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KDE 3.4 was released last week .. I have been quite busy and haven’t been able to install it until yesterday. Even though this is technically only a point upgrade, a lot of things have changed. So lets dive right in..

The first thing that struck me was the speed increase. Each consecutive 3.x release has been faster than the previous. This one honestly blows the marginal speed increases of previous versions out of the water. Startup time is significantly faster and application launch times just feel much snappier. Unfortunately, I do not have any benchmarks to backup this statement — needless to say, a snappier, more responsive desktop is always a nice thing. Perhaps with these types of performance increases, I’ll never need to upgrade my machine.

While purely cosmetic, the default wallpaper this time is a nice dark blue with a 3D translucent KDE Gear icon. Looks very professional. In addition, the plastik window decoration has superceded the more toyish Keramik look and some of the icons have been improved. These changes (along with yet-another-new startup box) continues to make the inital impression of KDE very professional and unique, yet inviting.

A few things I have found that I thought were nice..

Kontact

— Kontact, the KDE PIM (similar to Outlook on Windows) continues to integrate various components from the core system. The default configuration has email (kmail), contacts (kaddressbook), calendar and to-do list (korganizer), journal, sticky notes, rss feeds (akregator) and synchronization with your PDA.

The Akregator allows you to select various RSS feeds on your favorite websites (many websites have an “RSS” link on their home page) and then be able to quickly scroll through the new items on those websites. In many ways, the look emulates an email client — scroll through the news items as “messages” and the content is display underneath. Great for quickly staying up-to-date without having to visit a handful of websites.

The Summary page in Kontact has been improved. Default shows upcoming appointments, to-dos, birthdays & anniversaries, special dates, new messages and select news feeds. Needless to say, a great way to start out the day to get an overview of what is occuring and what is coming up.

KPDF, the default PDF viewing application, has once again increased significantly in capability. This new version includes the ability to search (sorely missing in previous versions), copy and paste text from the document and a presentation mode which will utilize the PDF as if it was a presentation (ie PowerPoint / Impress slides).

I got to try out the KHotStuff feature. Very nicely done. Once of the things I always do when I get a new KDE version is check out the new desktop wallpapers. On the desktop wallpaper configuration window, there was a button “Get New Wallpapers” — ahh! KHotStuff! So I clicked and it brought up a listing of wallpapers from the KDE-Look website. Included were the highest-rated, most downloaded and latest wallpapers. Clicking on one displayed a thumbnail of the wallpaper. After selecting a wallpaper, I click install and it brings up a download window and downloaded it to my user preferences. The wallpaper showed up in my wallpaper selection pulldown and well .. thats it.

Needless to say, this (along with Akgregator) makes utilizing internet resources much more streamlined. Instead of going to the resource, the resource is available for you, when you want it. Many more programs inside the KDE environment are slated to include KHotStuff functionaility in the near future. Fantastic.

As I toy with the new version a bit more, I may update this article… they crammed a LOT of new features in this version. I believe the next version will be the 4.0 branch which includes the new and improved QT library as well as (I believe) hardware accelleration which should increase the eyecandy, increase responsiveness even more and continue to make KDE a great, free, open source desktop.

KDE 3.4 has been released. KDE is the leading open source desktop environment available. Since the previous August 2004 release of KDE 3.3, several additional new features have been added.

KDE 3.4 features a new text-to-speech framework that is integrated into kPDF (PDF Viewer), web browser, text editor and other key applications. In addition, the new KSayIt app provides the ability to read out notifications from all KDE applications. In addition to this accessibility feature, 3.4 also features several high contrast themes, icons and automatic high-contrast icons so your favorite icon set can be used where high contrast is needed. This continues a trend for increasing the usability and accessibility of the desktop and applications for those who are handicapped or impaired in some way.

Kontact, the KDE Personal Informaiton Management suite, now has the ability to interact with Kolab 2.0, a backend groupware server that also supports Outlook clients. In addition to Kolab, Kontact has backend support for eGroupware, GroupWise, OpenGroupware.org and SLOX. Kopete, the KDE Instant Messaging client added support for contact photos, interfacing with AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, Lotus Sametime, MSN, Yahoo, and the sending of SMS.

