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KDE

Does the Linux Desktop Innovate Too Much? 542

Posted by kdawson from the billg-at-least-pretended-users-demanded-innovation dept.
jammag writes "The Linux desktop has seen major innovation of late, with KDE 4 launching new features, GNOME announcing a new desktop, and Ubuntu embarking on a redesign campaign. But Linux pundit Bruce Byfield asks, do average users really want any of these things? He points to instances of user backlash, and concludes 'Free software is still driven by developers working on what interests or concerns them. The problem is, the days when users of free software were also its developers are long gone, but the habits of those days remain. The result is that developers function far too much in isolation from their user base.' Byfield suggests that the answer could be more user testing."
Red Hat Software

Fedora 11 Is Now Available 195

Posted by timothy from the one-louder dept.
rexx mainframe writes "Fedora 11 is now available on BitTorrent. Fedora 11 offers ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3's latest pre-releases are available as well. Fedora 11 features Presto, a yum plugin that reduces bandwidth consumption drastically by downloading only binary differences between updates. It also features Openchange for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange. There are new security enhancements, improved and upgraded development tools, and cutting-edge features in areas such as virtualization."
KDE

KDE 4.2.4 Released 153

Posted by timothy from the smoothing-a-smoothie dept.
An anonymous reader writes "KDE 4.2.4 has been released. See the release announcement for details." Barring a "security issue or another grave bug," this is the end of the KDE 4.2 line, which means for distros based on long-term support, it might be the thing to get used to for a while.
KDE

KDevelop4 Beta 3 Released 59

Posted by timothy from the grind-your-own-gears dept.
mikesd81 writes "KDE announced on May 30th the third public beta of KDevelop4. Some new features include a new code-writing assistant, a new documentation plugin showing you the API docs for Qt and KDE APIs, a reworked Mercurial plugin, and a rewrite of the classbrowser plugin. Two plugins from the KDevelop source, QMake support and Qt Designer integration, were let go and moved to the KDE Playground area."
Operating Systems

Is ext4 Stable For Production Systems? 289

Posted by Soulskill from the work-in-progress dept.
dr_dracula writes "Earlier this year, the ext4 filesystem was accepted into the Linux kernel. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that some applications, such as KDE, were at risk of losing files when used on top of ext4. This was diagnosed as a rift between the design of the ext4 filesystem and the design of applications running on top of ext4. The crux of the problem was that applications were relying on ext3-specific behavior for flushing data to disk, which ext4 was not following. Recent kernel releases include patches to address these issues. My questions to the early adopters of ext4 are about whether the patches have performed as expected. What is your overall feeling about ext4? Do you think is solid enough for most users to trust it with their data? Did you find any significant performance improvements compared to ext3? Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?"
KDE

KOffice 2.0.0 Now Open For Firefox-Like Extensions 165

Posted by CmdrTaco from the i-got-yer-extension-right-here dept.
jakeb writes "After a massive three-year development effort KOffice 2.0.0 has been released (packages for Kubuntu are available) aiming to be a lightweight, cross-platform office suite that supports third-party apps and extensions. With its new design (everything, including the core components, is a module) and bindings, you don't need to know C++ to hack on KOffice, as extensions can be written in Python or Java, among others. TechWorld has an interview with KOffice marketing coordinator Inge Wallin about the vision for an easy-to-use office suite that supports click-to-install extensions like Firefox. Will this be the key to KOffice rising above all other free office suites? The KOffice devs think so. An online repository of extensions, templates, and content for KOffice? I like the sound of that."
GUI

Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD 75

Posted by timothy from the progress-in-unexpected-places dept.
Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."
Programming

Qt Opens Source Code Repositories 230

Posted by timothy from the good-news-on-a-few-fronts dept.
sobral writes "Following the announcement of the LGPL license model, since yesterday the Qt source code repositories are open to the public together with their roadmap. The contribution model is online and will enable developers from the community to submit patches through a single click process, avoiding the previous hassle of sending in signed paperwork. The code is hosted at qt.gitorious.org and an instant benefit of this launch is that Qt Software has been working together with Gitorious maintainers for the last four months to improve Gitorious and all these new features are already submitted upstream."
Announcements

FreeBSD 7.2 Released 204

Posted by timothy from the quite-up-to-date dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: Support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory; Support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails; csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository; Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2; Sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list." Adds another anonymous reader, "You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors or via BitTorrent. There is also a quick review of the new features and upgrade instructions."
KDE

Social Desktop Starts To Arrive In KDE 199

Posted by Soulskill from the there-are-little-people-in-my-computer dept.
FrankKarlitschek writes "At last year's KDE Conference Akademy, the vision of the Social Desktop was born and first presented to a larger audience. The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide group of contributors and users who believe in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making the sharing and exchanging of knowledge (PDF) easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself. One of the ideas was to place a widget on the desktop where users can find other KDE users in the same city or region, making it possible to connect to these people; to contact them and collaborate. If a user is starting KDE for the first time, he has questions. At the moment, a lot of the support for KDE users is provided through forums and mailing lists. Users have to start up a browser and search for answers for their questions or problems. The community is relatively loosely connected; it is spread all over the web, and it is often hard to verify the usefulness and accuracy of the information found somewhere out on the web. Although it works relatively well for experienced users, beginners often get lost."
Mandriva

Mandriva 2009 Spring Released 96

Posted by timothy from the great-distro-but-mandrake-was-a-cooler-name dept.
Frederik writes "Mandriva just released the 2009 Spring version of its distribution. Highlights of this new version include vastly improved boot times thanks to Speedboot, KDE 4.2.2, GNOME 2.26.1, XFCE 4.6 and LXDE desktop environments, a completely rewritten Mandriva Security Centre and improved firewall and network configuration tools, OLPC Sugar environment, QT Creator development environment, Songbird audio player, ext4 support and many more. Check out the release tour and release notes for more information or immediately start downloading it."
Debian

