K Desktop Environment - KDE 4.1 RC1 Release Announcement
The KDE project have issued a first release candidate of KDE 4.1, expected to be the last milestone release before the final release of KDE 4.1 on 29th July. This is an opportunity for any last-minute bug fixes; there is a freeze on any other changes. Source downloads (with links to binary packages) are available from the info page and binaries for some systems are being made available also.
A first beta of KDE 4.1 has been released. Major changes:
Source downloads available here; binaries are available for some systems. This is not a production release; it is intended for development purposes only.
A Qemu-based virtual machine containing Kubuntu 8.04 with a comprehensive set of self-compiled KDE 4.1 modules has been published, to facilitate bug fixes, localisation and documentation production. For full details, and downloads, see here.
blauzahl: BugSquad's BugDay #3!
The KDE BugSquad are putting on a third Bug Day this coming Sunday (4th May). It will be co-ordinated on the IRC channel #kde-bugs (on irc.freenode.net) and the subject will be Konqueror. Participants should be using KDE 4.0.3 or newer, or SVN trunk. For full details, see here.
A first alpha of version 4.1 of KDE has been released. This version is based on Qt 4.4 and features improved SVG rendering and general performance and the ability to draw widgets on canvasses. It also features Akonadi, the framework for storing personal data, and (non-Akonadi-based) versions of KMail and KOrganizer. Source code can be downloaded here. This is strictly a preview and is not suitable for daily use.
KDE Developer Friedrich Kossebau has published a list of KDE Utils projects which are without proper maintainers. Some of them have been ported from KDE 3 to 4 and others are in limbo and won't compile. The former category includes kcharselect (character selector), kdessh (SSH front-end), KFloppy, KTimer (to schedule the execution of a program), KWallet (the password manager) and Sweeper ("cleans unwanted traces the user leaves on the system"), and kregexpedit. Anyone interested should subscribe to the KDE development mailing list and introduce themselves.
Via Planet KDE, Roland Wolters has published a list of the KDE-related projects which are getting a Summer of Code slot this year:
* Media Device Support in Amarok 2 with Collections * Amarok and UPnP * Notes and Presenter View Support for KPresenter * Easy monitor hot-plug support in KDE * Integrate Decibel into the KDE 4 environment * Jingle video and voice chat in Kopete * KMail enhancements and porting to native Qt4 * Integration of the QtWebKit based KPart * Integration of WebKit SVG library with KHTML * StepGame: educational game based on Step
The KDE BugSquad are holding a BugDay this coming Sunday (midnight to midnight UTC). Participants should have a recent version of KDE 4 (or 3.5.9) and do not need programming experience. Join #kde-bugs on irc.freenode.net for details. There is also a mailing list.
The polishlinux.org website has published a review of a development check-out of KDE 4.1, finding that it offers "better stability and performance" than any previous revision, crashing only once and "the performance was more than satisfactory". The author is confident that he will be able to let KDE 3 go once version 4.1 is out. Polish original here and Arabic translation here.
Via Roland Walters (liquidat) on Planet KDE, the full release plan for KDE 4.1 has been published. This entails a freeze on new features in "trunk" on 31st March, a full feature freeze on 22nd April, with an expected four pre-releases until the projected release date of 29th July. A feature plan can be found here.
The first bug-fix release of KDE 4.0 has also been tagged, and a changelog can be found here.
The KDE project have issued a second release candidate of KDE 4.0, codenamed Coenig; there has also been a sixth alpha of the new KOffice (source download). The codebase is "now feature-complete", but work is ongoing in "fixing bugs, finishing off artwork and smoothing out the user experience". Official announcement is here; info page with downloads and instructions here. Packages are available for Kubuntu (Gutsy), Mandriva 2008, OpenSUSE, Debian experimental and Red Hat/Fedora Rawhide.
