KDE 3.1rc6: The Final Candidate?

KDE 3.1rc6, which most likely will be the final KDE 3.1 release candidate (where have I heard that before?), is now
available for
. It incorporates all of the
security fixes from the security audit that delayed the release
of KDE 3.1
. KDE 3.1 is scheduled for packaging on January 13th, so
your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to run this release through
its paces to find any show-stoppers. To help compile it you might check
out Konstruct, a build system
which helps you to install KDE releases - it has been updated today for
the rc6 release. While its compiling you might hop
over to the draft
KDE 3.1 Requirements
page and notify me of any omissions or mistakes.

Dot Categories: 


by em (not verified)

Wouldn't www.tug.org be a better URL for TeX instead of www.dante.de?

by Pierre (not verified)

www.ctan.org would be the best I think...

by jaysaysay (not verified)

so your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to run this release

will the packages auto destroy after ?

by SegFault II. (not verified)

Yes - and they will take your computer with them (or at least damage it)- if they are too close to your computer.

by jaysaysay (not verified)

no no no! my keyboard is still wor

by SegFault II. (not verified)

*lol* (hearing a computer die)

by Anonymous (not verified)

If RedHat8 is installed sans KDE, and Konstruct is used to install the latest and greatest KDE stuff, wouldn't that be the best of both worlds?
Has anyone tried this?

by Tom (not verified)

But youd still be using redhat with its broken kernel/compiler/glibc/etc/etc/blah/blah so you will still basically have a sub standard linux system. Be a man try debian, it really does kick ass, and with apt-build as an upcoming rival to gentoo's portage you get some great benefits. If that doesnt take your fance, then Mandrake is pretty damn good too.

by Chris (not verified)

I tried getting a windows friend into linux, and people like you are what turned him off. According to him now, linux users are "all wankers" .

by rinse (not verified)

Linux is a user product, not a religion or way of live.
Your friend should choose an OS that fits his needs, not an OS that has a nice user audience.


by Ranger Rick (not verified)

That's not exactly true, since in most cases, Linux is user-supported. If the user-community of a distro is hostile to new users, that distro has a very big mark against it in weighing the advantages or disadvantages with going with a specific distro or choosing another.

Debian has a ton of technical merits, but in my experience has a not-insignificant number of users who think that gives them the right to insult everyone else's choices.

by Kanwar (not verified)

Introduce your friend to a debian-based distro such as Xandros (if shelling out some $$$s is not entirely an issue). It is as user friendly as linux can get (as of now) and then one can always explore the rock solid debian root.... (no pun intended)

by Kurt Pfeifle (not verified)

> Be a man try debian,

I'd rather have a *usable* system. While I was contemplating for a while to
"be a man", I chose to stay a coward when I saw that the only offer for Samba
--a--: 1-year-old version 2.2.3a for so-called "stable" (a version which has
been urged by the Samba Team themselves long ago to upgrade)
--b--: the future version 3.o, currently tagged "21alpha" by the Samba Team
(not *really* fit for production use) in "unstable"
--c--: the same in "testing"...

I must say, the hi respect Debian *did* have in my mind (before I put a toe
into their water), has been heavily decreased now (and I can't say I'm in any
way faminliarized with it now.

Kurt [still a SuSE-coward]

by Dr. Freak (not verified)

Just because one debian is an asshole doesn't mean they all are.

by Thorsten Schnebeck (not verified)

Hi Kurt!

Maybe Gentoo is something for you as an experienced SuSEaner ;-)

Here are the current versions of cups, samba and kde. Gentoo is quite nice cause it makes no problems when installing a mix of distro-packages and normal source-tarballs.

bash-2.05b# ls /usr/portage/net-print/cups
ChangeLog cups-1.1.15-r2.ebuild cups-1.1.17_pre20021025.ebuild files
cups-1.1.14-r4.ebuild cups-1.1.16.ebuild cups-1.1.18.ebuild
bash-2.05b# ls /usr/portage/net-fs/samba/
ChangeLog files samba-2.2.5-r1.ebuild samba-2.2.6-r2.ebuild samba-2.2.7.ebuild samba-2.2.7a.ebuild
ls /usr/portage/kde-base/kde/
ChangeLog kde-2.2.2-r1.ebuild kde-3.0.3.ebuild kde-3.0.4.ebuild kde-3.1.ebuild kde-3.1_rc6.ebuild
files kde-3.0.2.ebuild kde-3.0.3a.ebuild kde-3.0.5a.ebuild kde-3.1_rc5.ebuild

Have a lot of fun!


by Stefan Heimers (not verified)

Security patches and fixes for grave bugs are usually backported to older versions in debian stable.

