After 6 months of hard work, the Kubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Kubuntu 8.10. The focus of this release has been to integrate our software with KDE4 to create a complete, refreshed desktop experience.



http://www.kubuntu.org/news/8.10-release

Digg it!: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Kubuntu_8_10 ... he_desktop

Release highlights include:
-KDE 4.1.2 with a custom-configured Plasma desktop with taskmanager tooltips/window preview effect backported from trunk.
-Desktop effects by default, if your card supports it.
-Adept 3.0
-New KDE4 update notifier
-Various Kubuntu tool integration

Here's what Jonathan Riddell, the Kubuntu Robot has to say:

Kubuntu 8.10 is out and available now.

This intrepid release lives up to its codename and features the
cutting edge KDE 4 desktop.  If you are unsure if you are ready for
KDE 4 do try it from a live CD.  If you would rather stay with what you
know, 8.04 is still fully supported and there will be no automatic
upgrade prompting.

The website is a bit overloaded as is usual for release day but you
can grab the torrents from here
 http://people.ubuntu.com/~jriddell/tmp/torrents/
seeders needed.

Or upgrade following these instructions
 https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IntrepidUpgrades/Kubuntu

Do glance over the announcement, including the known problems at the
bottom.
 http://www.kubuntu.org/news/8.10-release

If you'd rather download directly the first mirrors have updated
 http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/intrepid/
 http://us.releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/intrepid/

You can leave feedback here which goes straight into my inbox
 https://wiki.kubuntu.org/IntrepidIbex/Final/Kubuntu/Feedback

More help always needed of course
 https://wiki.kubuntu.org/HelpingKubuntu

Hope you enjoy it!

Jonathan and your Kubuntu Team

Congrats for this realase !!
Kudos to all involved, gonna test it by the end of the week

Fantastic!
Been running it this week, good to see the addition of the extra widgets!

Yeah, congratulations. KDE 4.1 feels really good with Intrepid.

I have a weird issue, I think it's a Kubuntu issue and not a KDE issue.

The text in Qt3 ou GTK apps is not displayed when I enable desktop effects.
Except for Firefox.

I don't see annything in knetworkmanager or in the GUI of openoffice.org

If you're using the latest nvidia legacy drivers, that's bug 294076. It's an issue with the nvidia beta legacy drivers.

I loaded Kubuntu 8.10 on a spare partition yesterday and played with it last night. My overall impression is that KDE 4.1.2 is very close to being a choice for daily use for me (I run 3.5.10 on Debian Sid on my desktop and laptop machines currently). I did manage to get Konqueror to crash rather reliably by selecting the Applications link from its startup page and then clicking any of the application folders on the following screen.

The network manager frontend seemed a bit clumsy to setup for my AP using WEP and on reboot didn't want to reconnect to the AP right away. I use WLAssistant normally and it always reconnects right away.

On the plus side, this is the best out-of-the-box configuration of fonts I have seen yet on a Linux distribution. I surfed several Web pages and each page was easy to read and the text was clear and crisply anti-alliased on my laptop.

Clearly, there will be a learning curve coming from 3.5.X, but it is gorgeous and is making the plastic theme with crystal icons now look dated. Keep up the good work. :thumbs_up:

I used to be a loyal Kubuntu fan for years now, using it on all my machines (ok sounds bigger than it is, there are two ;). This attitude changed after I tried Kubuntu 8.10. For me it looks like the worst Kubuntu released they ever delivered. I know that the most devs working spare time on kubuntu, but how can you release a distro with so heavy issues as "stable"? What am I talking about?

