Thursday, March 8, 2012

KDE 4.8.1 available in Fedora

Hello fellow KDE devs and users!

I'm glad to tell you that the 4.8.1 update is available in Fedora in fedora-kde48 and kde-testing. Check out the amazing KDEPIM and folderview bugfixes, and probably a ton of other nice stuff!

Also, the hardcore desktop tweakers out there will appreciate one kdelibs / workspace / folderview fix I did for 4.8.1. Namely, I introduced a new KGlobalSettings category, SETTINGS_STYLE, and patched kcmstyle to emit a KGlobalSettings::settingsChanged notification with this category when the Graphic Effects level in the Fine Tuning tab is changed. Then, I patched FolderView to take advantage of that functionality, so now the hover-enter / hover-leave icon frame animation will only be enabled for the "low-low" and "high-low" (the topmost two) effect levels. I welcome those of you who use animations in your apps to take advantage of this change as well and consider disabling some or all of those animations at a certain graphic effects level. FolderView, for example, disables animations at NoEffects and GradientEffects and enables them at the higher levels.

Unfortunately, I forgot to backport the kde-workspace (kcmstyle) part of the fix to 4.8.1, and done that only a few hours ago (the original fix I did it mid-February). However, in Fedora, the fix will be available in 4.8.1-2. The other distros will probably push it as part of 4.8.2 when it is released.

Feedback for 4.8.1 in fedora-kde48 / kde-testing welcome! (of course, you should be reporting it to the RH tracker, I can only notify you about the updates)

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for post :)

    Also there's ongoing work on pushing 4.8.1 to official Fedora repository for F16. For F17 it's already in updates-testing.

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  2. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Or, what does really, e.g., ‘Low display resolution and Low CPU’ mean?

    Should you select it if you have low display resolution, or does it mean that the display resolution of the resulting effect is low (if so, what does this mean)? Does it depend on your graphics card or on your screen resolution? And does ‘Low CPU’ mean low-quality CPU (old/slow), or that the effect uses little CPU power? Or is ‘Low‘ some sort of trademark, since it’s written with an uppercase L? I have always found these options extremely confusing, and the ‘What’s this’ help couldn’t be less helpful … :(

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  3. @Jaroslav:
    You welcome :) Nice to hear about official F16. I actually posted based on the info Rex had given me, just to spread the knowledge. BTW, what's up with the &quot thing? Do I need to allow HTML in the comments?

    @Karl:
    Let's make it clear:I have only modified the signal emitted when the graphic effects level changes. The actual values of KGlobalSettings::graphicsEffectsLevel(), defined in KGlobalSettings::GraphicEffects, and their mapping to the combobox items in the Fine Tuning tab of the Style KCM, have remained unchanged.

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