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KDE GUI

KDE 3.5 Beta 1 Announced 140

Posted by Zonk from the new-thing-thursday dept.
christchurch writes "The KDE Project has announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.5 Beta 1, dubbed "Kanzler". This will be the last major release in the KDE 3 series. Qt 3.3.5 was released too late to adapt to it and it shows some fundamental compilation problems. We had a preview of KDE 3.5 two months ago."
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KDE 3.5 Beta 1 Announced More

KDE 3.5 Beta 1 Announced

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  • Maybe they'll release a KDE 3.6 that is just a port to Qt 3.3.5 ?

    • Re:3.6? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CDMA_Demo ( 841347 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:01PM (#13624759) Homepage
      Does anyone think we can port KDE to Windows? It will be really cool if instead of explorer we boot up into KDE. Just an interesting possibility. I know something like this has been done before but its not as good as having complete KDE or Gnome!

      • Re:3.6? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Psiren ( 6145 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:09PM (#13624814)
        Does anyone think we can port KDE to Windows?

        I seem to remember reading somewhere that Qt4 would make this a distinct possibility, or at least make it easier to contemplate doing it. I don't know if there would be any interest in doing such a thing, but time will tell.

        • Re:3.6? (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Rich ( 9681 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:35PM (#13625029) Homepage
          Yes, since the release of Qt 4, Qt has been GPL on win32 as well as unix and Mac. Plans to change the way KDE is split up were discussed at akademy that should make a win32 version easier, as will the move away from autoconf/automake to a new build system. Some parts of KDE such as kjs can already be built on win32, but there are many other parts that would need quite substantial work to port. That said, there is already a cygwin port of KDE that can be used right now.

          • it's also nice to notice that "removing X11 dependancy" from kdebase and kdelibs is on the todo list. this will make it even easier to port kde to windows. (or native mac)

      • Re:3.6? (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        yes, that's the plan for 4.0, thanks to Qt now being GPL on windows too. i don't know how many people will be working on this, though. probably few.
      • Why not? Someone ported Afterstep to Windows. It was a native port, too, not using Cygwin. It should be possible for someone to examine how the replacement of the Windows GUI was achieved, and the X calls shouldn't pose a problem as KDE uses Qt, and Qt will run under Windows. Anything KDE doesn't do through Qt should be solvable by looking to see how the Afterstep port solved the problem.


        What I'd LOVE to see is someone porting the full KDE system to run natively on Windows, then write a layer that'll handle Windows GUI calls and DirectX through KDE. A screenshot of that would freak out so many people...

      • Re:3.6? (Score:5, Informative)

        by m50d ( 797211 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:28PM (#13624972) Homepage Journal
        It's a target for 4.0, since Qt wasn't free on windows before V4. However, there's already a working cygwin version and partial pure native port at http://kde-cygwin.sf.net/ [sf.net]
      • Does anyone think we can port KDE to Windows? It is possibile, and with Qt library already existing for windows it could be shorter than I fear. On the other hand I would surely prefer windows to be ported to POSIX.
    • Snapshots exist for Qt 4, so why not do a port for that? The KDE team'll need to do the port sometime anyway and it doesn't matter if Qt 4's API isn't stable yet provided the difference between the API now and when it stabilizes is less than the difference between the Qt they're using now and the final Qt 4, as they'll still save effort in the long-run. It'd also give them a feel for any tuning needed for Qt 4.

      Of course, this is pretty obvious stuff - the bleeding-edge branch of any rapid project is almost

    • I don't know, does anybody know if they meant that Qt 3.3.5 was out too early to make it work with just the beta version, or will the 3.5 full release also not support it? Isn't beta just a feature freeze, so then maybe they can get bugfixes in still for the problems making it impossible to build it with 3.3.5? Does anybody have any additional information?

