KDE SC 4.5 third release candidate arrives

The KDE Project development team have issued the third and final release candidate (RC) for version 4.5 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), a development preview of the next major release of the popular Linux and Unix desktop. The final version of KDE 4.5 is scheduled to be released next week, on the 4th of August.

The RC2 release from early July was originally expected to be the last release candidate, however, the developers say that the latest RC is "intended for verifying no show stoppers (major bugs) will creep into the final release of 4.5.0". KDE SC 4.5 RC3, code named "Canny", addresses several issues from the previous RC and includes updates for various translations. New features coming in version 4.5 of KDE include support for tiling in the KWin window manager, a reworked notification area, stability improvements and the use of the WebKit rendering engine in the Konqueror web browser.

More details about the release can be found on the KDE SC 4.4.95 Info Page and in the official release announcement. A list of planned features is available on the KDE 4.5 TechBase page. KDE SC 4.5 RC3 source code is available to download from the project's web site. The latest stable release is KDE SC 4.4.5 from the end of June.

KDE is licensed under a combination of the LGPLv2, BSD, MIT and X11 licences for core libraries and the GPLv2 or GPLv3 for applications. As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

See also:

• KDE Akademy 2010 conference: First videos and slides published, a report from The H.
• KDE SC 4.4.5 monthly bug fix update arrives, a report from The H.

(crve)