The KDE Release Team have decided to postpone the release of KDE 4 to 11th January next year, as they want to solve "a couple of essential issues", affecting the visual appearance and Konqueror, and upstream library problems. An overview of the issues can be found here at KDE TechBase. However, substantial parts of the system are release-ready, including the KDE Development Platform.
A first release candidate of KDE 4 has been released. This is defined as the first version suitable for general use, and it includes the final release of the development platform. Packages have already been released for OpenSUSE but source code and general information is here.
Q: What are you doing exactly 3 months from today? « Komandeering Developers Everywhere
Wade Olson (via Planet KDE) announces that the KDE 4 release party (17-19 Jan 2008) at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA, is now open to all now that the core invitees are confirmed; anyone who can and wants to come should email Wade and Troy Unrau at release-event[at]kde.org (spaces are limited). Meals, accommodation and visa assistance is provided, but travel costs are not covered. The contest to answer why should you go to the event is still open until midnight on 21st October (answer at the same email address).
A third beta of KDE 4.0 has been released (release announcement here). For most components this release contains bug fixes and polishing and bug reports are being accepted; these include Konsole, Dolphin and Okular. Plasma, the desktop interface, has received a lot of new features, and now includes "a basic set of working components such as taskbars, panels, desktop wallpapers, etc". A fourth alpha of KOffice 2 has also been released. Downloads, with compile information, here. See here for packages for OpenSUSE and here for Kubuntu downloads.
From KDE Dot News:
The KDE project have published details of the release event for KDE 4: it will be at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA, on 17th to 19th January 2008. Besides key KDE developers, around 200 people from the media, the IT industry, Linux distros and various open-source projects have been invited. There are to be talks from international KDE hackers and the major talks and keynotes will be available live on the Internet through Fluendo.
The release schedule for KDE 4 has been revised again, with a final release date now set for 11th December 2007 and no fourth beta. Earlier milestones include 2nd Oct (Beta 3), 19th Oct (total freeze except for critical bug fixes), 30th Oct (RC1 and Development Platform) and 14th November (RC2). All the release dates are Tuesdays, and tagging for each will take place on the preceding Wednesday, so developers should have their code in by the Wednesday.
The KDE project have issued a second beta of KDE 4 (announcement here). The announcement contains a long discussion of the changes since the last beta; there has also been a third alpha release of KOffice v2.0. Download locations, with links to instructions, can be found on the Info page. Binaries have been released for Ubuntu, Mandriva 2007 and OpenSUSE.
Troy Unrau has written, for Ars Technica, a review of the new beta of KDE 4, which was tagged last week and is due for release shortly. He says the new beta has "made significant progress" since the first. Stability is improved, although he reports a recurring crash when exiting programs; however, the Plasma desktop lags behind the rest of the system. (He has also put out a blog entry on the subject.)
KDE 4.0 Release Delayed for Two Months (at OSNews.com)
The KDE project has delayed the release of version 4.0 of the desktop, by inserting an extra two beta releases, due for release on Sept 24 and Oct 22. Following that: Nov 19: Total Release Freeze; Nov 21: RC1; December 5: RC2; December 20: 4.0.0 tagged. They have done this because they "feel that there are crucial elements of the release that need more development time". The new roadmap is available here.
A research study on failure sampling in KDE is scheduled for September. We are now looking for skilled C++ developers to test one or several C++ classes. The developers at KDAB have already provided some code for the occasion from kdepim. Discussions have been held with the SQO-OSS project on adding the sampling method's basics to Alitheia, the successor to the English Breakfast Network, if the outcome of the study is promising. Volunteers will need to answer a questionnaire on their experience of C++, and then download a package containing the classes they need to test; tests last 4 or 8 hours. The questionnaire can be downloaded here and should be sent to the email address mentioned in the file.
