Introduction
Like most geeks I needed to see the latests and greatest as soon as possible. So I downloaded the KDE 4 iso file from Kubuntu’s page and mounted it in VirtualBox to see what it was all about. I created this blog story to save some fellow geeks the time of downloading and Virtualboxing. The result can be seen as a screencast I made with Istanbul. You can download it here:
kde4.ogg (8.2 mb) (4 min. 20 sec.)
If you are not in yet a Linux user this format will maybe be unknown to you but it can be viewed with VLC among many other capable viewers.
A buggy ride
Even though I’m thrilled by the looks of KDE 4.0 it doesn’t really seem fit for a .0 release. In the short 4 minutes the screencast lasts several minor bugs present themselves. Some of the errors are listed below. The reason for the errors is perhaps the virtual machine or the fact that it was a live CD run – either way it doesn’t seem very stable albeit very pretty. 🙂
- (1:04) – Graphical errors with the design of the konqueror startpage.
- (1:18) – Graphical errors with box warning about the network connection in konqueror.
- (1:31) – “KDEInit could not launch ‘/usr/bin/konsole-kde4′” even though konsole is launched and works fine.
- (3:13) – Gwenview crashed upon startup.
All in all KDE 4.0 seems very promising and I’m confident that KDE 4.1 will be a much smoother experience but for now I will stick with KDE 3.5. For further reading see:
http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.0/guide.php
![](http://www.tjansson.dk/billeder/kde-screencast7.jpg")
I have installed KDE 4.0.0 packages for Mandriva Linux 2008 and I’m happy to report that all 4 problems that you encountered are not there. So it really looks like it is the virtualisation or LiveCD that is causing the problems. I think this release looks and works great, especially considering it is the very first release in the new KDE4 series.
Tsiolkovsky: You probaly right about some the above owing to the virtual machine. I just read this interesting story from a KDE developer about the good reason to release KDE 4 now and not wait further:
http://nowwhatthe.blogspot.com/2008/01/sweet-follows-sour.html
Interesting link, thanks. Yeah I can agree, it is sometimes quite hard for some people to understand all about *.0.0 releases in open source world. Well at least KDE people didn’t need 5 years+ for it, didn’t spend billions of US$ on it and don’t demand 100s of Euros to pay for it. And I’m sure the next “service pack” release is not one year away 🙂
the kdeinit issue may be a Kubuntu bug, if it is not present in Mandriva.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/184337