KDE 4.3 Beta 1 Release Announcement
KDE 4.3 Beta 1 Out For Testing
KDE Community Ships First Beta Version of KDE 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Many New Features and Improvements
May 13th, 2009. The
KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 Beta 1, the first 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. The KDE team is now in bugfixing mode in order to provide a smooth KDE 4.3.0 to end users in late July.
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 1 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.
The tree mode and the default icon mode in System Settings
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
Peeking into directories in Plasma and, formatting options in the notes applet and the translatoid
Note that the changelog is usually incomplete, for a complete list of changes that went into KDE 4.3 Beta1, 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 Beta1 Binary Packages
Packagers. Some Linux/UNIX OS vendors have kindly provided binary packages of KDE 4.3 Beta 1 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 Beta1 Info Page.
Compiling KDE 4.3 Beta1 (a.k.a. 4.2.85)
The complete source code for KDE 4.3 Beta1 may be
freely downloaded. Instructions on compiling and installing KDE 4.3 Beta1 are available from the
KDE 4.3 Beta1 Info Page.
