The MASTER KDE CE update thread!

[Rob Brill]

I second that

regards,
Roberto

[AK Dave]

I disagree.

I read the above announcement and I think "Cool; progress!"

Its like when you wake up from a nap on a 7hr plane flight and hear the engine noise lower in pitch, you know as a seasoned traveller that the flight crew just throttled back a little to sync themselves into the arrival queue. You know its just a matter of another agonizing indefinate time period drenched in sweat and wedged in a window seat next to some smelly widebody before the plane lands and you can start working your legs and avoid deep vein thromboses; you dreamily imagine in the meantime your seat companion developing said thromboses and keeling over somewhere, you smile, and the thought makes the time float by pleasantly.

Yeah: "Cool; progress!"

[clem]

I formulated my desire to follow the plan below:

Friday 18/07 --> XFCE CE RC1
Friday 25 /07--> KDE CE RC1
Friday 01/08 --> XFCE CE
Friday 08/08 --> KDE CE

I'm waiting on the team to tell me if this is realistic. I've taken over both CEs from now (B23 for XFCE and B41 for KDE) for the very simple reason that at this stage Exploder is happy with them and I only have tiny changes to make so I may as well make them myself. I'll submit XFCE B25 to Exploder tomorrow morning, and KDE B42 (or b43 depending on my own testing) a few days later. If he's happy with them and if the team is happy with the dates above we should be able to stick to them. As always, it will be released "when ready" so don't take these dates too seriously.. but here's the latest news on this anyway.

Clem.

[clem]

By the way, Boo has been working like mad on this one.. he started very early on it, released a lot of internal betas to the team, very often, and has been fixing issues until BETA 41 (which I think was uploaded yesterday). A huge amount of work went into this CE. I'm quite disappointed that the QT frontends and PulseAudio were dropped but we should still see a very nice release.

Clem.

[Zwopper]

Good news!

[big_dog1968]

I'm quite disappointed that the QT frontends and PulseAudio were dropped but we should still see a very nice release.
Clem.

What does this mean? I keep hearing about pulse audio, and when I looked it up, it appeared to be a synthesizer or something. Is it more meaningful than that? Also, am I to assume that QT front ends would mean a more integrated look or does the lack mean somewhat less functionality. As you can tell I am a less techinical user, so those statements were unclear to me.

Also, if these are important to you/us, can they be added as an update later?

Thanks for all you do.

[yhtomitwebb]

What does this mean? I keep hearing about pulse audio, and when I looked it up, it appeared to be a synthesizer or something. Is it more meaningful than that? Also, am I to assume that QT front ends would mean a more integrated look or does the lack mean somewhat less functionality. As you can tell I am a less techinical user, so those statements were unclear to me.

Also, if these are important to you/us, can they be added as an update later?

Pulse audio is a sound server, it is a relatively new thing that was included in LM 5 Main edition.
It is a very useful thing ( networked sound, aplication specific volume control ,etc) but it is also very new and has it's own bugs.
more about pulse audio: http://www.pulseaudio.org/

QT is the UI toolkit that KDE uses. You were basically right in that a QT front end would mean a more integrated look, the lack of should not change the functionality.

Hope that makes sense

Tim

[akshunj]

PulseAudio brought awesome sound server functionality to Gnome, but it sounds like integrating it with KDE is tougher due to the hooks that aRTs has into everything. aRTs is the KDE sound server. It's not as functional as PulseAudio, but it's been around for years and everything seems to rely on it. And it's not *that* bad. Certainly not as bad as Esound for Gnome...

--Akshun J

[big_dog1968]

PulseAudio brought awesome sound server functionality to Gnome, but it sounds like integrating it with KDE is tougher due to the hooks that aRTs has into everything. aRTs is the KDE sound server. It's not as functional as PulseAudio, but it's been around for years and everything seems to rely on it. And it's not *that* bad. Certainly not as bad as Esound for Gnome...

--Akshun J

So is this an issue with Kubuntu as well?

[67GTA]

It has been buggy for Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Mint, and any other distro that actually picked it up in their last release. If you only use basic sound functions such as listening to music, watching movies, playing games, etc., then you will never use it to it's full potential anyway.

[Cubby]

Thanks for keeping at it! I for one recently had one day trial of the latest kubuntu and adept package manager brought up the kde crash window whenever my dial-up conntection would get cut off (my ISP usually only gives you 5 hours connection time before cutting you off) and this would give the kde crash window. I would then try to get the updates and it would start all over again, not remembering what had been downloaded. That, and it was also default set to retrieve source, which to me isn't a good idea, but it was kubuntu for 64 bit, don't know if that was the reason package repositories was also set to source.

