[dot] KDE4Daily 4.2 Edition

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1228930911/

From: SSJ <>
Dept: third-time's-the-charm
Date: Wednesday 10/Dec/2008, @09:41

KDE4Daily 4.2 Edition
=====================

   KDE4Daily is an attempt to lower the barrier to entry for people who
would like to test KDE trunk in the run-up to 4.2, consisting of a Qemu
[http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/] VM image containing a Kubuntu
8.10 base and a comprehensive
[http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html#Included_Modules]
set of a self-compiled
[http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/buildprogress.html] KDE4 modules
from KDE trunk (all at r888587, initially), along with an updater system
[http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html#Updating_KDE4Daily]
inside the VM itself.  After an unusually rocky
[http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html#Bugs_In_KDE4Daily]
round of development, it is time to (finally!) announce the release of
KDE4Daily
[http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html#Bugs_In_KDE4Daily]
4.2!

     The updater downloads and installs binary updates provided by me to
the full set of modules: these updates tend to be roughly 20-50MB each
(although they will occasionally be larger), take a few minutes to
apply, and will hopefully be pushed out daily - hence the name.

     Because Qemu is distro-agnostic, you do not need to worry about
distros or libraries or dependencies or suchlike; in fact, you can even
test out KDE 4 while running Windows! The downside is that eye-candy
such as KWin's new Composite-based effects will not be testable as Qemu
does not support hardware graphics acceleration, and everything will
generally feel a lot more sluggish than is the case with a native
install.

     KDE4Daily comes with its own backtrace-generation system so
hopefully devs can be assured of having useful backtraces in any crash
bugs you file, courtesy of DrKonqui.  Do note that this system is still
rather slow and resource-intensive
[http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html#Slow_Backtrace],
so if you do somehow manage to crash a KDE app, please be patient while
the valuable backtrace is created!

     This time around I have included a chunk of the kdebindings module,
so you should have everything you need to start writing Plasmoids (or
other kinds of KDE apps) in Ruby and Python.

     An extensive FAQ
[http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html#FAQ] is
provided at the KDE4Daily homepage, above; please feel free to ask any
further questions in the Dot comments section!  Hope you enjoy it!