Ubuntu 9.04 Is As Slick As Win7, Mac OS X 871

Posted by kdawson from the continuous-improvement dept.
An anonymous reader writes in with an opinion piece from ZDNet Australia. "Here's what the official press release won't tell you about Ubuntu 9.04, which formally hit the streets yesterday: its designers have polished the hell out of its user interface since the last release in October. Just like Microsoft has taken the blowtorch to Vista to produce the lightning-quick Windows 7, which so far runs well even on older hardware, Ubuntu has picked up its own game."
Upgrades

PC-BSD 7.1 Released With Integrated Software Manager 81

Posted by kdawson from the new-bits dept.
Death Metal writes "PC-BSD 7.1 is built upon the FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE operating system. FreeBSD is a UNIX-based operating system that provides a high level of security and stability. The Galileo Edition of PC-BSD includes updated versions of KDE (4.2.2) and Xorg (7.4). The latest version of KDE includes new window effects, screen savers, and better 3D Acceleration. PC-BSD exclusively features the Push Button Installer, a software installation wizard with a wide range of applications. The latest version improves PBI self-containment to increase reliability. The Add / Remove Programs tool and the Update Manager have been consolidated into 'Software & Updates.'"
Upgrades

First Look At Fedora 11 Beta Release 205

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the shiny-bits-for-playing-with dept.
Ars Technica has a first look at the latest beta release from the Fedora universe and it has several new shiny-bits including kernel modesetting, ext4, and faster boot times. "Fedora 11, which is codenamed Leonidas, is scheduled for final release at the end of May. It will include several new features and noteworthy improvements, such as RPM 4.7, which will reduce the memory consumption of complex package activity, tighter integration of PackageKit, faster boot time with a target goal of 20 seconds, and reduced power consumption thanks to a major tuning effort. This version of Fedora will ship with the latest version of many popular open source software programs, including GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, and Xfce 4.6. This will also be the first Fedora release — and possibly the first mainstream distro release — to use the new Ext4 filesystem by default.
KDE

Attempting To Reframe "KDE Vs. GNOME" 455

Posted by kdawson from the evolution-revolution dept.
jammag writes "Setting aside the now tired debate about whether KDE or GNOME is the 'better' Linux desktop, Bruce Byfield compares their disparate development approaches and asks, not which desktop is subjectively better, but which developmental approach is likely to be most successful in the next few years. 'In the short term, GNOME's gradualism seems sensible. But, in the long-term, it could very well mean continuing to be dragged down by support for legacy sub-systems. It means being reduced to an imitator rather than innovator.' In contrast, 'you could say that KDE has done what's necessary and ripped the bandage off the scab. In the short term, the result has been a lot of screaming, but, in the long term, it has done what was necessary to thrive.'"
KDE

KDE Project Invites Ideas With Online Brainstorm 131

Posted by timothy from the gnome-project-has-telepathy dept.
ruphus13 writes "In addition to working with the community for source code, KDE is looking to democratize idea creation and innovation via its new initiative called KDE Brainstorm. The initiative, which attempts to further decentralize roadmap decision-making by allowing popular ideas to be voted up, is outlined here: 'The KDE team recently announced the KDE Brainstorm initiative. KDE Brainstorm, in practice, works much like Dell's IdeaStorm — community members of all walks of life are invited to chip in their ideas for new and improved features and functions, with the wider community voting on (and fleshing out) these ideas. Ideas that generate enough interest are then reviewed further by developers, who work to make them happen. KDE Brainstorm officially rolled out March 20th, and the response over these first few days has been enthusiastic. In less than 24 hours, over 100 new ideas were proposed.'"
Data Storage

Apps That Rely On Ext3's Commit Interval May Lose Data In Ext4 830

Posted by timothy from the heavy-trade-off dept.
cooper writes "Heise Open posted news about a bug report for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) which describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4 (German version): A crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded results in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files." The article mentions that similar losses can come from some other modern filesystems, too. Update: 03/11 21:30 GMT by T : Headline clarified to dispel the impression that this was a fault in Ext4.
Cellphones

Gnome, KDE, LXDE, IceWM All Working On Android 194

Posted by timothy from the options-are-good dept.
dooberrymctavish writes "Ghostwalker over at AndroidFanatic has gone and done it again; now he's released clear and concise instructions on how to get X11 server running on your Android device. Not only that, but he has successfully gotten LXDE, and IceWM running at a pace. There is even a photo with the instructions showing the LXDE desktop running right there on the device itself. Apparently, you can also VNC straight onto the phone's new desktop from your PC."
Education

350,000 Linux (Virtual) Desktops Land In Brazil 109

Posted by timothy from the rip-helio-gracie dept.
xufem writes "Millions of Brazilian schoolchildren will soon be 'brought up right' running Linux on over 350,000 seats each using PC sharing hardware and software from Userful and KDE. This is world's largest virtual desktop deployment and probably also the world's largest Linux deployment, and seems to have been selected over OLPC by Brazil. Definitely a moment to celebrate — and just in time for Brazilian Carnival which starts tomorrow!"
Security

Malware Threat To GNOME and KDE 348

Posted by timothy from the turducken dept.
commandlinegamer writes "foobar posted on his blog recently about 'How to write a Linux virus in 5 easy steps,' detailing potential malware infection risks in the .desktop file format used by GNOME and KDE. This is not a new threat, and it appears to still be a risk, as discussions in 2006 did not seem to come to any firm conclusion on how to deal with the problem." There's a followup on LWN.

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