KDE 4.1 feature plan and release schedule published, KDE 4.0.1 tagged

The full release plan and the feature plan for KDE 4.1 have been published, with the official release date July 29th, 2008. In the meantime, the first bugfix release of the new KDE, KDE 4.0.1, was tagged.

KDE 4.1 release plan and schedule

After the initial announcement to release KDE 4.1 in July this year there is now a full release plan available. According to the plan, the first important date will be the end of March: at March 31st, 2008, trunk will be closed for new features. The development of the already added (but just not ready) features will still be possible, even with binary incompatibility, but new features will have to wait for KDE 4.2 afterwards. The first real freeze will be at April 22nd, 2008: everything which is not basically ready until then has will not be included. After that the usual dance of Alphas, Betas and Release Candidates will begin, until KDE 4.1 final will hopefully be released at July 29th, 2008.

The current expected and planned features for that release are listed in Techbase under Release Goals, while the current status of these features is monitored at the Feature Plan page. These lists are not final yet, however they do resemble the already well known lists flying around the blogosphere.

The remaining question is which distributions will pick up this new release first: maybe OpenSuse 11.0 will ship it as a preliminary version with final updates shortly after the 11.0 release, but that was just mentioned with a big maybe. The other distributions which have releases in Fall 2008 (like Fedora which will have its 10th release at that point) will for sure include it – or maybe even the first bugfix version, 4.1.1. In any way, in Fall 2008 every larger Linux distribution will most likely ship KDE in a 4.1 version.
Also, since this is a big aim for the KDE 4.1 release, packages for two other “distributions” will be available: Windows and Mac OS X. I’m looking forward to equip my windows friends with Amarok, Akonadi-kmail/kontact and Dolphin (to replace Norton Commander).

KDE 4.0.1 tagged

In the meantime, the first bugfix release for the KDE 4 series was tagged: KDE 4.0.1. The changelog for this version can be seen in an XML file (or at this web page), and the multitude of entries shows that the developers were indeed working quite hard. Since these are only bugfixed and are not supposed to brake anything or to introduce new features it can be expeceted that the distributions will ship this update pretty soon.

NetworkManager enterprise encryption (Eduroam style) works again

NetworkManager was recently updated in Fedora 8. The newest version now works well again with a specific but widely used enterprise encryption method.

One of the major regressions in Fedora 8 was that the new NetworkManager was not working with a specific encryption method used by the European Eduroam (wlan) project. This network uses a certificate based TKIP-TTLS-PAP encryption system to allow or deny access to wireless university networks across Europe and is therefore at home at almost all larger universities in Europe (and Australia, btw.).

The proper solution to handle that situation was to configure wpa_supplicant manually or to run other tools or home-made scripts.

Two days ago, after more than two months, an update of libnl required a rebuild of NetworkManager and libdhcp as well. And with these updates, the login works again without any further problem.

It is not entirely clear why the bug is now fixed but it looks like the libnl package had some serious problems which might have caused the problem. I hope that NetworkManager soon reaches a state were all promised 0.7-features are available – and where I have a KDE gui to configure them

While the issue is solved the bug itself raises some valid questions: If the bug hit all Eduroam users, which are mostly students or academic people which have a high percentage of Linux users, why did so few people care? Is it because most European users don’t use Fedora but Opensuse, Mandriva or Ubuntu which all did not ship that specific NetwokManager version?
Or did the system work for most people and failed only for some odd reason for me and a couple of others? Strange in any case.

KDE 4.1 – release team aims at July 2008

The official KDE 4.0 release event is going on at the moment. Among the hot topics at that event is the release schedule for KDE 4.1, which now targets July this year.

While the official release schedule and plan for KDE 4.1 is still marked as “Nothing has been decided yet” the first information from the KDE 4.0 release event about the next bigger KDE release already surfaced elsewhere: German IT news Golem.de reported about an e-mail by Sebastian Kügler to the KDE release list about the next release.

In this e-mail Sebastian summarized past discussions regarding the release schedule and mentioned that the majority of developers would like to have a fixed 6 month cycle. Everything which would be ready by freeze time would be included, the rest would go into the next bigger release. This idea was already raised at the last KDE conference but was dismissed at that time due to the difficult situation of KDE 4.0. But the fact is that KDE 3.x already had a more or less stable release cycle anyway, and that such a system has a lot of tempting advantages (but of course also disadvantages which have to be addressed carefully).

