| KDE 3.5 goes gold |
Nov. 29, 2005
 The KDE Project Tuesday released the long-awaited KDE version 3.5, which will serve as the final iteration of the KDE 3.x line. Since being taken over by a new developer team, KDE Kicker -- KDE's much-improved desktop application-launcher menu bar -- has seen a wealth of small but useful improvements, the project spokesman Tom Chance said.
The pager now shows the application icons of each window to help distinguish between them, and allows users to drag and drop windows from one desktop to another, the project said.
In response to user feedback, the pager and taskbar now have three default styles -- elegant, classic, and transparent -- which have been tweaked to make them more usable, KDE said.
Other notable changes include:- Konqueror is the second major web browser to pass the ardous Acid2 CSS compliance test, ahead of Firefox and Internet Explorer. (Apple's Safari browser was the first; Safari makes use of Konqueror's rendering engine, KHTML.)
- Konqueror now frees webpages from ads with its ad-block feature.
- SuperKaramba is included in KDE, providing well-integrated and easy-to-install widgets for the user's desktop. Using SuperKaramba, users can add functionality such as weather and news updates, system monitors and alternatives to the existing functions of Kicker. New applets can be easily downloaded using the KHotNewStuff functionality.
- Kopete has support for MSN and Yahoo! webcams.
- The edutainment module has three new applications -- KGeography, Kanagram, and blinKen -- and has seen huge improvements in Kalzium.
A detailed log of changes, as well as some screenshots, are available here.
"[The Acid2 CSS is] a boring compliance test, but something of a benchmark at the moment amongst developers, since very few browsers have managed to meet the grade. It basically means that Konqueror renders some complex CSS code as expected, so the more of these tests Konqueror passes the better it is at displaying properly coded Web pages," Chance told DesktopLinux.com via email.
"The improvements made in the past year show how mature the KDE Project is," said Stephan Kulow, KDE Release Coordinator. "KDE is the most powerful desktop environment and development platform in the market. With huge changes expected in KDE 4, our next release, KDE 3.5 should provide users with the perfect productivity platform for the next couple of years."
KDE's Konqueror browser now has an optional search bar; this gives users the power to select his or her search engine from a dropdown menu.
KDE 3.5 also features much-improved portable media support: SMN (Storage Media Notification). When users place any new media, such as a CD, DVD or USB memory stick on a KDE-enabled system, SMN not only automatically mounts the appropriate file system, it also presents the user with a dialog asking what he or she want to do with its content, Chance said.
Tooltips, introduced in KDE 3.4, are now enabled for the virtual desktop changer (aka mini-pager) and taskbar buttons. Tooltips allows users to have more information about KDE's various displays and icons at their fingertips.
KDE's edutainment team added a number of new applications and features. KGeography lets users browse maps, learn about a country's capital and flag, and test their general knowledge. Kanagram is a fully featured anagram game with a vocabulary editor, many built-in vocabularies and sound effects, and new data packs available through KHotNewStuff. Finally, blinKen challenges players to remember sequences of increasing length, based upon an electronic game released in 1978.
KDE now supports POSIX file access control lists (ACL). If your filesystem supports them (most new Linux filesystems do) and you've mounted the filesystem with ACL support enabled, then the folder properties dialog will autodetect this and enable an extended permissions dialogue. You can then assign specific permissions to particular users or groups with the ease of a GUI, the project said.
To download your copy, go here. The cource code is available here.
You can order KDE 3.5 via CD-ROM here.
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