Couple of days ago, the second beta to the second version of the immensely popular and fantastic audio player Amarok was released by the Amarok team.
The second beta brings in some drastic changes, the main one being SQLite no longer being the default backend, and PostgreSQL support being dropped, in favour of a single backend, that being MySQL-Embedded platform. Other notable changes include improved scripting support, the return of lyric fetching and incremental scanner support.
KDE Developer beineri writes in blog about the general confusion among people between KDE 4 and KDE 4.0. To quote him,
The last feature release of KDE is just over a year old, is well maintained and gains selected features about every two to three months. Still people long for the first release starting with the number 4 often called “KDE 4″ – which is wrong. Let me try to disambigue: “KDE 4″ refers to the whole life-time of the KDE 4.x based framework, like “KDE 3″ does for now five years and six KDE 3.x releases. The “KDE 4.0″ release will be just the first one in the “KDE 4″ cycle.
“KDE 4″ can be compared to “MacOS X” (although it will be an evolutionary update rather than as revolutionary as MacOS X was compared to System 9). “KDE 4.0″ can be compared to “MacOS X 10.0″, which was far from complete in term of frameworks and functionality compared to today’s current MacOS X 10.4 release. The same will apply for KDE 4.0: not all features and goals the developers envision for KDE 4 will be implemented for KDE 4.0. The most important ones will be sorted out and will, some changes are possible and will be implemented later during KDE 4 and a few will turn out as impossible or even undesired.
There will be users (and young editors) who don’t understand the difference of KDE 4 and KDE 4.0 and will call KDE 4.0 incomplete or a disappointment because it will not do all stuff they read about KDE 4 will be able to do and who expect the release cycle and development cycle to be something like “Microsoft Vista”: a big dump of changes containing some new features to live with the next five years (and a lot of new features the competition introduced in the last five years).
KDE 4.0 will for sure not take full advantage of the potential of KDE 4 platform. Akonadi, Phonon & Co will show their power only as more backends and plugins become available. Can you remember when kparts and KIO slaves became essential in your daily work (eg fish slave creation)? It weren’t the x.0 releases introducing them. Also KDE 4.0 will not contain all or the complete imminent frameworks of “KDE 4″. Like much of the “social semantic desktop” functionality will be added only later, even beyond 4.1 – Nepomuk is a several year research project and nobody knows today what the final specification will be.
Indeed, he is right. KDE has come a long way. And the releases have made it a very good Desktop Environment. With the first release of KDE 4.0 soon on the horizon, it’ll be interesting to see how usable the first release is and what sort of improvements further releases would bring out
KDE 4 is coming. It’s starting to look and behave mature enough to use it on a normal desktop. This article is a little introduction to what you might be expecting from the brand new KDE due later this year.
Author: Korneliusz Jarzebski
It’s been a whole month when I’ve investigated the new environment called KDE 4. Honestly I wanted to wait till “Beta 3?, which should have appeared on 5th October. But as you all can see it has never happened. On the IRC channel #kde4-devel I was informed that the “Beta 3? should have been tagged yesterday but unfortunately it didn’t turn out to be true. Not waiting any longer I made my mind and I have updated the SVN and have run the cmake.
Right after running the KDE you can tell at once that new wallpaper is far more beautiful than the grey old one and the marvelous contrasting flower is well matched to the bottom bar. Unluckily it does nothing more than displaying the clock. The taskbar despite the fact it was on the bar didn’t display processes and all the effort I made to add there any applet or the Pager was in vain, and ended with a complete crash of the bar. The only thing I succeeded in was to put there the Kickoff menubar.
The first appearance of Kickoff was in SUSE Linux 10.2 as a new menu for KDE. The icons were arranged in five categories: Favorite, Applications, My Computer, Recently used, Leave. There is nothing more than the search box that helps you finding applications and documents. It’s too early to discuss about the new KDE menu even talking about its appearance. IMHO I wish that the searching engine wouldn’t be based on Nepomuk or Strigi. I’d like to mention that it is only the initial version of this menu in KDE.
More on PolishLinux
The first release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2008, codenamed Galilee, is now available. The release notes are also available via the wiki. A guide to major new features (some of which are not yet implemented in this release candidate), and the detailed technical specifications are also available. This release candidate is available as a three CD or one DVD Free edition (containing no non-free software or drivers) for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, with a traditional installer, and as a mini-CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. A One combined live / install CD edition will be released in the near future (problems with unionfs prevented the One edition from being release at the same time as the other editions).
Updated Software:
Once again, Mandriva Linux 2008 will come with the latest release of GNOME, which will be hot off the press at release time. The development releases will feature the latest available releases of GNOME 2.19, the development series for 2.20. New features planned for GNOME 2.20 include:
See the full plan here.
