Friday, June 11, 2010

:: KDE-4.5Beta2 ::

Hello there! Long time I don't show up, huh?

Today I am posting about kde-4.5Beta2, which was released this week. Why posting about a beta version of KDE? Well, this might help some people understand the evolution of this version (4.5) or some people, who are trying the beta, will be able to find out that (s)he isn't the only one suffering with some bug.

First impressions:

KDE-4.5 is getting nicer. I didn't spot all the new features, but some which called my attention:
  1. Now you can set the calendar to show you special dates/holidays. Just configure it to show the dates of your location (Brazil in my case) and you are done;
  2. New desktop effects;
  3. New window decorations;
"Bah, only that?"

No, I believe there is more. I just didn't have time to mess around more deeply ;)

Problems found:

Yes, it has problems/bugs. Remember, IT IS A BETA VERSION. It is supposed to not be ready and stable. That said... a problem I found (and many other users also) is that plasma-desktop is not enjoying keeping the configurations you will do (or have done). You set up your wallpaper, place some widgets on the desktop... and when you restart KDE (or simply plasma-desktop) the default wallpaper is back and the widgets have been moved to "another dimension". Yes, another dimension because the widgets were not removed. They are somewhere you can touch them. I even tried removing the plasma-desktop config file, to no avail.

I found out there is a bug report open about this, and as far as I read, this problem is fixed on the SVN. So you can either download and compile the SVN version, or you wait for the next Beta (or perhaps a RC version).

I had a problem with kwalletmanager on my computer at home, when I first tried kde-4.5beta2. But I didn't have that when I installed it on my work PC. It might have something to do with my '.kde/' at home. On the second time I ran kde-4.5beta2 the problem was gone.

Well, I will report more as soon as I find more insteresting news (be them good or bad).