Anyway, one day later I received LINUX Mint Elyssa rev. 1 via my husband and it is so nice! But, I miss my KDE destop, so I'm patiently looking forward to this outcome. I stopped using KDE Daryna when I kept getting a speedstep centrino error after doing updates, which I ignored, unti I received Mint Elyssa and had to try it out.

Thank you for taking the time with this!

[akshunj]

It has been buggy for Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Mint, and any other distro that actually picked it up in their last release. If you only use basic sound functions such as listening to music, watching movies, playing games, etc., then you will never use it to it's full potential anyway.

I have actually not experienced any issues in Mint main edition with Pulse Audio. I use it on my laptop to switch sound between the built-in speakers and a set of external USB speakers. This is especially cool for flash content like Hulu. The ability to move streams between devices and control the volume of individual applications is phenomenal. So, I would say that for everyday ordinary use (music, movies, stuff that 67GTA talks about), Pulse is a winner. If you're using your sound card for something more advanced (maybe podcasting, Skypeing, etc) I don't know how Pulse will perform.

I think the difficulty with Pulse was integrating it into desktop environments where a native sound server was present. In Gnome, I know that Pulse relies on some sort of abstraction layer that catches calls to a sound server and routes them wherever it is directed. If you have Pulse, the calls go to Pulse. No Pulse, then they go to Esound. I think the goal was to use the abstraction layer so that you could just drop Pulse into Gnome, and it would "just work" without modifications to any of the multimedia apps. In KDE, I think there is a higher dependency on aRts (KDE's sound server) by the multimedia apps, and the two servers don't play well together. I read this in an article a few months ago. In the end, I think Pulse will end up dominant in Gnome, but not KDE. The KDE guys seems to be on their own plan...

--Akshun J

[Cubby]

Did I read somewhere correctly that aRts will be dropped in the future? I can't remember where I read about it. " aRts is designed to provide its filter and synthesis capabilities to other applications using the multimedia communication protocol (MCOP)." from freshmeat.net

http://multimedia.kde.org/

[67GTA]

It was dropped in KDE4, but I haven't kept up with what has replaced it because I can't stand using plasma. I've stayed with KDE3.

[Cubby]

I had to see what you meant by Plasma, and when I saw the icon for it, I recognized it right away as I had tried out Fedora 9 KDE version just this past week which has kde 4 installed. Funny, I would have never guessed the fine folks at KDE to go this route, but would have thought the Gnome folks to be the first, unless they have something similar that I don't know about. I have another computer, an apple iMac intel osx and it has what seems to me to be an uncontrollable moving thing that twirls around and you can see through it. Reminds me of some of the stuff my husband works on in CAD. I don't like it. It is a cross between Las Vegas at night and trying to remove an air bubble from a water bed.

[akshunj]

FYI, for those who don't check the blog. It looks like a critical bug has been discovered and the KDE CE release has been postponed.

http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=224

[AK Dave]

Thanks, akshunj. I don't check the blog. I don't plan to make a habit of checking the blog. I check this thread. I thought thats what this thread was for.

[hamburn]

FYI, for those who don't check the blog. It looks like a critical bug has been discovered and the KDE CE release has been postponed.

http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=224

But, but.... yesterday I found it on the servers. Downloaded it and here I'm, playing around happily with
Linux Mint 5 KDE CE Beta 44.
Now I have to back up my data from Suse and can install Mint again on the whole harddrive.
And it works, better than the Suse 11, I've used the last weeks.
Guys of Mint you are geniuses, thank you for the work.
One flaw I found. The mailto:command in Firefox is linked to Evolution as default.

[locutus]

But, but.... yesterday I found it on the servers. Downloaded it and here I'm, playing around happily with
Linux Mint 5 KDE CE Beta 44.

Geez. you had my hopes up there for a moment, but it's not there now
If perhaps I'm looking in the wrong spot, please post the link!

I understand Mint's reluctance to release something that's not quite perfect, but this is Beta, after all. If theres a bug (international languages, I think?), so what? Release it with a "known issues" disclaimer so the rest of us can try it. Maybe it'll be otherwise perfect, maybe not and we'll have more testers to hunt for more bugs before 5-Final is released (and maybe avoid Gnome 5's oops with one of the tools).

[kanishka]

I understand Mint's reluctance to release something that's not quite perfect, but this is Beta, after all. If theres a bug (international languages, I think?), so what? Release it with a "known issues" disclaimer so the rest of us can try it. Maybe it'll be otherwise perfect, maybe not and we'll have more testers to hunt for more bugs before 5-Final is released (and maybe avoid Gnome 5's oops with one of the tools).

I absolutely agree, it's not a showstopper bug for a Beta; release it anyway, so the community will find any other bugs sooner!