The latest stable KDE 3 release will be included, with all the bug fixes since the previous 3.5.6 release. KDE 3.5.7 is mainly a maintenance release but also comes with some new features :
KDE 4 will be available as an experimental preview, with the latest available pre-release included. The development releases will be tracking KDE 4 development very closely. The changes in KDE 4 are countless and, of course, include the revolutionary Nepomuk semantic desktop system, whose development is being led by Mandriva. There is no single resource for a full list of new features in KDE 4, but Wikipedia gives a good overview.
The new Mandriva XFCE development community will present improved packages for XFCE 4.4.1 in Mandriva Linux 2008. They are working on various areas including integration of the Mandriva themes and menu structure into the XFCE desktop. XFCE will be moved into the supported /main repository, and we hope to build an XFCE-based Mandriva Linux One image for 2008 in addition to the regular GNOME- and KDE-based One images.
As Mandriva Linux 2008 marks a new basesystem (after the previous basesystem was used for Mandriva Linux 2007 and 2007 Spring), it will of course include a new kernel. 2.6.22 will add support for new hardware and also has many interesting new features.
Perhaps the biggest new feature visible to end users will be the new Devicescape (mac80211) wireless networking stack, which provides a superior base with much more common code than the previous kernel wireless stack, allowing drivers to be more reliable and functional.
2.6.22 also includes the new ‘tickless’ technology which will save battery power on laptops, with the effect increasing over time as applications are improved to avoid needlessly waking up the kernel. There’s a good write-up of this system here.
It also includes ALSA 1.0.14, adding support for some newer sound cards and chipsets and improving support for others.
Other improvements include the usual gradual improvements to suspend support, a new scheduler (which will result in improved responsiveness in typical desktop use), and the integration of the ivtv TV card driver (as used, notably, for the Hauppauge PVR series cards). An exhaustive overview of changes between 2.6.21 and 2.6.22 is available here: the same site has similar pages covering the changes back to 2.6.17, the kernel that was included in Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring.
Compiz Fusion, the result of the re-merge between the Compiz and Beryl 3D desktop technologies, will replace Compiz and Beryl in Mandriva Linux 2008. The development branch is currently tracking the pre-release Fusion code, prior to the first official release. New features in Fusion are many, and a video demonstrating some of them is available at YouTube.
Other significant updates will include X.org 7.3, featuring the new XrandR 1.2 framework which vastly improves support for multiple displays and display hotplugging on supported drivers, OpenOffice.org 2.2, featuring improved text rendering, improved PDF exporting and enhanced compatibility with Excel spreadsheets, GCC 4.2 (with a complementary build of 4.3 available as an option in the /main repository) and IcedTea, a GNU project which makes it possible to provide an open source Java implementation based on the code open sourced by Sun as the OpenJDK project. IcedTea will likely not be ready for use as a browser plugin by the time of 2008′s release.
Changes from previous beta releases include:
draknetcenter, the new consolidated network configuration and monitoring tool, is included in this release candidate. For now it is available only by running draknetcenter from a console or a run dialog. This tool is still undergoing revision and improvement: the version you see in this release candidate is not the final design.
A new menu structure, based on an initial proposal by Frederik Himpe, has been implemented in this release candidate. This structure attempts to reduce the amount of nesting in the menus. Applications are split into category groups. In each category group, applications native to the current desktop environment are displayed in the top level, and applications native to other desktop environments are displayed in a sub level. Some applications that are commonly used across many desktop environments are specially configured to always appear in the top level.
The kernel package has now adopted the kernel-tmb spec file, which means that the kernel packages have been renamed. The old kernel is now kernel-desktop. The old kernel-enterprise is now kernel-server. The old kernel-legacy is now kernel-desktop586. A kernel-laptop package is now introduced, which contains several customizations useful to laptops in terms of reducing power usage.
This also means that the official kernel packages now adopt the kernel-tmb style for source and headers. Each kernel package now has its own -devel package – e.g. kernel-desktop586-devel – which contains the source and headers necessary for building external kernel modules. This is the package you should install if you need to compile external kernel modules. The single kernel-source package is of interest only to those who need to build an application against a complete copy of the kernel source, or those interested in building their own kernels.
This release candidate is available as a Free edition for the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures, on three CDs or one DVD, with a traditional installer. It is also available in a mini CD edition for both x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. It will also be available as a One combined live / install CD edition in the near future: issues with unionfs prevented the One edition from being released at the same time as the other editions.
The images are available from any official Mandriva mirror site in the /devel/iso/2008.0 subdirectory. For the list of Mandriva mirrors see CookerMirrors.
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