Now the discussion was brought up again by Sebastian and most developers had no strong objections against that idea. Of course such a cycle can only be accepted if the major circumstances like a sufficient Qt 4.4 release will be available and integrated, by it was already checked that that would be the case. As a result of that discussion the KDE release team created a KDE 4.1 schedule:

• January – KDE 4.0.1
• February – KDE 4.0.2
• March – KDE 4.0.3
• April – KDE 4.0.4
• May – KDE 4.0.5
• June – KDE 4.0.6
• July – KDE 4.1.0
• August – KDE 4.1.1

In the end the release schedule is not that surprising: if it is enforced reasonable and flexible enough it is a powerful tool regarding the cooperation with other developers and distributions while the negative effects on the development and the releases itself are not too bad. As a side note this release schedule is however not in total sync with GNOME but has the release a month earlier. This is mainly by chance since July seems to be the best option for some KDE strong distributions. Also, it was considered as not too bad if the major desktops would have some spare time in between their releases so that no one steals the show of the other one.

The question is now which big goals will be set for KDE 4.1. One of the main goals – which at the same time depends massively on Qt 4.4 – is an improved and API stable Plasma afaik. But the current KDE 4 is still missing some important components: KDE-PIM, Decibel and KDevelop are still not there yet. Most of these parts were targetting for KDE 4.1 anyway so it can be expected that they will make it in time.

That’s the burden with KDE, I guess: No sooner an amazing release was released, the next is already in sight.

Short Tip: Start an application in a foreign language

Quite often I have the need to start an application in a foreign language. Given that the language is installed for that program all you have to do is via a terminal:

LANG=en_US firefox

For KDE you have to use a slightly different syntax:

KDE_LANG=en_US kwrite

Since these things are entered in a terminal they are forgotten after you’ve closed the terminal.

As a last note: using this way the only application affected by the new LANG is the application started in the same command line. The rest of the session will not be affected!

KDE 4.0 is out – a look back

KDE 4.0 is out. While I won’t have the time to give it a rough test today I do have some minutes to look back.

It’s done: KDE 4.0.0 is out.

There is a great Visual guide available, and release parties are going on or will be taking place the next days. Also, don’t miss the clearing words about expectations, features and reality Aaron has posted recently.

For me, unfortunately, KDE 4.0.0 has to wait some more weeks since I am in the final weeks of finishing my diploma thesis, and I cannot risk to alter any of the basic things on my machine. My distribution of choice, Fedora, only delivers KDE 4.0.0 packages for the devel branch, and that is too risky for me atm. Also, as regular readers might have noticed already, I simply have no time at the moment for non-study-related things, I don’t even have the time to blog.

Anyway, KDE 4.0.0 is out now, but it is “just” the final climax of a process started years ago. So here is a short retrospect:

It all started long, long ago. It was in a time when the future of Windows was still called Longhorn; it was a time when Pluto was still a planet; it was a time when I still blogged in German – and for the KDE project it was a time of wild dreams and exciting phantasies:

i’d like kicker to look nicer in general. which is why in KDE4 it will receive a new theme engine

Erm…right, that was just a bit too early. But it shows where to look at: 2005. In these days first bits about the possible KDE future were mentioned in the public for the first time. Around summer things became concrete: Qt 4.0 was released and Plasma was introduced. Some weeks later KDE 4 was already a topic at the annual KDE Conferece: talks were given about Oxygen and Phonon (which was still namend KDEMM at that time).

During fall 2005 the main KDE topic was not KDE 4 but KDE 3.5, which was released at the end of November. But in the background the developers continued their work on porting to Qt4 as well as designing concepts and libraries.

2006 Was the year of the basis: the new foundations for the future KDE found their way into live and were shaped up to become usable for developers. Solid and Decibel were introduced, KDEMM was renamed to Phonon and the first specialiced meeting, the KDE Multimedia Meeting took place. The KDE Four Core meetings followed shortly after, and in the middle of 2006 the kdelibs were finally in a state so that they were merged into the regular directory structure instead of being published as snapshots. And if that wouldn’t be enough the developers got rollicking and released a first pre-Alpha version, Krash.
During the second half of 2006 the KDE conference Akademy 2006 dominated the KDE land. Of course KDE 4 was the major topic (available as slides and videos) and numerous talks were about the new APIs and libraries.
At the end of 2006 the basic foundations for KDE 4 were laid, and it was clear what KDE 4 would leave behind.

The beginning of 2007 brought a pleasant surprise for most users: Troy Unrau started his famous “Road to KDE 4″ series and kept everyone informed about the development around KDE 4. This was one of the most important KDE 4 related PR moves and showed everyone how much development was going on and what really could be expected. This series was great. And indeed, the year 2007 was the year of polishing, shaping up – and showing! 2007 was the year of the screenshots, screencasts and reviews. But of course it was alos the year of Alphas, Betas, cooperation with Trolltech and another conference. 2007 was the year which prepared the world for the launch.

And the launch just happend – the future is now.