    great job KDE developers!!

  • they improve the UI design. I recently installed KDE on an old laptop and kpanel was bigger than the screen at 640x480 and it was impossible to click on the "OK" or "Apply" buttons. That was on 640x480 but it was still a tight squeeze on 800x600 (had to click on the line at the very top of the buttons). Of course, KDE doesn't come with "move" available from right-click-on-desktop. Fvwm for me I think

    Rich

  • Or kconfig or whatever that setup program is.

    Rich

  • Cheers

    Rich

  • Have you actually tried any of the mirrors? I got my RC from the swedish mirror [kde.org] at 270KByte/s just after this story was posted.
    /per
  • You posted this story before I could get my copy. Now I'll have to wait for ages until the Slashdot effect wears off.
  • Aqua will *never* become the dominant Unix GUI for because it's proprietary Apple (and Adobe) technology. No Unix vendor would be crazy or stupid enough to hand over wads of cash to lock themselves into a proprietary solution particularly since it's unproven technology (security, stability), processor & memory intensive, doesn't run over a network, doesn't run the thousands of X apps, relies on other Apple technologies (e.g. Quicktime) and doesn't support multiple users on the same box.

    I'm sure Apple could address some of these issues but frankly they'd be better off saving their money unless they intend to open it up. There's fat chance of that happening.

  • Re:KDE2 vs. Solaris (Score:3)

    by Karma Sucks ( 127136 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @12:54AM (#712871)
    Solaris only supports GNOME now. Didn't you hear the GNOME Foundation? PS Troll -1

  • Test now (Score:5)

    by halk ( 139476 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @01:48AM (#712878)
    The CVS will be tagged for release next monday. This means that if you want your patches/bug reports to have any effect, they should be posted as soon as possibly, preferably today. Please report critical issues only.
  • The final release is supposedly due in just over a week. I won't apt-get it onto my woody system until then.

    By that time I might have dist-upgraded completly to woody from potato - blasted British Telecom and their ADSL policy!

  • However, a few of the KDE developers are on the payroll of SuSE. I heard this at a talk given by the head of the UK division of SuSE a few days ago.

    It does appear, though, that SuSE allow these developers to do whatever they want.

  • Re:Does this mean Mandrake 7.2 will follow soon? (Score:3)

    by shippo ( 166521 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @02:40AM (#712882)
    Fixed release dates are the biggest scourge of the software industry. I worked on a smaller project that suffered in the same way - release x.y was promised for a certain day, and yet a serious shortcoming was discovered in the software that made it unusable. Ended up releasing the junk.

    What ever happened to releasing software when it was ready. Is Debian the only distribution that does this?

  • Coming from another blackbox user, I heartily agree. Gnome and KDE are fairly pathetic imitations of an already pathetic OS (windows).

    Until linux/bsd has a truly pervasive UI, and solid pervasive support for multimedia, things like KDE and Gnome are window dressing.

    The joy of blackbox is that it doesn't try to fool you into thinking that unix actually supports a full-featured UI - so instead it gives you what unix actually provides, and then gets out of your way.

  • Compiling Qt for a faster KDE2 (Score:3)

    by JudgeJackson ( 167835 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @05:08AM (#712885)
    There was an intersting thread [kde.org] on dot.kde.org [slashdot.org] the other day. Those of you who find KDE2 much slower than KDE1 probably need to recompile Qt with the -fno-exceptions flag added to CXXFLAGS. See the thread for more details.

    This improved performance on my machine by at least 30%. Credits go to fura (that's the nick used on dot.kde.org, anyway) for this information.

  • If I need to get work done, I start blackbox and fire up half a dozen xterms. For development this cannot be beat.

    It all depends on your definition of work. Xterms are more than enough for some people, but for a large portion of computer users getting work done involves more than writing code. I could not live with just xterms, it would just be impossible for me to do what I need to do (which involves more than just putzing around), so I (and many users like me) need a different desktop solution than you do.

  • The mac interface is just as bad as windoze. Windoze using the mac 'finder' idea as a start menu is dumb. TERRIBLE interface! I wish everyone would stop making their environments use that crap!

    If you want a good interface, OS/2's WPS has been far superior for many many many years. EVERYTHING works TOGETHER the way you would expect it to. Objects are really objects, and each individual one can be modified.

    But with IBM doing so much work for the linux community lately, maybe we'll get lucky and see a WPS on linux. One can only dream.

  • Re:Mandrake RPMS? (Score:3)

    by buttfucker2000 ( 240799 ) on Thursday October 12, 2000 @02:18AM (#712904) Homepage Journal
    Make sure you install mandrake_desk as well. This Mandrakeizes KDE 2. Otherwise you will be mixing the Kde1 stuff with KDE2, and they won't work.

    Recommended, of course, is to download the latest Mandrake release candidate from www.linux-mandrake.com [linux-mandrake.com]; then report bugs to their bugzilla [mandrakesoft.com].

    A quick query on that site shows that there aren't too many release-critical bugs, but if you find any, PLEASE REPORT THEM.

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