KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Out For Testing

KDE Community Ships Second Beta Version of KDE 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Many New Features and Improvements

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 Beta 2, the second preview of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.

KDE 4.3 focuses on polishing and completing the user experience by providing a modern and beautiful Free working environment. KDE’s award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages. After the first beta, the focus has now shifted clearly from the implementation of new features to polishing the user experience for the 4.3 release. As there’s still well over a month until we would like to give testers an update of KDE 4.3’s status. In the last month, 2991 bugs have been closed and 3008 new bugs opened, meaning that there is a lot of testing and fixing going on.

Highlights of KDE 4.3 are…

Integration of many new technologies, such as PolicyKit and Geolocation services

New Window animation effects, a more usable Run Command popup and many new and improved addons in Plasma

Many bugfixes and improvements across all applications and more integration of features coming with the KDE 4 platform

Please note that KDE 4.3 Beta 2 is not suitable for end users. Its sole purpose is gathering feedback and testing. Following that, we recommend those that are merely out for an upgrade but cannot live with severe instabilities to wait until KDE 4.3.0 is released in late July.

Highlights of KDE 4 include…

A streamlined hardware integration and multimedia experience thanks to the Solid and Phonon libraries

A fully themable look taking advantage of modern graphics hardware combining the Oxygen artwork with the new Plasma desktop shell

An extensive high-level development platform built on top of Qt, available in C++, Python, Ruby and other programming languages

Changes

General

Policykit integration

Settings module for actions triggered by hardware events

Recent applications, titles and context menues for the classic application launcher

New Tree Mode in System Settings

Revisited user interface of the crash dialog, including backtrace parsing and rating

A network:/ IO Slave to show services such as Zeroconf as view in the file manager

Sorting folders in the file manager first is now optional

Support for the mobipocket format in the document viewer and desktop search

Plasma Desktop & KWin Window Manager

KRunner now displays all known syntax in the results area when Help button pressed

Spacers for the panel

Holidays are now displayed in the calendar of the clock

Configurable keyboard shortcuts for Plasma

Grouping support in Extenders

“Open…” in notifications for finished jobs

Entering into directories when hovering over them in the folder view

Keyboard navigation in the zooming user interface and the folder view

Animations of dialogs from the Panel

SVG-themed desktop and panel toolbox

Unit conversion library

Completed wallpaper renderings can now be cached

More complete JavaScript API

Window manager elements now follow the Plasma theme

Fading desktop switcher

Windows sliding behind each other when changing focus

Plasma Addons

New Plasmoids: Bubble Monitor (a playful system monitor), Magnifique (Plasma magnifier), Media Player, openDesktop (Social Desktop Plasmoid), Remember The Milk Plasmoid (time management), retro-style system load viewer, Unit converter

New dataengines: Akonadi, Calendar Geolocation, keyboard state, access to Nepomuk metadata, Open Collaboration Services, Picture of the day, support for sun positioning and sunrise/sunset in the time engine

Rich-text editing and text-zooming in the Notes applet

Microblogging Plasmoid now also supports identi.ca

Pastebin applet has been reworked

The System tray can now show / hide icons based on their category

Jobs are now grouped together

Grouped windows’ tooltips now also show previews

Lancelot launcher: Improved theming, configurable actions for system buttons, clear document history

Speaking the time from the clock

Weather wallpaper displays a wallpaper matching the current weather

The Virus wallpaper slowly eats your desktop

Mandelbrot fractals as real-time computed wallpaper

Marble Interactive desktop globe can be used as wallpaper

PIM

Updated contact list in the instant messenging application Kopete

Export, drag and drop and improved configuration in Alarm notifier

A resource to sync Akonadi with Google Calendar

Support for inserting inline images into emails in KMail

Games

New game “Curse of the Mummy” in KGoldrunner, more accurate pause and resume and recording and replaying of games

KPatience can now save the game state on exit to be restored later

New in KDE 4: KTron

Improved AI and asynchronous “thinking” in Bovo

70 new levels in KMahjongg

Others

The moon and other Planets can now be displayed using the Marble desktop globe

Support for imperial units, DGML2 and geolocation plugins in Marble

The Juk music player now supports real translucency in track announcements

UI improvements and better format handling in the compression tool Ark

New bookmarking tool in Okteta hex editor

KGpg, the GnuPG key manager has been ported to the new system tray

Note that the changelog is usually incomplete, for a complete list of changes that went into KDE 4.3 Beta 2, you can browse the Subversion log.

To find out more about the KDE 4 desktop and applications, please refer to the KDE 4.2.0, KDE 4.1.0 and KDE 4.0.0 release notes.

Installing KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Binary Packages

Packagers. Some Linux/UNIX OS vendors have kindly provided binary packages of KDE 4.3 Beta 2 for some versions of their distribution, and in other cases community volunteers have done so. Some of these binary packages are available for free download from KDE’s http://download.kde.org. Additional binary packages, as well as updates to the packages now available, may become available over the coming weeks.

Package Locations. For a current list of available binary packages of which the KDE Project has been informed, please visit the KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Info Page.

Compiling KDE 4.3 Beta 2 (a.k.a. 4.2.90)

The complete source code for KDE 4.3 Beta 2 may be freely downloaded. Instructions on compiling and installing KDE 4.3 Beta 2 are available from the KDE 4.3 Beta 2 Info Page.

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information.

About KDE

KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE’s products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE4’s full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Windows and Mac OS X.