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KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 KDE today celebrates its semi-annual release event, making available new releases of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Development Platform and a large number of applications available in their 4.5.0 versions. In this release, the KDE team focused on stability and completeness of the Desktop experience. More than 16,000 bugs have been fixed, and many feature requests have been filled. The result for the user is a system that feels faster, takes less time to "think", and works more reliably. The large number of bug fixes goes accompanied with many parts that have got an extra portion of tender loving care. Plasma 4.5.0's new notification system is one example here. It is designed to get less in your way, yet to support your workflow as smoothly as possible. Visually, the monochromatic icons strike, which make for a more consistent look in the notification area. A highlight of the KDE Applications 4.5.0 is surely Marble, which can now be used for map routing as well as viewing. The Konqueror web browser can now also use the WebKit engine to render its content. The KDE Development Platform 4.5.0 offers a new generic cache for applications that need high-speed access to certain data, such as icons or other pre-rendered artwork. The new KSharedDataCache speeds up loading of many components, while the new HTTP scheduler is optimized for concurrent access to web servers, and makes loading of pages in Konqueror and other parts using the KIO HTTP mechanism faster. Today's releases are the first in the 4.5 series and will be followed with updated versions approximately monthly that will focus on fixing bugs. The next feature releases are planned for January 2011. If you would like to test- drive 4.5.0, you can do so by installing the packages that should be made available by your operating system vendor. You can also choose to build 4.5.0 from source, the nitty-gritty of that can be found on TechBase. For the impatient, there is also a Live CD available. http://kde.org/announcements/4.5/ http://kde.org/announcements/4.5/plasma.php http://kde.org/announcements/4.5/platform.php http://kde.org/announcements/4.5/applications.php -- sebas http://www.kde.org | http://vizZzion.org | GPG Key ID: 9119 0EF9 _______________________________________________ kde-announce mailing list kde-announce@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-announce (Log in to post comments)
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 10, 2010 17:51 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
I like it so far.... except that I HATE the new monochromatic icons, and would love to know how to get the old ones back. (Though I still have color icons from Kmail, KBluetooth, and Pidgin.)
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 10, 2010 18:42 UTC (Tue) by wstephenson (subscriber, #14795) [Link]
Delete the monochrome icons that the system tray widget substitutes for those set by the apps using the tray, and the colourful originals will be used instead (I know because I mispackaged these in openSUSE and discovered the fallback behaviour).
The standard location for them is
`kde4-config --prefix`/share/kde4/apps/desktoptheme/default/icons/
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 11, 2010 5:07 UTC (Wed) by arekm (subscriber, #4846) [Link]
Hm, interesting that this announce says nothing about kmial (kdepim) absence in 4.5.0 release.
You need to use kmail from 4.4.5 until new kmail arrives in some 4.5.x release.
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 11, 2010 11:26 UTC (Wed) by Wummel (subscriber, #7591) [Link] 16000 bugs have been fixed from 4.4.0 to 4.5.0? Impressive, and I'd like to see some statistics of that. I was unable to see that number of bugs for target "0.10.0 (KDE 4.5.0)" searching the KDE bug database. But perhaps I was using the wrong search options.
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 11, 2010 15:14 UTC (Wed) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
Administrative issue, in order to count, we simply took the number of bugs closed in during the last development cycle. The metadata of the bugs is often not complete, just snapshotting a period in time does actually give us numbers we can work with.
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 11, 2010 17:19 UTC (Wed) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
So you count all the duplicates bugs closed during the cycle ?
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 11, 2010 17:33 UTC (Wed) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
That's correct.
KDE Releases Development Platform, Applications and Plasma Workspaces 4.5.0 Posted Aug 12, 2010 5:50 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]
Finding duplicates is actually also real work which is worth something, otherwise the non-duplicates would get buried below them.
Alex
KDE & HAL Posted Aug 11, 2010 12:09 UTC (Wed) by ejmarkow (guest, #56170) [Link]
Is eliminating the KDE dependency on HAL one of the 16,000 enhancements? Xorg has done it already, now it's KDE's turn. Looking forward to it.
KDE & HAL Posted Aug 11, 2010 12:54 UTC (Wed) by Adi (guest, #52678) [Link]
AFAIK definitely not.
Maybe 4.6 will change something in this matter. Any KDE developer reading this?
KDE & HAL Posted Aug 11, 2010 15:12 UTC (Wed) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
We still rely on HAL for most of the hardware and powermanagement tasks. There is work going on on moving to u*-based solutions, but that won't be ready before 4.6.0, planned for January 2011.
The nice thing about HAL is that it works, and given the confusion about HAL, devicekit, upower and all those middleware technologies that have crept up lately to replace HAL, we figured it would save a lot of time if we waited a bit until that part of the stack has settled down and stabilised a bit. It's been quite a mess lately, and hard to follow. The shift in middleware can be made in a way transparant to applications and the workspace, thanks to the Solid framework which will just change backend, similar to Phonon.
HAL on the opposite works just fine, today.
KDE & HAL Posted Aug 11, 2010 15:43 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
There isn't any real confusion. HAL has been split up into upower and udisks. DeviceKit was just a intermediate name and no longer exists.
KDE & HAL Posted Aug 11, 2010 17:36 UTC (Wed) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]
That *is* confusing ;-)
Thanks for your explanation, though. It's the first time I hear in clear words what happened to the stack -- that's likely my fault for not spending enough attention. It could also point to a lack of clear communication around that move, though.
Anyway, a upower backend for Solid has already been merged into trunk, I'm not aware of a udisks one.
One question left: is it actually new code, or just a refactoring of the old code?
KDE & HAL Posted Aug 11, 2010 17:56 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
I am hardly any expert on this topic. My understanding is that, a lot of it is refactored code but there is a fundamental difference in approach as well.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2008-May/011560...
KDE & HAL Posted Aug 12, 2010 14:44 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Quite. upower and udisks are Linux-specific, where HAL was not: the idea is that other OSes will come up with non-Linux implementations of the same thing, implementing the same dbus interface.
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