      As far as I know, the only other releases in the KDE 3 series will be 3.5.x bugfix releases, and then KDE 4 comes out, which will be on Qt 4. Either th

  • Already running it! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Mishura ( 744815 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @04:54PM (#13624692)
    Its pretty cool. Hasn't crashed yet. If you are running Kubuntu, you can go to this site: http://kubuntu.org/kde-35beta1.php [kubuntu.org] and get the hookup.
    • How are some of the more advanced guifications/eye candy? Last time I tried turning them on, KDE slowed to a crawl, and my system's not too shabby. If KDE could get the same performance as Enlightenment, that would be great, otherwise, I hope more development goes into Enlightenment. As it stands, I prefer Gnome, so make of that what you will.

      • Re:Already running it! (Score:2, Informative)

        by Mishura ( 744815 )
        Lets see, everytime I try to use Transparency or drop shadows (in KDE 3.4.2) it wouldn't work. It wouldn't crash, just give me an error message.

        Haven't tried it yet with 3.5.. no point really. My system gets bogged down if I'm running amaroK and something else thats big. I do like the new mouseover effects on the taskbar (hover mouse over clock when you upgrade. Thats cool.) As far as speed goes.. feels just as fast as 3.4. I've only had it installed for about 4 hours, so.. I'll find out the little

        • Lets see, everytime I try to use Transparency or drop shadows (in KDE 3.4.2) it wouldn't work. It wouldn't crash, just give me an error message.

          What did the error message say? You do need to enable the composite, damage, fixes extensions on xorg. With those, it gives me a warning that it may not be stable, but it works.

  • Old news again! (Score:4, Funny)

    by BestNicksRTaken ( 582194 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @04:54PM (#13624693)
    Can whoever it is that reads osnews.com stop posting copies to Slashdot 4 days later?
    • Either:
      1. Those submitting stories to slashdot are VERY serious about accuracy and spelling.
      2. The stories from osnews.com get circulated through several dozens of blogs until they finally reach the one the slashdot submitters are reading.

      If it's number two, we just need to convince these guys to read osnews.com. If it's number one... well, I didn't get what I didn't pay for.

    • Re:Old news again! (Score:5, Informative)

      by m50d ( 797211 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:15PM (#13624867) Homepage Journal
      It's not OSNews, it's KDE Dot [kde.org], the summary is identical. This happened with the Qt 4 release too, even though I'd submitted a better version. I think the way to get stories approved is to bribe the /. editors.

  • KDE NEEDS WYSIWYG PRINTING (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    kde cannot print for a damn, it lacks wysiwyg printing, documents in konqueror and kmail and koffice do not appear the same on the screen when compared to print output.

    do not tell me it works fine because i know that it does not work.

    • Re:KDE NEEDS WYSIWYG PRINTING (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:03PM (#13624778)
      it was one of the Google Summer of Code projects
      http://developer.kde.org/summerofcode/pagedmedia.h tml [kde.org]

      it is in trunk, will be in 4.0

    • Re:KDE NEEDS WYSIWYG PRINTING (Score:4, Informative)

      by chill ( 34294 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:10PM (#13624829) Journal
      I have not had a problem with printing from KWord using CUPS as the printing service and the standard KDE interface to it. The print preview looks just like the output, as does what is on the screen in KWord.

      I haven't tried it in Konqueror or KMail, but if you're having a problem it is probably something to do with KHTML's interpretation. That is a known issue and being actively worked on. It was part of Google's "Summer of Code".

        -Charles

    • Re:KDE NEEDS WYSIWYG PRINTING (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Since when is a browser supposed to exactly match the printed output?
      • You do know what WYSIWYG means, right?
        • HTML isn't WYSIWYG. Browsers can and do render pages differently for display vs. printing. If a separate style sheet is supplied for printing, the difference can be drastic.
          • Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that is the purpose of "Print Preview" in Windows.
            • "Print Preview" isn't part of what most folks consider WYSIWYG. The commonly-used definition of WYSIWYG is a situation where the normal rendering of a document onscreen - that is, the one you see when you're interacting with the document - closely matches that of the printed output. There's no real need for a separate "print preview" function, because there's no significant difference between what that function would display, and what's already being displayed.
              • well what if the screen width is wider than the printed page? then what? you end up with images that either resize, get cropped, or text is pushed around onto other pages. you can end up with two pages printing for a single page in browser with an orphan on the 2nd page.
                • well what if the screen width is wider than the printed page? then what?

