Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 23rd Dec 2008 20:20 UTC, submitted by AdamW
The first pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is now available. This alpha concentrates on updating to the major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2 Beta 2, GNOME 2.25.2, Xfce 4.6 Beta 2, X.org server 1.5, and kernel 2.6.28 rc8. It is also the first distribution to introduce the major new Tcl/Tk release, 8.6. The alpha is available only in the DVD Free edition with a traditional installer and no proprietary applications; future pre-releases will add the live CD One edition with proprietary drivers. Please help test this first pre-release and report bugs to Mandriva.
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Member since:
2007-02-17
This is especially so with KDE 4.2. However, even with KDE 4.1.3, it is possible to emulate a KDE 3 desktop fairly well. It is a mistake to install both KDE 3 and KDE 4 at the same time, because of confusing duplicate menu entries that doing this causes. If a KDE 3 application does not have a KDE 4 port at this time, most distributions will re-compile the KDE 3 version against KDE 4 libraries and emulated-kde3-compatibility-libraries such as libao2 (which is an audio output library on KDE4 which supports ALSA, aRts, ESD, OSS, Pulse and several others). This means that if one installs KDE3 and KDE4 at the same time, one will have quite a few programs which have a KDE3 version, sometimes a KDE3-but-complied-for-KDE4 version, and sometimes a new version for KDE4 only of the same program on one's menus.
This is bound to cause confusion if it was not what one was expecting.
The only thing that I found to be essential for a quick transition form KDE3 to KDE4 was to remove the Kickoff menu from the panel and install the Lancelot menu instead.
http://lancelot.fomentgroup.org/main
This should be available for installation via the package manager if it is not included by default.
Also recommended, but not essential, is to change the default theme to something like Glassified or Aya.
There was until very recently a bug in the nvidia binary driver for Linux that caused dramatically horrible performance, and instability on many systems. If you have a nvidia graphics card, then in order for KDE 4 to be useable you must install the latest nvidia beta driver. The versions shown on this page:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
are not recent enough, as these versions still contain the bug. As this thread shows:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=8885a0b51b794ca159...
you need a nvidia driver of version 180.06 or later in order to avoid this bug.
Please don't confuse any poor performance resulting from this bug with performance of KDE4. There is a great deal of dismissing of KDE 4 that has been done because of this nvidia bug.
Also recommended on older systems is to turn off the desktop effects.
After few tweaks like these the KDE 4 experience easily surpasses the KDE 3 experience.
KDE 4 is, after all, the ONLY desktop environment for Linux that makes use of the system's GPU to accelerate graphics rendering of the desktop. As a consequence, it out-performs any other Linux desktop, even the "lightweight" ones such as fluxbox and openbox, on any system that has even a modest (but working) GPU.
Edited 2008-12-26 00:30 UTC