So you get a stable and secure system, and don't have to reconfigure your system every other day as would be the case if you always upgrade to the latest and greatest version of every package.

If you absolutely need new features of a certain program you usually can build a package from debian unstable or testing inside of debian stable. Just adjust the deb-src lines inside of /etc/apt/sources.list to testing instead of stable. So you get stable binary releases and testing sources. Then all you need to do ist "apt-get source --compile " to build your *.deb files.


by ranger (not verified)

Nice try, but the samba team has been recommending migrating to 2.2.6 or later for quite a while, and the security backport patches only addressed the security issue, not the bug fixes (mostly locking and printer support) that have ocurred in samba.

Mandrake provides updated samba RPMs (at ftp.samba.org, http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~staburet/samba or http://ranger.dnsalias.com/mandrake/samba) for most current releases (currently 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 and 9.0) with and without ldap support (compile-time option in 2.2.x) plus there are samba3 RPMS that will parallel install with 2.2.x (avialable for 9.0, and in cooker).

IMHO, only SuSE and Mandrake are really useful for production samba servers (maybe Gentoo, which I haven't tried).

by dealing_death (not verified)

Don't confuse Red Hat 8 it with the 7.x series, which used the experimental GCC branch 2.96.x. RH8 uses GCC 3.2.x - there's nothing broken about it.

by Bob (not verified)

Just a badly compiled glibc

by Uno Engborg (not verified)

Have never had any problems with glibc on redhat.
What is supposed to be wrong with it?

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

RedHat 8's glibc is a pre-release CVS snapshot. It's quite close to 2.3.0 though, so I don't know that there are any specific problems that aren't in glibc 2.3.0 (there is one that makes some database problems not run properly) -- and RedHat certainly knows a great deal about glibc, as they employ the glibc maintainer, so I guess they probably have some idea of what they're doing with it (unlike with KDE). Also, IIRC, RedHat 7's biggest problem was actually glibc and not gcc - they shipped a pre-release as well, and if my memory serves me right, that release had some binary compatibility problems and had to be corrected with an update.

by tfar (not verified)

I have been using the RedHat distribution since 4.0. I have informally tried other distributions out of interest but all production servers and desktops since 1997 have all been RedHat, simply because it is what I know best and not becuase of any deficiencies in those other distributions. I have never had even one single problem related to the integrity of Redhat versions of kernels, libraries or compilers including the supposedly infamous 2.96. This version of gcc was released for very valid reasons at the time and I personally believe it to be more standards compliant and certainly no more buggy than any other release as far as I can tell from net traffic over the past few years.

Comments like this from Tom merely serve to highlight the unfortunate tendency that some people have to spout off about something that they very obviously know nothing about.

Having said that I think RedHat have made a mistake with the BlueCurve desktop design and I will be continuing to faultlessly compile the excellent KDE desktop from source and implementing it on RH 8.0.

by mike ta (not verified)

I'll second this, and I've coincidentally been using RH since 4.0, and I've never had *any* problems that I could attribute to the stuff that it usually trotted out.

But I do agree about bluecurve, and even if not then I'd still be building my own KDE so that it can live in /opt/kdeX, which is clearly were The Great Budgerigar [*] intended it to go.


[*] s/The Great Budgerigar/Deity of Choice/

by Xavier (not verified)

Totaly agree with you

by NewMandrakeUser (not verified)

I absolutely agree with tfar : "Comments like this from Tom merely serve to highlight the unfortunate tendency that some people have to spout off about something that they very obviously know nothing about."

