KDE project ships "Kippie"

BANGALORE, INDIA: The KDE Community has recently released the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. As KDE has largely has been in bugfix mode, this latest Beta aims to encourage testers to have a look at it to find and solve the remaining problems and bugs. Besides the stabilization of the codebase, some minor features have been added, including but not limited to much work on Plasma, the KDE 4 desktop shell.

Sebastian Kügler said: "The improvements have been huge, and plasma is much closer to what it needs to be before the release. I am confident we will be able to finish it and present a very usable plasma to our userbase with KDE 4.0. We will then be able to extend on that and present truly innovative desktop interfaces throughout the KDE 4 lifecycle.

The new Beta 4 incorporates many improvements from previous Beta and alpha releases: Beta 3, Beta 2, Beta 1, Alpha 2 and Alpha 1.

Beta 4

With the fourth Beta, the KDE developers hope to collect comments and bug reports from the wider KDE community. With their help, we hope to solve the most pressing problems with the current KDE 4 codebase to ensure the final 4.0 release is usable. We would like to encourage anyone who is willing and able to spend some time on testing to find and report problems to the KDE developers, the release adds .

For developers

At the same time, the KDE community unleashes a release candidate for the KDE Development Platform, the collection of libraries that are needed to develop and run KDE 4 applications. This development platform aims at making it possible for third parties to start porting their applications without the need to compile everything from KDE's source code repository. The final KDE 4 Development Platform will follow shortly, as soon as it is made sure that the current snapshot does not contains any grave bugs.

Next Up

While the last improvements will be made in the coming weeks, as soon as the Betacycle objectives are met, we will start preparing our first Release Candidate. This marks the beginning of a short period where we will allow only the most important bugfixes in preparation for the release.

Get it, run it, test it...

For those interested in getting packages to test and contribute, several distributions notified us that they will have KDE 4.0 Beta 4 packages available at or soon after the release. The complete and current list can be found on the KDE 4 Beta 4 Info Page, where you can also find links to the source code, information about compiling, security and other issues.

(Compiled by Jos Poortvliet and Sebastian Kügler with extensive help from the KDE community)