Thread: KDE 4.2 knocks on your doors

By the time you read this, it will be at your doorstep as the final version is scheduled to go live on January 27. What were looking at currently is the final testing version, KDE 4.2 RC. The new version introduces a large number of improvements over the v4.l.x branch. Some of the highlights according to the release information are as follows:

• Compositing Desktop effects are enabled where hardware and drivers support it, and automatic checks confirm that the compositing feature works before enabling it.

• New desktop effects have been added, such as the Magic Lamp, the Minimise effect, the Cube and the Sphere desktop switchers. All existing effects have been polished and feel natural due to the use of motion dynamics.

• Central elements ofthe desktop experience have seen Significant improvements to give a more coherent experience: These include grouping and multiple row layout in the task bar, icon hiding in the system tray, notifications and job tracking by Plasma, the ability to have icons on the desktop again by using a Folder View as the desktop background.

• KRunner, the 'Run command' dialogue box, has extended functionality through several new plug-ins, including spell-checking, Konqueror browser history, power management cQntrol through PowerDevil, KDE Places, Recent Documents, and the ability to start specific sessions of the Kate editor, Konqueror and Konsole.

• The Plasma workspace can now load Google Gadgets.

• Theming improvements: A new System Settingsmodule-Desktop Theme Details, gives the user control over each element of various Plasma themes.

In addition to the overall usability improvements, the application-specific highlights include: Dolphin now supports previews of files in tooltips and has gained a slider to zoom in and out on file item views; Konqueror offers increased loading speeds by pre-fetching domain name data in KHTML. A find-as-you-type bar improves navigation in Web pages; KMail has a powerful and attractive message header list, and reworked attachment view; PowerDevil, the new KDE4 power management infrastructure brings in a modern, integrated tool for controlling various aspects of mobile devices; a new printing configuration system brings back a number of features that users have been missing in KDE 4.0 and 4.1; KRDC, the remote desktop client, improves support for Microsoft's Active Directory through LDAP; Kontact has gained a new planner summary. and support for drag ~d drop in the freelbusy view.

Of course, this is in addition to all applications that have received bug fixes, feature additions, user interface improvements and generally more polish. Wen strongly recommend you keep an eye on www.kde.organd update to this release if you haven't already done so.