A first beta of KDE version 4 has been released. Changes since the last alpha:
Source downloads, with build instructions, here. Packages are available for Ubuntu (Feisty backports and Gutsy), OpenSUSE and Mandriva.
api.kde.org relaunched - Daniel Molkentin's blog
The KDE project have relaunched the KDE API Reference site, which contains the API reference documentation for both KDE 3 and 4 (i.e. the class documentation) and is maintained by Adriaan de Groot. The site contains nightly-updated API docs for both versions with a search facility. It does not contain tutorials; for those, see KDE TechBase, or Qt documentation, which is at Trolltech's documentation site.
The KDE Human Interface Hunting Season has moved on to spelling mistakes and font settings, which should respect the user's configuration. The instructions for participating are on the KDE Dot News page above.
A first alpha version of KDE 4 has been released. Highlights include Oxygen icons (though not the Oxygen widget style), new hardware and multimedia frameworks (Solid and Phonon), the Dolphin file manager and Okular document viewer. This is a very unstable and feature-incomplete release, but the libraries have been largely stablised according to the release notes. Downloads are available here - when I checked, I could only find the sources (version 3.90.1) on the ftp.kde.org site. Anyone tempted to use this is advised to create a dedicated user account, as unstable versions of KDE 4 have been known to delete files.
KDE developers are being invited to examine KDE 4 applications which are already in the Subversion trunk, but not already reviewed (see details here) for violations of the KDE Human Interface Guidelines. The focus today is on configuration dialogs (HIG checklist is here). Information on the "hunting season" experiment and how to participate are at the KDE Dot News page linked at top.
KDE Four Live++ | www.kdedevelopers.org
Stephen Binner (KDE hacker) has released live CDs featuring the development version of KDE 4, which are based on openSUSE. The 477Mb ISO downloads (CDs only, which contain all the KDE modules) can be found here. They were first released last week, but in this one the "last week unmentioned problem with squashfs" has been fixed, making a DVD unncessary. Note, of course, that this is a pre-alpha release.
The release schedule for KDE 4.0 has been finalised (see above link for full details). In short, a freeze on major changes to kdelibs is expected on 1st April, an alpha on 1st May, a first beta on 25th June, a first release candidate on 25th September (with more as the autumn progresses), and the targeted release date for the final version is 23rd October.
The KDE team have advised that anyone with a KDE 4 development system to upgrade their version of CMake to upgrade it to version 2.4.5 or newer, as this will be required from next Monday (the 19th). The new version offers, among other things, faster dependency scanning and automoc during build, rather then during configuration. Source downloads are available here.
A third snapshot release of KDE 4, the Qt 4-based desktop to be released some time this year (one hopes) has been released. As yet, the KDE website has not been updated (this page will have it when they do), but packages for Ubuntu have been released and can be downloaded with APT as usual. There is also a YUM repository for OpenSUSE 10.2, which can be downloaded through YaST.
The Road to KDE 4: CMake, a New Build System for KDE
KDE Dot News has an in-depth article on why KDE has chosen CMake as its build system for KDE 4 in place of the old system, the GNU Autotools (in short, ease of use, portability, need for fewer tools and speed). Scribus, Rosegarden, PlPlot and my own QTM have also switched.
Linux.com has interviewed the developer of the Sonnet library, which is to replace KSpell 2 as the spell-checking library in KDE 4. The new library is to provide grammar checking, multilingual tools and possibly translation, dictionary and thesaurus functionality. The interview also discusses the new feature of language detection, which would eliminate the need to manually switch the spell-checker's language whenever a writer switches language in his writing.
The first official release of D-Bus, Freedesktop.org's inter-process messaging system, is out. The system is being adopted in KDE 4 as a replacement for KDE 3's DCOP, and a D-Bus module is also present in Qt 4.2 styled in a way to make it familiar to KDE programmers familiar with DCOP. The source for D-Bus itself can be downloaded here; bindings are available for GLib (GTK), Python, Java, Qt 4 (bundled with 4.2), Perl, C++, Pascal, Qt 3 and .NET. The system presently works on all Unix platforms including Mac OS X; there is a Windows port here which is expected to be merged with the official D-Bus.
