Some KDE news

The last days several news around KDE were published. Most notable was the release of KDE 3.5.7 and a new article of Troy Unrau’s “Road to KDE 4.

The release of KDE 3.5.7 marks another maintainance release of the KDE 3.x branch. It covers mainly bugfixes, but also some improvements like better IMAP support of kmail and a new kdevelop version. I haven’t tested it yet since there are no packages for Fedora 7 – everyone is busy preparing the v7 release, I guess.
Anyway, this might be the last big release of KDE 3.x before KDE 4 comes into a usable shape – usable in the way of beta versions many people will try. But we might also see additional maintainance releases. Especially enterprise users are unlikely to upgrade their KDE to KDE 4 anytime soon and will most likely continue using KDE 3.x for years – a KDE 3.x version just got a usability certificate in Munich, for example.
Therefore I wouldn’t be surprised to see more maintainance release over the time even after the release of KDE 4, with bugfixes and of course security fixes (if necessary).

Besides the KDE 3.5.7 release Troy Unrau released yet another article in his famous series, this time featuring konsole. The article compares the new features in konsole to the old KDE 3.x version of konsole – and even shows a screenshot of a very early version
However, Troy forgot somehow to mention that one of the most notable features of the new konsole will be the Firefox like search bar.

Anyhow, one last thing about KDE news: in the last commit digest there was one commit which got my attention:

Stephen Leaf committed changes in /trunk/KDE/kdebase/workspace/kcontrol/kdm:
Implement KNewStuff2 for Themes

This is nothing really new since it was clear that knewstuff will be featured almost everywhere – but this commit is a very good example that is already totally natural to have knewstuff inclusion. With KDE 4 it really becomes part of the desktop in every way which is a huge benefit compared to other DEs. I don’t know of comparable functions in other DEs or operating systems.

X.Org-ATI driver news

In a recent blog entry the developer airlied gave an update about the current development state of the X.Org drivers for ATI cards. After the next vesion 6.7 randr-1.2 support will be integrated.

While everyone is waiting for more details about AMD’s driver fixes the X.Org developers for the ATI drivers are not sleeping either. The developer airlied announced a pre-release to the next version of the drivers and also outlined the current road map.

The next version, 6.7, will be aimed at the X.Org server version 1.3 – remember: the X.Org server has another version scheme and release schedule as the complete X.Org package. This driver will not contain randr 1.2 support – unfortunately, because I have an ATI card – but soon after the release the driver development team will focus on merging the randr 1.2 support.

According to another post by airlied, the new drivers are already in an at least early usable state. There are comments indicating that there are people out there running the new radeon driver with RandR 1.2 support already.

Ha, I can’t wait to get that on my computer. In the meantime I wonder what ATI will do about the new RandR – and when the will start integrating AIGLX support…