The KDE team has released the first beta of KDE 4.2, slated for release coming January. Quite a lot of new features have been added, as well as lots of bug fixes and performance improvements. This release also makes a lot of strides to feature parity with KDE 3.x, by adding those small little features that KDE 3.x users are barely aware of, but which were missed in KDE 4.0/4.1, such as taskbar grouping, multiple rows in the taskbar, panel auto-hiding, a traditional icon desktop through 'full-screen' foderview, and so on.
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Member since:2007-04-06
I know this isn't want you want to hear, but with the nVidia graphics card on my MBP, external monitor is quite painless. Not through anything that KDE does, but nVidia's configuration tool, it can be quick and (relatively) easy. It still has to be set manually, but no restart of X or anything is required. I was actually rather impressed - pessimist that I am, I did not expect it to be that seamless. It still falls short of the plug and play of doing it under OSX, however.
Good luck with that intel chipset.
Member since:2006-01-28
So you are actually able to have one resolution on the laptop and a different one on the external monitor? If this is the case, and if I can´t solve this in the next couple of months, I will look for a laptop with a built-in nvidia chip.
I like the fact that my netbook did not need one single proprietary driver to function, so I am actually hoping that this can be fixed as otherwise I really like the hardware.
Thanks for your input
Member since:
2006-01-28
It looks very impressive. Here's to hoping that this is the one that I can actually recommend to clients and friends.
I am currently using kde 4.1 and the main missing feature for me is that kde and/or xorg are incapable of using a laptop with an external monitor in clone mode with each screen retaining its respective native resolution and the interface being scaled appropriately for the native resolution of each screen.
My netbook (medion akoya) has an intel graphics card where this works ok in windows. It's the only part of the laptop experience where it works better in windows. Everything else from suspend to boot time to general responsiveness works much better in Mandriva with kde 4.1. Here's to hoping that this will soon be fixed.
If anybody has a laptop and an external monitor working in the setup I have described, I would love to know how you did it.