Blog: KDE 4.10 Released Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform

[menotu]

6-Feb-2013

KDE Software Compilation 4.10

The KDE Community proudly announces the latest releases of Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. With the 4.10 release, the premier collection of Free Software for home and professional use makes incremental improvements to a large number of applications, and offers the latest technologies.

Plasma Workspaces 4.10 Improve Mobile Device Support and Receive Visual Refinement

Several components of Plasma Workspaces have been ported to the Qt Quick/QML framework. Stability and usability have been improved. A new print manager and Color Management support have been introduced.

KDE Applications Improve Usability, Performance and Take You to Mars

KDE Applications gained feature enhancements to Kate, KMail and Konsole. KDE-Edu applications saw a complete overhaul of KTouch and many other changes. KDE Games introduced the new Picmi game and improvements throughout.

KDE Platform 4.10 Opens Up More APIs to Qt Quick

This release makes it easier to contribute to KDE with a Plasma SDK (Software Development Kit), the ability to write Plasma widgets and widget collections in the Qt Markup Language (QML), changes in the libKDEGames library, and new scripting capabilities in window manager KWin. The KDE Quality team organized a testing program for this release, assisting developers by identifying legitimate bugs and carefully testing the applications. Thanks to their work, KDE innovation and quality go hand in hand. If you are interested in the Quality Team and their work, check out The Quality Team wikipage.

The KDE Quality team organized a testing program for this release, assisting developers by identifying legitimate bugs and carefully testing the applications. Thanks to their work, KDE innovation and quality go hand in hand. If you are interested in the Quality Team and their work, check out The Quality Team wikipage.

Follow what is happening on the KDE live feed. This site aggregates real-time activity on identi.ca, twitter, youtube, flickr, picasaweb, blogs and other social networking sites. The live feed can be found on buzz.kde.org.

a testing program

The Quality Team wikipage

Live feed Buzz KDE

http://kde.org/announcements/4.10/

Take You to Mars

and see What's new with Nepomuk 4.10

[pinoc]

dropboxed.

no, joking, this will have to wait until at least 4.10.1 or more likely 4.10.2.
-p.

[menotu]

dropboxed.

no, joking, this will have to wait until at least 4.10.1 or more likely 4.10.2.
-p.

 

I was expecting that it would be the 4.10.1 (or .2) maintenance release, which, in my thinking is no bad thing

[menotu]

Seems that KDE 4.10.0 and QT (64bit) are causing problems for some users on different distros
============================================================

The dilfridge blog - Friday, February 8, 2013

KDE 4.10.0 plasma-desktop crashes and qt frustrations

While on my machine KDE 4.10.0 runs perfectly fine, unfortunately a lot of Gentoo users see immediate crashes of plasma-desktop - which makes the graphical desktop environment completely unuseable. We know more or less what happened in the meantime, just not how to properly fix it...
The problem:

    plasma-desktop uses a new code path in 4.10, which triggers a Qt bug leading to immediate SIGSEGV.
    The Qt bug only becomes fatal for some compiler options, and only on 64bit systems (amd64).
    The Qt bug may be a fundamental architectural problem that needs proper thought.

............................

The bugfixing situation:

    Reverting the commit to plasma-workspace that introduced the problem makes the crash go away, but plasma-desktop starts hogging 100% CPU after a while. (This is done in plasma-workspace-4.10.0-r1 as a stopgap measure.) Kinda makes sense since the commit was there to fix a problem - now we hit the original problem.

    The bug seems not to occur if Qt is compiled with CFLAGS="-Os". Cause unknown.

    David E. Narváez aka dmaggot wrote a patch for Qt that fixes this particular codepath but likely does not solve the global problem.

    So far comments from Qt upstream indicate that this is in their opinion not the right way to fix the problem.

    Our Gentoo Qt team understandably only wants to apply a patch if it has been accepted upstream.

Right now, the only option we (as Gentoo KDE team) have is wait for someone to pick up the phone. Either from KDE (to properly use the old codepath or provide some alternative), or from Qt (to fix the bug or apply a workaround)...

http://dilfridge.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/kde-4100-plasma-desktop-crashes-and-qt.html

[menotu]

Lots of comments about KDE 4.10.0 in the following blog
===================================

By Thomas Capricelli - February 10, 2013

Yet another KDE QA failure

http://www.freehackers.org/thomas/2013/02/10/yet-another-kde-qa-failure/

[KernelKarter]

Tried it on another distro and it's ohhhh, soooo, sloooooooooow!

-- Eddie

[AndrzejL]

Well I find it fast and stable...



Regards.

Andrzej

[muungwana]

Well I find it fast and stable...



Regards.

Andrzej

Do you have nepomuk enabled? I have experienced this crush on startup and had to turn it off

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314589

[AndrzejL]

Well I find it fast and stable...



Regards.

Andrzej

Do you have nepomuk enabled? I have experienced this crush on startup and had to turn it off

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=314589

I always disable akonadi and nepomuk as I do not find any use for them.

Regards.

Andrzej

[menotu]

sebasgo - Mar 2nd, 2013

February Update for KTouch

I have expected the February to become a month full of bug fixing because of the the KTouch’s release at the beginning of the month, but I haven’t received a single valid bug report to date.1 Well, except ones which will be addressed by the the feature I have been busy working on instead.