                  In a WYSIWYG app, you get the same layout, scaled to fit. So you either have vertical scrolling to view the whole page, or unused space to the left and/or right of the document display area.

                  you end up with images that either resize, get cropped, or text is pushed around onto other pages. you can end up with two pages printing for a single page in browser

                  Like I said before: HTML isn't WYSIWYG.

  • But... (Score:3, Funny)

    by PowerPunk ( 714231 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @04:58PM (#13624736)
    ...is it Merkel or Schröder?

  • Two Words (Score:2, Informative)

    by mpapet ( 761907 )
    Print Selection

    One of many basic features that remains unfulfilled.

    One example of the fundamental difference between OSS and commercial offerings.

    Now, if you can work just fine without such a simple feature, then KDE is great. I use it and have been for quite a while now. But KDE is low on the WAF. (Wife Acceptance Factor)

    I know, more than two words. Don't get your knickers in a bunch.
    • One word: Idiot!
      Why?
      Not because you might not be right about some feature missing, but for taking out one missing feature and bashing a whole desktop and in fact OSS in general based on it.

      That's just stupid trolling.
      • If you can step away from the emotional response you had, you might acknowledge the following:

        1. I didn't bash a whole desktop. As my original post states, I use it. It's good for me, but as the Print Selection feature example points out, there are some feature gaps. I tend to think they're pretty boring gaps to fill which is why someone hasn't taken the time to do it. But the gaps narrow their potential user base.

        2. As OSS matures, people far more detail oriented than me are evaluating it for adoption
        • If you had actually cared to investigate, you'd be aware of the fact that KDE actually has the feature you are "missing".

          1. Two words: You did!

          2. And I quote: "One example of the fundamental difference between OSS and commercial offerings."

    • Re:Two Words (Score:1, Informative)

      by user317 ( 656027 )
      huh? kde works with cups lpr lpd and rlpr. setting up yor printer is outside the scope of kde and should be done by your distro/admin, but once printing is working its fairly trivial to select that printer that you use. my office uses lpr, and my laptop running gentoo automatically finds all the printers on the network. i can select the one that i want to print using, you guessed it File->Print. A dialog box pops up where you can select the printer that you want to use under Name:. so wtf r u talki
      • You missed the point. He's talking about making a selection (such as a text selection of a paragraph or two) and then printing only that selection. Not selecting a printer to print to. Unix has done that for 30 years.

      • Re:Two Words (Score:3, Informative)

        by bsartist ( 550317 )
        A dialog box pops up where you can select the printer that you want to use under Name:. so wtf r u talking about?

        Perhaps if you spent more time reading standard English and less time using "cute" messaging baby-talk, you'd understand. The OP didn't say he has a problem selecting a printer. He said he has a problem printing the current selection. That is, the currently selected text.
      • Scenario 1. Print a portion of a newsgroup digest from Kmail.
        Let's say the digest contains two U.S. Letter sized pages of text of which I want to print a single insightful portion.
        -File>Print....... Guess what? I can't print a selection because there's no option in either Kmail's File menu or KDE's print dialog box.

        Scenario 2. Print a portion of code from KDE's text editor.
        The file is open in the text editor and the editor does a beautiful job of rendering the code. Now, I want to print just one secti
      • Text selection, not printer selection.

    • Re:Two Words (Score:5, Funny)

      by Just Some Guy ( 3352 ) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Thursday September 22, 2005 @06:05PM (#13625322) Homepage Journal
      But KDE is low on the WAF. (Wife Acceptance Factor)

      KDE's WAF an KidAF scores are pretty high in my household. Maybe you need to upgrade your W?

