The source code of the first RC for the upcoming KDE 3.2 release is here.
KDE 3.2-RC1 Tarballs Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Updated Konstruct builds are available at the usual place: http://developer.kde.org/build/konstruct/unstable/
Don’t know what Konstruct is? It’s KDE’s smart little command-line tool enabling you to retrieve, compile and install KDE source releases (plus KOffice and some other KDE apps) as easily and comfortably as possible. Documentation: http://developer.kde.org/build/konstruct/index.html
*warms up gcc*
KDE has really come a long way and it shows. I tried out the betas and it is amazing how fast KDE is. The KDE developers really did a great job optimizing KDE. Konqueror is my standard browser for a long time and I look forward to an even better konqueror. KWallet is really nice and makes handling passwords for webpages really easy. Kate works great, it is becoming my favorite editor lately. It is powerful, fast and easy to handle without knowing thousands of key combinations. KStars also looks really amazing. I like astronomy and hope to find some time to play with kstars soon. I also love plastik. Thank you very much to all the KDE developers for giving us such a nice desktop!
Personally, I think the single app that has seen the biggest improvements, aside from the whole KDE framework, is probably KMail. KMail in KDE 3.1.x was not a particularly exciting email client, and a slow and cumbersome one to boo – IM(H)O. In 3.2, it’s extremely snappy, with lots of nice feature additions. Definitely my favorite email client on GNU/Linux systems now. Before, it was Sylpheed (for pure speed).
I remember reading an interview done years ago with the head KDE guy. I distinctly remember him saying that they always are thinking about speed when doing their coding. None of this nancy-boy premature-optimization business ;-). I wonder if the gtk+ people will ever fix the gtk+ redraw slowness problem. When osnews did the interview with Havoc Pennington he seemed to have the attitude “Hear no evil, speak no evil…”. Gnome/Gtk+ needs an influx of talented engineers.
Well, I haven’t been invoved in KDE CVS since the 1.x days, but speed was usually just assumed to happen once you had decent code.
Hand-micro-optimizations are not a hot commodity in KDE’s code.
What has happened in the last year or so, is that Valgrind and Cachegrind have made profiling the apps, so the effort of “optimizing the slow parts” is better directed.
Do you know whether it is possible to import evolution’s vcard contacts into Kmail now? Evolution is one of the few GTK+ apps that I use because I have found it to be superior to kmail, but I can’t stand the look of GTK apps and everytime I open the file dialog, it irks me.
I tried it to import them ito the KAddressbook in KDE 3.1 and it didn’t work. So if this works now, I could almost move to a complete KDE desktop
Thanks
AFAIK, KAddressbook does have full support for vCard 2.1 and vCard 3.0 in KDE 3.2, so as long as Evolution follows one of these standards, it shouldn’t be a problem.
I remembered reading about a bug concerning vCard 2.1 imports in a recent KDE CVS-Digest, here it is: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72380
… which seems to indicate that the import from one of Evolution’s *.vcf files does indeed work, but with a small problem regarding utf-8 formatting at the time. This bug has been closed since, so I assume your import should work flawlessly now. I haven’t tested it, but that’s what I gather.
Hope I could help.
It’s pretty hard to attend KDE meetings in US since there aren’t any.
On a personal preference note, Linus mentioned KDE before Gnome about 2 weeks ago in another interview… Not that it really matters. Linux probably won’t do any significant contribution to any of the DE’s.
He’s down in Australia where he will attend the gnome meetings. Once again, you can’t read too much into it though. I’m sure he’d check out the KDE meetings if they were happening.
Torvalds has done a really good job at remaining neutral over the years, I sincerely doubt he’ll start ‘taking sides’ now – he knows his credibility as a leader depends on being a fair. And even if he did otherwise: So what? Do you chose your desktop by looking at what Torvalds uses? It’s not like he’s a desktop developer, or claims to be one. Foolish debate, stirred up again and again by zealots on both ‘sides’, IM(H)O.
I will guess that Linus does have a preference for which desktop he wants to take off but he just doesn’t want to express his opinion for fear of a backlash. There are numerous advantages to having a “dominant” desktop. Note, I didn’t say that you couldn’t run fluxbox or anything else.
Whatever else, you cannot say that Plastik’s author doesn’t listen… Nice thin lines separate my toolbars now.
One of the reasons why he is attending the gnome meetings could be because Ximian hired this kernel hacker?