Lesson Rendering Evolved

or KTouch 2.0 I have employed a rather simply approach to paint the current training line: for each character of the current line KTouch instantiates a dedicated QML Text item. This way it was easy to apply the styling for the individual states any character can have: placeholder text, typed text, contains a tying error and finally beeing part of the pre-edit text of some input methods. It also allowed my to implement the training screen very fast and works well for for Western languages with their simple Latin alphabet.

But this technique shows its deficiencies when used for more complex scripts like Arabic or Thai. Because of use of individual Text items for each character it’s impossible to draw typographic ligatures. Both of the aforementioned languages rely heavily on them: Arabic joins most letters of a word together, Thai often stacks consecutive letters on top of each other. And for the former it doesn’t help either that KTouch currently can’t do right-to-left training.

With these issues it is clear KTouch needs new lesson rendering engine.

As of now the new engine is already nearly completed and fixes all the problems outlined above, only a few minor features compared to the old engine and some general code cleanup are missing. When these are done I will push the changes to the KTouch’s central Git repository.

The new engine is now written in C++ as a new custom declarative type. Actually the old and the new approach doesn’t differ that much technically: both my custom type and the stock QML Text element leverage a QTextDocument to do the actual text rendering, the difference is only that my component gives me the control over it which I need. And that I now use only one single declarative item for the whole lesson text instead of one per character of the active line and one for each other line.



As one can see it is now possible to properly train on Arabic lessons, even though the alignment of the training text is still incorrect.2

One nice side effect of doing all the painting in C++ is that it gives exact control over the font rendering. KTouch uses scaled font rendering to fit the lesson text into the viewport. In this case it’s important to disable hinting at least horizontally, because the rendering hints are calculated before scaling and this results in letter-spacing. I consider bad letter-spacing to be a major nuisance, so I was happy being finally able address this issue in the new C++ component.



The first line shows the old, fully hinted font rendering, the second the new font rendering where only vertical hinting is applied. As one can easily observe the letters in the second line are much more evenly spaced out.

    This either means there are really no issues (rather unlikely) or the existing issues don’t get reported. So if you experience problems with KTouch please don’t hesitate to report them. ↩

    Although the training part of the application has now no problems with right-to-left rendering, the rest of the application has still issues with it. But those are small and easy fix compared to the trainer and will be taken care of soon.

http://blog.sebasgo.net/blog/2013/03/02/february-update-for-ktouch/

[menotu]

5-March-2013
 
KDE Ships March Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform  (4.10.1)

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. These updates are the first in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.1 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended updates for everyone running the initial 4.10 releases. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

The over 100 recorded bugfixes include improvements to the Personal Information Management suite Kontact, the Window Manager KWin, and others. KDE's Development Platform has received a number of updates that affect multiple applications. The changes are listed on KDE's issue tracker. For a detailed list of changes that went into 4.10.1, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs.

To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.10.1 Info Page. If you want to find out more about the 4.10 versions of KDE Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform, please refer to the 4.10 release notes.



KDE software, including all libraries and applications, is available for free under Open Source licenses. KDE's software can be obtained as source code and various binary formats from http://download.kde.org or from any of the major GNU/Linux and UNIX systems shipping today.

Full blog and links

[AndrzejL]

As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

Yup... It's definitely pleasant.



Regards.

Andrzej

[menotu]

2-April-2013
 
KDE Ships April Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform  (4.10.2)

Today KDE released updates for its Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform. These updates are the second in a series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.2 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended updates for everyone running the 4.10 release series. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

The over 100 recorded bugfixes include improvements to the Personal Information Management suite Kontact, the Window Manager KWin, and others. KDE's Development Platform has received a number of updates that affect multiple applications. The changes are listed on KDE's issue tracker. For a detailed list of changes that went into 4.10.2, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs.

To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.10.2 Info Page. If you want to find out more about the 4.10 versions of KDE Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform, please refer to the 4.10 release notes.

KDE software, including all libraries and applications, is available for free under Open Source licenses. KDE's software can be obtained as source code and various binary formats from http://download.kde.org or from any of the major GNU/Linux and UNIX systems shipping today.

Installing 4.10.2 Binary Packages

Packages. Some Linux/UNIX OS vendors have kindly provided binary packages of 4.10.2 for some versions of their distribution, and in other cases community volunteers have done so. 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 4.10.2 Info Page.

Compiling 4.10.2

The complete source code for 4.10.2 may be freely downloaded. Instructions on compiling and installing 4.10.2 are available from the 4.10.2 Info Page.

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.10.2.php

[menotu]

May 7, 2013

KDE Ships May Updates to Plasma Workspaces, Applications and Platform (4.10.3)

These updates continue the series of monthly stabilization updates to the 4.10 series. 4.10.3 updates bring many bugfixes and translation updates on top of the 4.10 release and are recommended updates for everyone running the 4.10 release series. As this release only contains bugfixes and translation updates, it will be a safe and pleasant update for everyone.

The over 75 recorded bugfixes include improvements to the Personal Information Management suite Kontact, the Window Manager KWin, and others. The changes are listed on KDE's issue tracker. For a detailed list of changes that went into 4.10.3, you can browse the Subversion and Git logs.

To download source code or packages to install go to the 4.10.3 Info Page. If you want to find out more about the 4.10 versions of KDE Workspaces, Applications and Development Platform, please refer to the 4.10 release notes.

http://www.kde.org/announcements/announce-4.10.3.php