I personally switched from RedHat to Mandrake because I *prefer* Mandrake (I love their user-friendly approach). And I spend less time in configuration and sofware management. That's all. But I consider RH a rock-solid distro. Moreover, they are the strongest company behind a free software distro, this is a plus for them. I only have gratitude to RedHat. And in gneral to the whole free software community.

by anoymous (not verified)

hey i'm curious if there is a kde 3.0.5 package compiled for redhat but use the default kde menus? i tried installing the 3.0.5 rpm's but still very ugly menus, i would just like stock kde in rpm. if this exist please reply, but don't waste my or your time saying for me compile it myself (i want it in rpm).

by Thundabird (not verified)

I have never had a hassle with RH, sure version 7.0 was quite buggy, but I found it easy enough to get around most problems. I must say though I do agree with the Bluecurve idea, at least they are changing their approach towards KDE a lot by at least supporting both, thats more than I can say for SuSE. I mean I do like SuSE and I do like Debian, even though it is very messy: /etc files are all over the place, Redhat make their OS a pleasure (as with SuSE and other Standard Linux's), who store their main config files in the /etc/sysconfig/

So "Mr I'm better than everybody else Debian User" before you slag off an operating system take into consideration that without Red Hat a lot of the cool things that come with Linux now (Oracle and other high end stuff), most probably would not have really made it here as quickly. Oh and another point before you say sub standard, you should reconsider because Red Hat, SuSE, SCO, Mandrake are all LSB compliant. Which makes them THE standard, and that is mearly one reason why they all have massive followings compared to the little debian system, and I can bet you right now that RH Advanced Server will kick the shit out of any Debian box.

by KenArnold (not verified)

One can bicker about the relative merits of any Linux distro for hours without really getting anywhere (no need to try; it's been proven many times on IRC).

I have never had a hassle with Debian unstable; sure it was quite buggy around last year when a bunch of core packages went through some incompatible changes (like Perl), and occasionally something breaks now (there's a libc and qmail that just got fixed), but I've found it easy enough to get around most problems.

... surely you see what I mean.

In response to the comment about /etc files, practically every admin and server package, and a good many of others, install something in /etc by default, and it's the distro's business to clean it up if it is a problem. I've found Debian's setup to be a good balance -- close if not exactly what the upstream distributer does with its configuration where it makes sense, but changes to the distributed init scripts so that you generally don't have to alter /etc/init.d files, grouping multiple files related to one package in a subdirectory, and putting all real config files in /etc to match LSB even when the upstream puts them elsewhere (e.g. qmail).

In the end, though, it's a matter of personal preference. There are a large number of often-conflicting considerations when laying out a distribution, and different people will weigh them differently.

You bring up a good point about LSB. While it is not perfect for everyone, it does give a base for 3rd-party software distributors to build upon. While Debian chose not to make its base distribution LSB-compliant, installing three packages (lsb, lsb-release, and lsb-rpm) is sufficient to add LSB compliance, making it a Standard Linux as you call it.

I would advise not placing any real money on the bet you bring up in the last sentence, especially where any hardcore Debian user is involved. For example, I find (after rejecting ~5 cookies from the redhat.com site in the process) the top listed Highlight of Red Hat Advanced Server to be an "extended release cycle for long-term stability." If I am not mistaken in my interpretation, it means that the same typical arguments against Debian's stable distribution -- that software is too old -- can apply to RH Advanced Server. As for the other highlights, clearly the corporate backing allows them to get certification from other companies, but it comes at a price, literally: subscription services. I'm not claiming this is a bad thing; it is just necessary to see the whole picture before making a judgement. The rest of the Highlights are available in one form or another in the broader Linux community, and able to be packaged and distributed by any distribution.

In summary, I give Red Hat the credit it is due for helping to push Linux into the mainstream. (Other companies, such as IBM, Dell, Oracle, VMWare, and many others, also deserve credit in this regard.) However, I caution against taking any one radical user's opinion from any side before making a choice. After all, Linux is all about choice; isn't that what we say to the "GNOME Rules!" crowd?

By the way, KDE 3.x on Debian is easy enough, though not as easy as it would be if they included it in unstable (*hint, hint*); a line like this in /etc/apt/sources.list will work for KDE 3.0.5a on a 'sid' system:

deb http://download.us.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/latest/Debian/sid ./


P.S. - I apologize for the length. I have been writing a lot of essays lately, and the habit has carried over to my everyday writing.

by Thunderbird (not verified)

This is probably the most intelligent argument I have probably ever read in a forum. You are right about one thing, I would never argue with a true and hardcore debian user. I would also never trash an Operating System before I try it. I like debian infact, even though my workstation at the office is RH we are going to be rolling out Debian for this new software we are writing. (Quite franckly because an installation is tiny and Debian is the most secure linux distro I have tried).

