KDE 4.3 RC1 Out For Testing

KDE Community Ships Release Candidate of KDE 4.3 Free Desktop, Containing Many New Features and Improvements

July 1st, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC1, a release candidate 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. Compared to the Beta releases, this release candidate now contains the new Air theme, which will be the default for KDE 4.3.0. Air is a theme lighter than Oxygen, which ist still available as an option through the "Desktop Settings" dialog.
KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages. After the second beta, the focus is now on ironing out the last problems with KDE 4.3.0, to be released at the end of this month.

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

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

• 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

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 RC1 Binary Packages

Packagers. Some Linux/UNIX OS vendors have kindly provided binary packages of KDE 4.3 RC1 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 RC1 Info Page.

Compiling KDE 4.3 RC1 (a.k.a. 4.2.95)

The complete source code for KDE 4.3 RC1 may be freely downloaded. Instructions on compiling and installing KDE 4.3 RC1 are available from the KDE 4.3 RC1 Info Page.

Supporting KDE

KDE is a Free Software community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information.