What's in KDE 3.2?

With a new release of KDE right around the corner, we thought we'd take the first release candidate for a spin to see what KDE 3.2 has to offer. I used Konstruct to build 3.2rc1, which took several hours on an Athlon XP 2600+ with 1GB of RAM running SUSE 9. Though Konstruct is not new to 3.2, it still deserves a mention. Konstruct allows the user to build and use a given KDE release (as well as many KDE apps) without disturbing their current KDE installation, and doesn't require root access. Users who are hesitant to try new KDE releases for fear of breaking their current install need not worry.

The first things I noticed about 3.2 were some of the small changes. KDE 3.2 seems faster than the 3.1.4 release that comes with SUSE 9. The KDE Kicker panel is finally Xinerama friendly again, allowing the user to span multiple desktops with the Kicker panel if they wish to do so. The KDE 3.1 release forced a user to choose between desktops, and did not allow the Kicker to span both desktops. The KDE start menu has also changed slightly; it now includes built in separators between applications, "most used" applications (as determined by apps launched using the menu), and "actions." The KDE Menu Editor is largely unchanged from the 3.1.x release, however.

In previous releases of KDE, users could switch between virtual desktops by hovering the mouse cursor over the pager on the Kicker panel and scrolling with the mouse wheel. With the 3.2 release, users can enable the feature for the entire desktop -- so all a user needs to do is place the mouse cursor over an empty space on the desktop and use the scroll wheel to move between virtual desktops, which is an enormously useful feature for users with several applications spread over multiple desktops.

There are a few accessibility-related applications in 3.2 that might be of interest to users who have physical limitations. KMouseTool allows the user to set the mouse to left-click after a set period of time. This is useful for users with carpal tunnel syndrome, and may also be of interest to users with touchpads or other non-traditional pointing devices. KMouseTool also has a "smart drag" feature that takes a bit of getting used to. It allows the user to hover over a title bar or other window element for a set period of time and then drag the mouse as if the user were holding down the left button without actually requiring the user to use the button.

KDE 3.2 includes an improved KHotKeys, which now has support for mouse gestures. As a safety measure, the user must replicate a mouse gesture three times before they can assign an action to a mouse gesture. Users can also assign actions to hotkey combinations and other KDE events. I was able to use KHotKeys to assign hotkey combinations to launch applications, but wasn't successful in assigning a mouse gesture to an application. I may have been doing something incorrectly, but it was hard to tell, as the KHotKeys documentation was missing from the KDE Help Center.

Konqueror has a number of enhancements in 3.2 as well. First off, the rendering speed for Konqueror 3.2 is noticeably faster than for Konqueror 3.1.4. Konqueror also has built-in spell checking, which is a nice touch for anyone who uses a Web-based e-mail client, weblog client or any other situation where you might be entering text in a form on the Web. Folks using KDE 3.2 no longer have an excuse for poor spelling -- a quick spell check is just one right-click away. After using Konqueror about five minutes, I also discovered another new feature in KDE 3.2: integration with KWallet. KWallet is an application that stores passwords for websites, messaging applications like Kopete and other apps. One difference between KWallet and the Mozilla password feature, is that KWallet requires the user to enter a separate password to obtain the username/password combination for any given web page.

Web developers may find the Quanta 3.2 release interesting. It has a number of improvements, including "Visual Page Layout," which allows users to edit web pages in a WYSIWYG mode or a joint editing mode combining WYSIWYG and traditional text-editing. For users who prefer to edit HTML source directly, the joint mode offers the ability to immediately see changes rendered without removing the direct control over the HTML that many prefer. Quanta has quite a bit to offer, but it is still somewhat buggy. Quanta locked up a few times during testing, and the application consumed far more than its share of system resources during use.

With 3.2 KDE now has its own unified groupware suite, Kontact. Kontact bundles KMail, KOrganizer, KNotes, KNode and the KAddressBook applications. Right now, Kontact is a little rough around the edges, and definitely not quite as polished as its GNOME counterpart, Evolution. KNotes caused Kontact to lock up on more than one occasion. Kontact also lacks a unified configuration menu -- meaning that users still have to configure each application separately. However, KNotes aside, it seems to be a very usable and full-featured groupware suite. Unlike Evolution, Kontact does allow the user to de-integrate the suite as well. For example, if a user prefers to use a different e-mail client, they can disable KMail's integration and use Kontact without the KMail component.

Though it was released separately, I also looked at some of the KOffice 1.3 components. KOffice 1.3 includes all the usual office suite suspects, a word processor (KWord), spreadsheet (KSpread) and a presentation program (KPresenter). It also includes five other productivity applications, including Kivio for creating flowcharts and a vector drawing application called Karbon14. I didn't have time to test all of the office applications extensively, but I did test out KWord and KSpread using a few Microsoft Office docs. KSpread's import features have definitely improved, as have KWord's. However, KWord still had problems with some Microsoft Word documents that open fine in OpenOffice.org. KOffice 1.3 has been officially released and is available now.

Ever wonder what's taking up so much disk space? 3.2 includes an application called Filelight that generates an interactive graphical representation of your file system, or just part of the filesystem. For users with a large number of files, it may take some time. It took Filelight about three minutes to generate a map of all 305,184 files in my home directory. When a user drills down into the file map generated by Firelight, it's possible to open files that KDE has associations for. I stumbled on this feature by accident by clicking on an HTML file in the Filelight map. Unfortunately, Filelight doesn't offer the ability to delete files.

With a few notable exceptions, the 3.2rc1 release has proved to be very stable overall. It isn't a huge leap in functionality from the 3.1.x releases, but 3.2 includes enough refinements and new features to make the move from 3.1 to 3.2 well worth it. There are far too many improvements in 3.2 to go into here, but suffice it to say that KDE users are in for a treat when the final 3.2 release goes "gold." According to the release schedule, 3.2 final is slated to be released on Monday, February 2nd.

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   Use right-mouse-click on a file to get the Delete option.
   Use right-mouse-click on a directory to get the Recursive Delete option.