KDE fully supports 49 different languages, which, if I recall correctly, is the most of any operating system currently available.

There are some additional exciting new features scheduled for future releases. This includes the interface being fully vector based and accelerated via a GPU. This should result in greater use of alpha transparency, eye candy, 3d modeling (where applicable) and smoother transitions throughout the interface.

Another interesting upcoming feature is Get Hot New Stuff. This provides a framework to allow greater interaction between desktop applications and network based resources. For example, when selecting wallpaper or icons, instead of only having a selection of items available on the local computer, the framework could automatically provide previews for these items available online. Simply selecting the item will download it to the computer and install it — all transparently. Layout templates (ie word processor, spreadsheets, etc) may also tap into this framework as well as fonts, clipart, system sounds, themes, window decorations and much more. One really cool feature is the fact it is centralized and not per-application so updating to the latest versions of these items would be simple and could be automated.

Scenario: A server is under powered and needs an upgrade FAST. What do you do?

I had a situation like that today. I was dealing with a virus/spam filtering mail gateway server that was running on a Pentium 200mhz with 64MB RAM. Unfortunately, while the server was running great, the complexity of the spam and virus scanning (thousands of spam filtering rules, tens of thousands of virus definitions) was simply overwhelming the RAM causing the entire system to slow to a crawl.

Given the age of the system and lack of easily accessible compatible memory, a server upgrade was required.

The replacement box was an Athlon 1700+ with 256MB memory. To put this hardware upgrade in perspective, the Pentium 200MMX was released in early 1997 and the Athlon in 2002. Even though both are ia32 compatible, the systems had different chipsets, processor capabilities, RAM type, memory buses, onboard features, etc.

So I ended up doing some “open-heart surgery”. I opened up the new machine, removed the existing hard drive and opened up the existing server (while still running). Once I was prepared to do the upgrade, I issued the shutdown command. The clock was on.

The first minute .. the first minute of downtime was waiting for the old server to shutdown — those old machines sure do take their time. Doh!

The second and third minute .. after the machine was shutdown, I quickly unplugged the cables and yanked the hard drive.. I placed the hard drive into the new server, screwed it in and hooked up the power, keyboard, monitor and network cable and then proceeded to power on the system.

The fourth minute .. On first boot it came up with a kernel panic. DoH! On the old server, I optimized the kernel to minimize the RAM usage as much as possible (it was a tight fit to begin with.. no room for growth) and in the process, only enabled compatibility with the Pentium MMX chip and disabled support for the “686″ and Athlon processors. Needless to say, for a few seconds I was in a slight panic on what to do … I couldn’t easily recompile the kernel without a working system and compiling the kernel on the old server would take a significant amount of time.

I remembered that the FreeBSD developers are smart and keep several versions of the kernel available.. the current working kernel is named “kernel”, the previous kernel is named “kernel.old” and a default stock kernel is named “kernel.GENERIC”. So I restarted the server and at the boot prompt typed in unload (unload existing kernel) and “boot kernel.GENERIC” to boot with the generic kernel (loads default settings).

The fifth minute .. the server is online, accepting mail connections and filtering. Success!

So the total downtime for the upgrade was quite short. After the new server was online, I ended up compiling a new kernel to replace the old kernel (while the GENERIC one worked, it was not necessarily optimized for the system) and did some other minor system tweaks to enable certain items that were disabled previously (due to hardware constraints). Given the additional resources of the system, these post-upgrade tweaks did not impact the ability to do its primary mail gateway tasks. The server was rebooted after work hours to install the updated kernel (about 1 minute of downtime).

Needless to say, the actual time to isolate the issue, fix and do follow-up was longer than 5 minutes. However, with proper planning both for the actual upgrade and well before the upgrade (such as the FreeBSD developers including a backup bootable kernel) the outage was minimized. Too bad I was not able to maintain the long uptime (147 days) of the previous system.