KDE 3.5.5

KDE 3.5.5 was released this morning. I had been eagerly anticipating it’s release for a week now as there are some good fixes and updates in this release. I am writing this using KDE 3.5.5 as I built the latest KDE triumph last night while the source files were still being pushed out to the mirrors.

I don’t normally build KDE until a few days after release as I’m usually too busy to grab the 150MB+ of source files and then wait 12 hours while my machine builds it. But last night I couldn’t sleep so I figured I’d surf over to KDE’s main FTP site to see if the files were available yet. But the site was non-responsive which I found strange, so I checked out another mirror and was delighted to see the 3.5.5 source code tar files available. So I grabbed the files and started the build. And knowing that I would wake up to a new version of KDE, I was able to fall back asleep.

A quick check of Gentoo’s stable Portage tree shows that the latest version of KDE available to those who don’t want to live ‘close to the edge’ is still KDE 3.5.2. As I said before, I’ve always found KDE to be very stable on Gentoo and I had zero issues with KDE 3.5.4 over the past two months so I’m not anticipating any issues with KDE 3.5.5. So, that said, once again my suggestion is to update your /etc/portage/package.keywords file and use the latest KDE; I doubt you’ll regret it.

KDE 3.5.4

KDE 3.5.4 was released a couple weeks ago. As per my normal routine, I had my machine compiling it the night of it’s release and had the latest version KDE running by morning. But then I flew out to Prince George for my brother’s wedding the next day and forgot to blog about my success with KDE 3.5.4 like I normally do.

Gentoo’s stable Portage tree is still stuck back at KDE 3.5.2 but in the past two weeks since building KDE 3.5.4 I’ve experienced no problems whatsoever. So, if you’re impatient like me when it comes to your X Windows environment, my suggestion is to update your /etc/portage/package.keywords file and use the latest KDE because I suspect it will work just fine for you also.

Lunch With KDE

On Friday I had lunch with KDE. Would you believe part of KDE? Okay, how about two KDE developers and a five year old? The truth of the matter is that I was lucky enough to catch Zach Rusin while he was still hanging out at Aaron’s place and invited them both to lunch. And since school was out, Aaron brought along p-man.

Nellie’s on 17 Avenue and 9 Street SW is an arm’s throw from the Zymeta office so we met up there for a late lunch. In honour of my guests, I had a meatless breakfast burito, which I have to admit was as good (if not better) sans sausage as it normally is. Lunch was also filled with lots of coffee, (!blueberry) icetea, and some rather deep discussions as to how KDE should be packaged and what applications should come standard with KDE.

After lunch, I took everyone over to the Zymeta office for a tour. I was the only one lame enough to actually be working so it was a complete tour, without interruption. It was a repeat visit for Aaron, who simply dropped by one day this past summer, but since things had changed somewhat there was something new for everyone. Of course, for Zach, it was all new so I showed off the jukebox application, the guts of the jukebox hardware and we talked about how various ‘cool’ features were implemented. Overall, a great afternoon.

In my defence of lameness, it was mostly an admin day anyway and thus a chance to catch up on some paperwork. I was also able to find some time to overhaul the firewall rules, which was long overdue. And of course, I ended off the work day (and in this case, work year) with a little ‘Enemy Territory’.

KDE 3.5.3

KDE 3.5.3 was released on Wednesday, though the monolithic ebuilds for Gentoo weren’t available until yesterday afternoon. I prefetched all the packages earlier this week and yeserday evening set up my Dell Latitude C840 to crunch all night long, compiling KDE 3.5.3. Once again, the KDE gang has produced a solid release, and thus far KDE 3.5.3 (built from source under Gentoo) appears to run just fine. It also seems to start up slightly faster, though the improvement for me is not as much as some people have been reporting.

KDE 3.5.2

KDE 3.5.2 was released yesterday. So, in keeping with tradition, my Latitude C840 churned away last night and built it under Gentoo. And I’m happy to report, once again, that KDE 3.5.2 (built from source under Gentoo) appears to run just fine.

KDE 3.5.1

I just noticed that KDE 3.5.1 was released this morning. As per normal, Gentoo is a little behind given that the stable version in the portage tree is 3.4.3. I feel like a bit of a broken record since this is a repetative story; I’ve been running KDE 3.5.0 on Gentoo since it was released with no issues. And as per normal, I will be building KDE 3.5.1 and expect few, if any, issues to pop up.

Update: I’ve been running 3.5.1 now for a week with no issues; if you run Gentoo and you’ve been waiting, I see no real need to wait. So start building.

Tweaking KDE

If you are looking to improve the speed of your KDE installation, there is a good wiki page within the KDE website on improving performance. While some of the tips don’t apply to KDE 3.5.x and some of the tips are rather obvious (such as reducing ‘eye-candy’ features), the majority of the article is pretty good and, at the very least, you should end up learning one or two things you didn’t already know about KDE.

KDE 3.5.0

I finished building KDE 3.5.0 overnight last night and have now been using it all morning. There are lots of changes (this is a great article on KDE.org explaining all the new stuff), but the most critical change for me is the speed increases in Akregator and Kopete. It’s also nice that Konqueror is now ACID2 compliant and of course Konqueror’s integration with things like a video player is incredibly nice (and is one of the things that Konq has over Firefox).

I’ll keep you posted on how things go with KDE 3.5 on Gentoo but I suspect (given my past experiences with KDE on Gentoo) that I won’t run into much in the way of issues.