Look I will say this: Debian and RedHat put out a great name for Linux and I would like to say I do give credit where it is deserved and I think if it wasn't for any of the linux distributers we would end up like FreeBSD??????? With hardly any application support etc, etc, etc.

But the point I was trying to make even though I let my love of flaming take over was that Linux is about pure preference, thats what makes it linux and a great OS! It completely destroys the object of being forced and thats what I love about it. I also love the fact that we can sit here and slag off every other distro out there except for our own. But the difference with that is, and if I do so its like supporting the home team. As they say how many Geeks do you need to choose a linux distro: 1 because they will fight for years and never come to a neutral ground or a compromise.

and to justify everything: A year ago I started a project on asynchrony called Messiah. It was supposed to eventually become a linux distro that destroyed the boundries between Distros like Debian and RedHat because it was a direct merger of both. In other words if you were to take a debian package and dump it on it will work perfectly on the box, likewise with RPMS from any distro, and it I was even going to build special developer tools to make packages for each of the distros independantly. It only ever got to be a small linux build that could boot in under 30 seconds. I plan to rebuild this project soon.


P.S. I too appologize for the length but when you code as much as me typing comes natuarally!!!!!!!!!!

by Kuba (not verified)

RH8 uses gcc 3.2. Why does it seem to be broken?
RH8 uses stabilized glibc 2.3 development snapshot. Why should it be considered substandard?
RH8 uses 2.4.18 kernel with added scheduler optimizations and other patches that add functionality. Why is this broken?
RH8 uses your everyday etc directory ;-)

Redhat8 is a well performing system, I use it every day for cross-platform development work. You don't seem to have a clue what you're talking about.

Cheers, Kuba

by Haakon Nilsen (not verified)

Indeed, so. I've compiled my own KDE in RH8. Went without problems, and I now have a proper KDE in an otherwise very nice and stable distro.

by moz (not verified)

Um...you know that you can change the QT style and KDE icons to KDE default in the Control Center, so there's no need to rebuild the whole of KDE on Red Hat 8 just to avoid the Blue Curve look...

by Sad Eagle (not verified)

There is a need to do that to avoid some serious packaging bugs, though.

by Haakon Nilsen (not verified)

Maybe so, but I wanted to try out 3.1 in the same go.

by Somebody (not verified)

Is anyone with an i810 chipset getting artefacts when resizing windows with the Keramik decorations/widgets?

by Gunter Ohrner (not verified)


Not directly, but using i815 onboard graphics and its XFree86 driver (currently the latest Debian XFree86-release, "") I get vertical colourful stripes in Konquerors toolbars and in titlebars of inactive windows, both with the Highcolor-Style/ModSystem window decoration of KDE 3.0.x and with Keramik/Keramik of KDE 3.1rc5. (The problem appeared at least with all versions of XFree 4.2.x IIRC, possibliy with XFree 4.1 as well, although there once was a time where I had no graphic problems.)



by Ranger Rick (not verified)

I had the same problem with my i810 card, and was able to fix it by putting:

Option "XaaNoOffscreenPixmaps"

...in the "Device" section of my /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

by Gunter Ohrner (not verified)

Thanks a lot! That fixed the stripes in the tool bars. The stripes in inacxtive title bars, however, still persist. Maybe I'll have to play a bit with other acceleration settings or wait for XFree 4.3 which should be released in less than a month as I've heard.


Gunter Ohrner

See the title :)

cvs upd -rKDE_3_1_BRANCH kdelibs kdebase

or you can use the KDE_3_1_0_RELEASE tag instead. read the infopage on CVS for details.

