Monday, January 12, 2009

pre-release sprint

As KDE 4.2 release is also coming near on windows, I need to give a short overview of what we have planned for the release so far:

  • the KDE systemsettings will come to windows; they can be integrated into Microsoft Windows Control Panel as well.

  • KDE/Oxygen Wallpapers and Cursors will be available for Windows as well.

  • all platform related settings can be made in a new KCModule called 'Platform'. It can be found in the systemsettings and is made by Eduard Sukharev (kraplax).

  • there is some support for spellchecking

  • many improvements especially about security and download checking have been made to the kdewin-installer, thanks to Ralf again for it


the systemsettings in Microsoft Windows XP Control Panel
A very unstable part but yet really interesting is plasma. We managed to replace the existing windows shell with plasma (these settings will go into the Platform kcm as well but will be disabled for now) but since some more important plasmoids (especially systray and tasklist) are still missing, that is really experimental ;-). Most work on Plasma is done by _Brandon_ and zbenjamin.


On the Marble side we also have some fine features to release. Maps can now load up custom kml files at the start, the map painting got even more efficient and startup times have been lowered as much as we could.
If you use the marblewidget in your application, you can have multiple marble widgets and they can safely work together. Even though digikam already does this for quite some time I just recently found out that the implications are bigger than expected - but these issues should be fixed now.
The rest of the marble related changes will hopefully be within a proper change log or in a new post of Torsten Rahn.


This blog post is also in memoriam of my old desktop which served me quite some years now and in the last months served as my build computer for KDE packages. He is now pining for the fjords, pushing up the daisies, he is an ex-buildserver (scnr). The release packages are done by Christian though, so you don't have to fear about the release. If some other packages will need a bit longer, please excuse me though - I am already searching for a new solution...

and the systemsettings in Control Panel in the classical view