KDE SC 4.4 RC1 released

The KDE project developers have announced the availability of the first release candidate for version 4.4 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), code-named "Cornelius". The latest development release of the desktop, applications and development platform includes a number of changes, as well as bug fixes and stabilisation work.

Notable changes in KDE SC 4.4 include improvements to the Nepomuk Semantic Search framework, which features a new storage backend to improve its performance and a new user interface (UI) to interact with the Nepomuk database. Additionally, the Plasma Desktop has been updated, including updated user interface elements, a new widget explorer and the ability to share widgets with other users over the network. New applications include the Blogilo rich-client blogging tool and two scientific applications for advanced math and graph theory called Cantor and Rocs. Other applications, such as the Gwenview image viewer and the Dolpin file manager, have also received improvements.

KDE SC 4.4 is also the first KDE SC release to be based on Qt 4.6 which was released in early December. The new KAuth authorization framework has been added to the KDE Developer Platform for "easy and secure privilege escalation, printing of odd and even pages, scanner support for the Windows platform and the first pieces of integration of the popular webkit rendering engine". As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised.

More details about the release, including a list of known problems, can be found in the release announcement, 4.4 Release Goals change log and on the KDE 4.3.90 Info Page . KDE is licensed under a combination of the LGPLv2, BSD, MIT and X11 licenses for core libraries and the GPLv2 or GPLv3 for applications. A second release candidate is expected to arrive on the 20th of January and the final version of KDE 4.4 is scheduled to be released on the 9th of February, 2010.

See also:

• KDE SC 4.3.4: big fix for Linux desktop environment, a report from The H.
• KDE rebrands as KDE, a report from The H.

(crve)