And don't forget that it's for arts "cvs up -r ARTS_1_1_BRANCH". I read that the KDE_3_1_0_RELEASE tag has not been moved for all modules (e.g. kde-i18n) to reflect this release candidate.

by me (not verified)

I wish this tool had been put together a long time ago. It will help the beta process alot as it makes it much easier to download and compile KDE. Job well done.

by B. K. Oxley (bi... (not verified)

I just pulled down the CVS sources for Konstruct and there is no apps/koffice as mentioned in the README. There is a meta/everything however which started to pull down a koffice tarball before I killed it. (I had expected it to have a dependency on meta/kde, but apparently not, so I'm building "install" in meta/kde first.)

by Anonymous (not verified)

How should it otherwise know where to pull the koffice tarball if apps/koffice would be missing?

by Andreas Pietzowski (not verified)

Is there anybody who thought about creating a GUI for the same job Konstruct does?

by Anonymous (not verified)

There's no need for that. See:
Anybody who is compiling KDE from source needs to be able to handle the console. There is nothing difficult in reading the documentation, go to meta/whatever and type "make install". Why on earth should anybody need a GUI for that? Remember: The right tool for the right job.

by Alexander (not verified)

I tried konstruct but it stoped with this error :

g++ -c -pipe -fno-exceptions -Wall -W -O2 -pipe -D_REENTRANT -fPIC -DQT_SHARED - DQT_NO_DEBUG -DQT_THREAD_SUPPORT -DQT_THREAD_SUPPORT -DQT_NO_CUPS -D_LARGEFILE_S OURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -DQT_NO_XFTFREETYPE -DQT_NO_IMAGEIO_MNG -DQT_NO_IMA GEIO_JPEG -DQT_BUILTIN_GIF_READER=1 -DQT_NO_STYLE_MAC -DQT_NO_STYLE_AQUA -DQT_NO _STYLE_INTERLACE -DQT_NO_STYLE_WINDOWSXP -DQT_NO_STYLE_COMPACT -I/home/alex/Desk top/Downloads/Linux/konstruct/konstruct/libs/qt-x11-free/work/qt-x11-free-3.1.1/ mkspecs/linux-g++ -I. -I../include -I/usr/X11R6/include -I.moc/release-shared-mt / -o .obj/release-shared-mt/qpngio.o kernel/qpngio.cpp
In file included from kernel/qpngio.cpp:45:
/usr/include/png.h:324:18: zlib.h: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden
In file included from /usr/include/png.h:327,
from kernel/qpngio.cpp:45:
/usr/include/pngconf.h:1103: syntax error before `*' token
/usr/include/pngconf.h:1104: syntax error before `*' token
/usr/include/pngconf.h:1105: syntax error before `*' token
In file included from kernel/qpngio.cpp:45:
/usr/include/png.h:1040: 'z_stream' is used as a type, but is not defined as a
kernel/qpngio.cpp: In function `void qt_zlib_compression_hack()':
kernel/qpngio.cpp:1216: `compress' undeclared (first use this function)
kernel/qpngio.cpp:1216: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once for
each function it appears in.)
kernel/qpngio.cpp:1217: `uncompress' undeclared (first use this function)
make[6]: *** [.obj/release-shared-mt/qpngio.o] Fehler 1
make[6]: Verlassen des Verzeichnisses »/home/alex/Desktop/Downloads/Linux/konstruct/konstruct/libs/qt-x11-free/work/qt-x11-free-3.1.1/src«
make[5]: *** [sub-src] Fehler 2
make[4]: *** [build-work/qt-x11-free-3.1.1/Makefile] Fehler 2
make[4]: Verlassen des Verzeichnisses »/home/alex/Desktop/Downloads/Linux/konstruct/konstruct/libs/qt-x11-free«
make[3]: Verlassen des Verzeichnisses »/home/alex/Desktop/Downloads/Linux/konstruct/konstruct/libs/arts«
make[2]: Verlassen des Verzeichnisses »/home/alex/Desktop/Downloads/Linux/konstruct/konstruct/kde/kdelibs«
make[1]: Verlassen des Verzeichnisses »/home/alex/Desktop/Downloads/Linux/konstruct/konstruct/kde/kdebase«
make: *** [dep-../../kde/kdebase] Fehler 2
[email protected]:~/Desktop/Downloads/Linux/konstruct/konstruct/meta/kde>

Whats wrong ? Something with png maybe ?


by Anonymous (not verified)

zlib.h: Datei oder Verzeichnis nicht gefunden

Install zlib Development package

by Mano Brodi (not verified)

A parada he maluka mano. Vacilaun legal, se liga ai !

Falta o lance do zlib Development

Instala essa parada na fita que o lance rola legal.

by Filósofo. (not verified)

Ou não.