@RoyBatty: There certainly are advantages to having a dominant desktop, yes – and agree that Torvalds probably has a preference. But he’s smart enough not to make it public, because his leadership is tied to neutrality on the application side. I’d call him a fair guy, and that’s exactly because he’s been one in the past
.
What I like about Linus is that he has managed to say surprisingly neutral over the years. Since there seems to be a GNOME-bias among many high-up people in the Linux community, this is surprising. For example, when xconfig was changed to use Qt in kernel 2.6, he let it through despite all the politics.
There was also a problem with one version of Evolution writing broken vCards (forgot to write the VERSION attribute)
Fixed in later versions of Evolution.
Well I had various conversations with Kandalf (Ralf Nolden) from what I was told Linus uses KDE as his primary Desktop. But that is what I heard.
He likes it very much and has made comments on it. He said he used to submit regular bug reports in the 2.x and 3.0 days, but he doesn’t have any irritating bugs left, so doesn’t bother. He didn’t mention anything + or – about Gnome
In short, it’s just his desktop and nothing should be inferred. He’s a Kernel hacker and the DE stuff isn’t what he’s interested in, that much.
> Linus had stated that he was going to check out the Gnome meetings
Not surprising when he is interested in the desktop and no KDE meeting happend, or?
> coupled with the fact that OSDL has some new desktop initiative in the works
OSDL also talked with a KDE representative. So what?
I can’t remember where I read it. But Linus stated some time last year that he uses KDE.
Last time I read a Linus interview with pictures, he was using his laptop which was sprouting a very nice Gnome desktop with the bluecurve theme.
Ok, can we stop the “Linus uses X” comments now?
Last time I checked *I* use my computer and not Linus. If he would like to pop on by and do some of my C.S. assignments then his opinion counts. Until then the only thing that really concerns me is how *I* feel about a desktop. Now, personally I feel (I give no reasons because reason is a rational process and feeling is emotive and thus outisde the realm of reason) that KDE gives the superior experience. It appears that Linus and I share this belief. That has nothing to do with the pricer of potatoes so there is no point in arguing about what he said. Just d/l-ed the thing and make up your own mind. So Gnomers feel free to keep on Gnomeing away happily (just no Trolling
!
PS- I hate to point this out but the kernel is more than just Linus’s work and I’m sure that the aggregate work of the others outweighs his and they (I hear) perfer Gnome. thus you could say that the Linux kernel group perfers Gnome… but again this don’t mean @#$$%.
List of bug reports Linus has reported:
http://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&shor…
Of course, they have all been closed
He also named KDE and GCC as the two OSS communities he particularly admires.
http://dot.kde.org/1057763789/
I must say, the man has good taste
This si definitely looking like a solid release, but probably we won’t see any mainstream distribution using it until early March.
I know Mandrake 10 will suppsoedly be released in February, but that seems too early to me so I am betting it will get pushed back until March.
Anyone out there running this latest version care to comment on its memory footprint?
anybody got links ?
http://kde.ground.cz/tiki-index.php?page=Screenshots
Well I heard Linus say “You throw like a girl!!!”, it must have been important because Linus says so.
http://dreamcatcher.ait.org/files/linus-dunked-small.avi
:b
Grow up people.
This release slipped with a pretty annoying and obvious bug…a shame that is wasn’t caught before RC freeze.
You can’t move a window by dragging the title bar…instead you get the resize action.
So far I’ve installed arts,lib,base and pim. Top shows 220Mb mem in use out of 256Mb and no swap – immediately after login after reboot. I don’t know if that is a lot or not. And if it matters besides from load time going up with increasing footprint. OpenVMS supports what it calls installation of shareable images e.g. where the copy of an application extension in memory can be shared by more than one program. The closest I think Linux comes is with COWS (copy on write) but it is not quite the smae.
Does konstruct detect dependencies you already have installed?
I tried it on FreeBSD but it started grabbing glib 2.2.3. However, I already have the glib 2.2.3 port installed (yes, that same exact version). Or is konstruct just not finding the already installed glib?
FreeBSD will benefits from the faster loading? I assume that’s not a linux specific feature.
Can’t wait to try 3.2 (rc)!
As Claus wrote above “So far I’ve installed arts,lib,base and pim”. This got me thinking that I would like to know more about the KDE packages.
Others in past posts have said that you can choose to not have some programs compiled in to the base package.
What would be cool if someone could write an article to educate us (people like me) on KDE.
For example if I wish to use Konstruct to compile only the absolute minimum KDE, how would that be done?