A second development snapshot of KDE 4 has been released, including source from all KDE modules, which builds on Qt 4.2. Application developers are strongly advised to work primarily on KDE 4 from now on. Packages are available for Kubuntu Edgy (instructions here) and for SUSE 10.0 and 10.1. Packages of Okular, the replacement for KPDF, have also been released.
Torsten Rahn writes that he committed a mapping widget called Marble to the KDE Subversion repository at the aKademy conference in Dublin. Implementation for such a widget is currently duplicated across the system (in the Control Center, EDU, PIM, Games and several other areas). It uses a minimal free dataset which can be used offline, although minimal support for Google Earth KML files is included. It requires (only) Qt 4.1; instructions for obtaining and compiling are included.
Benjamin Reed has announced that he has put out new packages of KDE 4 for Aqua on OS X. They can be downloaded from the new Wiki-based KDE/Mac pages as torrents.
A new IRC channel has been set up to discuss CMake, the cross-platform make tool being used for KDE 4 as a replacement for the GNU Autotools. It is to be found on the Freenode IRC network.
Tales of the Racoon Fink: KDE4/Mac Binaries
Benjamin Reed has produced binaries of the recently-released snapshots of KDE4 (codenamed Krash) which run on the Aqua version of Qt for the Mac. The five Universal Binaries (kdepimlibs, kdebase, kdelibs, kdesupport and Qt) can be found here along with installation instructions. They work with Tiger only at present (though Panther packages are in preparation). Note: the Qt binary is the 4.2 snapshot, not the current 4.1.4.
A first developer snapshot of KDE 4, codenamed Krash, has been released. The release is intended for developers who want to play with parts of KDE 4's new technology or start porting their apps to KDE 4; it's not intended for end users. It consists of three source packages available here, kdelibs, kdepimlibs and kdebase, and uses the Qt 4.2 snapshot released in July. It also contains the Phonon multimedia backend, DBus inter-process communication and uses CMake rather than GNU Autotools. No binaries will be released and other KDE 4 technologies are missing.
The KDevelop team have announced that they have released version 3.3.4 of their IDE along with KDE 3.5.4. The only change listed is a fix to the Ruby TOC documentation (full commit list here). Screenshots here, downloads (links to binaries; sources and build/install instructions below) here. Requires KDE 3.2 or later; version 3.4 is in beta stage.
froglogic today announced the availability of Squish/KDE, a free (beer) edition of the Squish/Qt application testing system for use with open-source KDE (3 and 4) applications. A Flash demonstration of Squish can be seen here.
The KDE project has ceased using the GNU Autotools for developing KDE v4, adopting CMake, a cross-platform make tool which is "much easier to learn, handle and maintain" than the Autotools. Developer Alexander Neundorf explains why, and how, here. Scribus is also switching.
The KDE project today removed the inter-application communication system DCOP from the head of its Subversion repository; it is being replaced by FreeDesktop's D-BUS. Thiago Macieira explains:
D-BUS brings us better interoperability with many other programs. While DCOP was pretty much restricted to KDE applications (yes, I know there were C bindings, but not many people used it...), D-BUS already comes with bindings for several other major frameworks: glib, Java, Python, Perl, Mono, etc. D-BUS has been designed from the ground up to be an interoperable IPC system and also to replace DCOP when the time came. And so it did.
D-BUS also allows us to better talk to our own system: projects like HAL and Avahi are already being used by many Linux distributions to let normal applications get access to some privileged resources. In time, I also hope the Portland Project to come around and use D-BUS for its IPC needs, thus freeing us from using a special library with its own protocol to do what D-BUS already does.
More unexpected build success - Bobulate
Adriaan de Groot reports that KDE PIM "just builds" using Qt4 and KDE 4:
No tweaks, no hacks (except for enabling compilation against kdelibs trunk). Just CMake, make, make install... This means that -- without kdebase, so you'll need some other window manager like twm -- you can run KDE PIM apps right now from KDE4. Which in turn means that it's a viable development platform to work one.