      • My wife uses KDE. I use either Gnome or WindowMaker. Why can't we argue about normal things like other couples?
    • I believe the bug report in bugs.kde.org actually have patch you can apply to achieve that. Otherwise expect it for KDE 4. Until then you can use the rich text copy-paste to move the selection including mark-up to another document and print that.

  • Konqueror succeeds at ACID2 and gets Adblock! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Einherjer ( 569603 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:07PM (#13624799) Homepage
    Konqueror (I suppose with the Apple patches in, thanks guys) now succeeds at rendering the ACID2 Webstandard-Tests (yes, we know that it's not an official standard. Firefox still can't do this.

    And best of all, its got AdBlock-like functionality integrated, that works like a charm. Even with the Filter G Set for Mozilla Adblock.

    That's one less user for Firefox, I'm sticking to Konqueror now as it is faster and not as memory-greedy.

    Check it out!
    • A lot of the patches had to be rewritten and others could only be merged after apple opened up its VCS (which it only did after the row provoked by those patches), it wasn't just a question of dropping in the Apple patches. It was quite a flamewar if you remember.
      • oui, but they opened up and that's what matters, after all they were not obliged to do so.
        (the long-old discussion of "choose the right license if you can't cope with it".)

        I say kudos to the KHTML/Konqueror Team for making this world-class engine,
        and also to the Apple WebCore Team for improving it even further.
    • I use KDE and would gladly browse using Konqueror, if only Scrapbook (http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/ [vis.ne.jp]) wasn't da shit.

    • Konqueror (I suppose with the Apple patches in, thanks guys) now succeeds at rendering the ACID2 Webstandard-Tests (yes, we know that it's not an official standard.

      Do you not think that Konqueror developers have the talent and the ingenuity to make their own browser render CSS properly... without the help of (by comparison) newbie developers who quickly littered their fork full of OS-specific code?

      Have you missed the whole big thing about Apple's changes not being clean enough to merge back into Konque

      • I'm not sure I understand your point here.

        Are you an Apple developer so you know that they are "newbie developers" ? Do you know that they littered their source? Have you even looked at WebCore?
        I did, and it is one of the tightest integration of an HTML engine I've ever seen.
        I presume you miss the goal of what was to accomplish:

        1. the KHTML want to make a full-fledged HTML engine
        2. the Apple guys want to make an Apple Webbrowser(!)

        there are fundamentally different concepts of the two being compatible in the
    • I would love to switch to Konqueror, but there are serious issues with trying to configure it as both a good browser and a file manager. For instance:

      1. As a file manager I can set the Home button to take me to my home directory. But I can't set the browser's Home button to Google at the same time. Either I get a file manager's Home or a browser's Home.

      2. I love Konqueror's tabbed file manager interface. When I have one instance open and I open another directory, I get a new tab instead of a new window. Per
      • Everything you want to do can be achieved by hand editing the user profiles, and then putting a 'load profile' button in your main toolbar.

        Define separate homes for browsing and file managing.

        I believe you can specify target windows for file manager tabs. You'd need to edit your default file manager profile

        Any of the KDE window settings can be defined in the view profile, and it will be specific to the profile.

        The only problem is you can't get multiple bars for the user profiles on your toolbar, just a 'loa
    • I use Opera. Now it's free. Doesn't pass Acid2, but damn close. It's quick in loading itself and rendering pages. Crossplatform. Has mouse gestures and a mail client. For four megs.

  • Doh! (Score:4, Funny)

    by uberjoe ( 726765 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:19PM (#13624900)
    Qt 3.3.5 was released too late to adapt to it and it shows some fundamental compilation problems

    Oh Krap!

  • Website information (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shotgun ( 30919 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @05:22PM (#13624930)
    Why should I care?