Also it would be cool to be able to compile all other programs of KDE as seperate. So if I wish to add only one program out of say the multimedia package.
Is this at all possible? I realise there may be a lot of code re-use in KDE architecture.
Not quite an article, but should give you an idea of how KDE is laid out:
arts — KDE’s multimedia infrastructure. All of it is required.
kdelibs — KDE’s base libraries. All of it is required.
kdebase — KDE’s base programs. Almost all of it is required, because it includes critical programs like the window manager, login manager, panel, etc. The only really optional apps it includes are kwrite and kate. All of this is optional if you plan to just use KDE apps, and not KDE as a desktop.
kdemultimedia — KDE’s multimedia programs. Progams like noatun, juk, and kaboodle. Everything here is optional.
kdeartwork — Extra artwork. Styles, color schemes, window decorations, etc. Again, everything is optional.
kdenetwork — KDE’s network tools. KMail, KNode (Usenet), Kopete (IM), etc. All of it is optional.
kdepim — KDE’s PIM tools, including Kontact, the new PIM app. Again, all optional.
kdegraphics — KDE’s graphics applications. This includes utilities like a color picker, simple paint program, PDF and PS viewers, etc. All optional
koffice — KDE’s office suite. Its optional, but you have to install them all at once.
kdeutils — KDE utilities. Useful stuff like Ark (kinda like winzip). All optional.
kdetoys, kdegames, kdeedu — Toys, games, and educational tools. All optional.
kdeaddons — Plugins and extra helper programs. All optional.
kdeadmin — System administrative tools like kpackage (package manager). All optional.
kdesdk — Software development tools. KDevelop and Umbrello are the big apps here. All of them are optional.
If you are using a distro (like all Debian-based ones) that packages KDE apps seperately, you can just install arts, kdelibs, and kdebase, then install everything else one at a time. If you want to compile things manually, I don’t think Konstruct will allow you to install only single apps. Instead, you can do it from the KDE sources directly. Just download the appropriate tarball, extract it, and run ./configure –prefix=<where you want it installed> in the top-level directory. After that, go into the directory of the app you want (they’re all children of the top-level directory) and type in “make install”.
Of course, its usually not worth bothering to install KDE apps one at a time. Since most of the code of KDE apps is in the framework itself, the apps themselves are usually quite small. If the menu entry bothers you, just remove it from the menu — most likely, its only taking up a couple of megs of hard-drive space at most. A moderately complete KDE install (including KOffice, KDevelop, and common tools) is only about 200MB, so there is not a lot of fat there to trim.
Thanks Rayiner, that is useful info. I even learned something about ./configure
specifically the part about going into a directory before make install. Thanks.
I got a question about kate, can it be used without kdebase?
Also about removing from the menu, I am thankful the KDE folks removed “Preferences” from the menu. I once removed it and it reduced kcontrol to an empty shell
> This release slipped with a pretty annoying and obvious bug…a shame
Wrong. There was only a binary incompatible change in-between.
> You can’t move a window by dragging the title bar…instead you get the resize action.
You obviously upgraded kdebase but not kdeartwork which contains the window decoration you use.
> Does konstruct detect dependencies you already have installed?
No.
> For example if I wish to use Konstruct to compile only the absolute minimum KDE, how would that be done?
From the README:
Directory/Target | Size | Description
——————-+———+—————————————- ——
kde/kdebase | 46MB | Desktop with browser, editor and terminal
So, “cd kde/kdebase;make install”.
> kdenetwork — KDE’s network tools. KMail, KNode (Usenet), Kopete (IM), etc.
This is wrong, KMail and KNode are now in kdepim.
Yes, you can use Kate without the rest of kdebase. After ./configure, just ‘cd kate && make install’. Most of Kate is actually already in kdelibs — the Kate program itself is basically a UI to the built in advanced text editor widget.
oops
You are, of course, correct.
Due to the way the kernel manages memory and represents it when you do a PS, the figures you typically get for memory use under Linux are highly inaccurate.
Hopefully something will be done in 2.7… Who knows?
use ‘free’ and problem is solved
arts is no longer a required module, unless you need audio. Just configure kdelibs with “–without-arts”.
according to “free -m”, 117 Mb used (minus cache), 126 cached and no swap on my 512Mb system, which I think is fairly small, running konqueror (reading osnews & 3 tabs open) and kmail. Actually, once the framework is loaded, each application uses only a little memory.
I ran it on a 128Mb system, and it worked fine.