    Really, in the best writing classes that I've ever taken, the instructed always made the point that a writer should always be first concerned with why would the reader care about the subject matter.

    I looked all over KDE's website. About all I could find was "Here's a new beta. Try it and tell us what you think." But, nowhere did it give me any reason to want to try it. I use KDE on a production basis, but there's no reason for me to go poking around and messing with stuff that ain't broken unless there is some benefit to realize.

    Hey, guys and gals. I know ya'll've been working on something. What have you fixed/upgraded/added?

  • Wha? (Score:2, Funny)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 )
    Kanzler? I thought Microsoft's beta naming conventions were goofy, but after Mandriva and now Kanzler, I think a torch has been passed.

    • Re:Wha? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Nasarius ( 593729 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @06:05PM (#13625319)
      Kanzler? I thought Microsoft's beta naming conventions were goofy, but after Mandriva and now Kanzler, I think a torch has been passed.

      Like many of their other release names, it's German. And probably a reference to the current election mess in Germany (Kanzler = chancellor).

  • Meh (Score:1, Funny)

    by stud9920 ( 236753 )
    Windows NT has been past that since what ? 1995 ?
  • It still seems like nothing is there yet. At home, I run the big 3.. OSX, Windows, and Linux. It may be for a lack of looking, but I still haven't found a desktop manager for linux that really screamed "COOL". So I've settled for fluxbox which is light and functional.

    Currently I have to run all three to get everything I want. I love the OSX desktop. As a unix administrator who works from home quite a bit, I rely on linux. It's the swiss army knife of my environment.. (firewall, file server, terminal
    • The only person who can really judge for you what's cool is you. To that end, and considering that 100% of KDE is pretty easily customizable, why don't you try bothering to make it cool instead of bitching about its default characteristics?
    • What might be good is a Windows-alike that doesn't do the XP-bloat thing.

      For some folks, at least. As for me, while I still use a lot of KDE apps (including Konqueror for my file manager), I switched to WindowMaker for my desktop about a month ago and immediately noticed a performance boost. (2.8 GHZ Pentium with 1GB RAM that's less than a year old, so it's not exactly ancient hardware I'm using here.) Starting a wterm takes about a fifth as long as it does to fire up Konsole, for instance, and switching de
      • I used to do this for the longest time. I ran Afterstep with a kde session running in the background. Then, at work, I ran WindowMaker using the same setup.

        Eventually, I found that KWin can be configured to work almost exactly like AfterStep (which was my ideal WM for a long time), and that it isn't in fact any slower.

        Now I'm simply running a full KDE desktop. It looks a lot like AfterStep, and nothing like a regular KDE default, but i find it works just as well as AS/WM and it saves me some trouble.

        Similar
      • Starting a wterm takes about a fifth as long as it does to fire up Konsole, for instance, and switching desktops is also much faster.

        I am running on a 1.7 GHz laptop right now, and it takes less than one second to start up Konsole:

        $ time konsole -e "/bin/echo"

        real 0m0.603s
        user 0m0.409s
        sys 0m0.033s

        Did you actually time the startup of the shell? Even if you did, do you really notice the 0.5 seconds of difference? For myself, KDE's "bloat" actually increases my efficiency, because I can create a ne

        • Did you actually time the startup of the shell?

          No. Why should I? I don't need to use the eyedropper extension to tell that the Slashdot logo is white on green, either.

          Even if you did, do you really notice the 0.5 seconds of difference?

          Yes. wterm or xterm is virtually instantaneous, and I can tell that Konsole takes a LOT longer than 0.5 sec to start up. (Don't get me wrong, I like the tabs okay. But I don't need a stopwatch to tell me which one's faster.)

          As for the desktop switching... the desktops swit

  • Any hope of being able to sync to a WinCE PDA?
  • Maybe I'm just as lame as a one-legged duck, but would someone please explain why I ought to ditch GnuStep in favor of KDE? Dammit, I have work to do, and none of it involves learning how to futz around with my UI!

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