• no proper i18n for KDE4 (and this is really a shame - i18n.kde.org states 99% translated for DE)
• no working bluetooth - how can this be for a release dedicated to "connectivity everywhere"??
  see https://launchpad.net/bugs/280997
• huge issues with KNetworkManager and WLAN - same as above: "connectivity everywhere"??
  see https://launchpad.net/bugs/259278

After two days of fiddling around with that chaos I installed OpenSuse 11.1 beta2 - I hate Yast, but if you want a working KDE4 desktop it#s definitelly the better choice. It's sad to see a beta in better shape than the Kubuntu release.
I'll watch the development of Kubuntu closely in the hope that they will be able to fix their problems. I still love their idea of creating a "KDE only" distro with as less homebrew additions as possible.
And as for the i18n issues, i hope they get rid of rosetta rather sooner than later. It's not the first time, that rosetta is causing huge problems (I think it was dapper drake the last time).
And instead of investing time in the porting of guidance-kde-frontend, it may be a good idea to pick up PowerDevil instead, as it is now the "native" kde power management solution. Had a first look at it on OpenSuse - still some polishing to do at the frontend, but already much more powerfull than guidance.
I hope this is not taken as a rant against kubuntu. I know the kubuntu devs are working really hard and lots of issues are not their fault (especially the i18n stuff).

dtritscher wrote:I used to be a loyal Kubuntu fan for years now, using it on all my machines (ok sounds bigger than it is, there are two . This attitude changed after I tried Kubuntu 8.10. For me it looks like the worst Kubuntu released they ever delivered. I know that the most devs working spare time on kubuntu, but how can you release a distro with so heavy issues as "stable"? What am I talking about?

• no proper i18n for KDE4 (and this is really a shame - i18n.kde.org states 99% translated for DE)
• no working bluetooth - how can this be for a release dedicated to "connectivity everywhere"??
  see https://launchpad.net/bugs/280997
• huge issues with KNetworkManager and WLAN - same as above: "connectivity everywhere"??
  see https://launchpad.net/bugs/259278

The Rosetta issues have been identified and were fixed yesterday. At the Ubuntu Developers Summit this December we will discuss how to make sure this never happens again.

Bluetooth and Network Manager really weren't our fault... Ubuntu upgraded Network Manager to the latest stable release (0.7) but a KNetworkManager frontend compatible with NM 0.7 hasn't been released. We were forced to upgrade to an unstable svn snapshot of KNetworkManager to get it working *at all*.

Bluetooth was also updated to 0.4 without anybody testing to see if it would break KDE. Needless to say nobody at Kubuntu is/was amused.

OpenSuse 11.1 beta2 - I hate Yast, but if you want a working KDE4 desktop it#s definitelly the better choice. It's sad to see a beta in better shape than the Kubuntu release.
I'll watch the development of Kubuntu closely in the hope that they will be able to fix their problems. I still love their idea of creating a "KDE only" distro with as less homebrew additions as possible.
And as for the i18n issues, i hope they get rid of rosetta rather sooner than later. It's not the first time, that rosetta is causing huge problems (I think it was dapper drake the last time).
And instead of investing time in the porting of guidance-kde-frontend, it may be a good idea to pick up PowerDevil instead, as it is now the "native" kde power management solution. Had a first look at it on OpenSuse - still some polishing to do at the frontend, but already much more powerfull than guidance.

Minimal effort was put in to guidance-power-manager this time around. Basically it was ported to PyKDE4 and a few bugs were fixed. At the time we didn't even know of PowerDevil's existence, and the KDE 4.1 backported version of PowerDevil was released too late for us to integrate with Kubuntu. That being said I think guidance-power-manager is pretty OK, and we're going to be dropping it for PowerDevil and friends in Kubuntu 9.04.

I hope this is not taken as a rant against kubuntu. I know the kubuntu devs are working really hard and lots of issues are not their fault (especially the i18n stuff).

Thanks for the understanding.
At least our KDE packages are great this time around, even if sucky circumstances elsewhere in the stack arised. I think our KDE package QA team did a great job this time around.

The Rosetta issues have been identified and were fixed yesterday. At the Ubuntu Developers Summit this December we will discuss how to make sure this never happens again.

I just read that Canonical is also hiring a "Translation Coordinator". I hope this person is not only coordinating the Ubuntu translations

Bluetooth and Network Manager really weren't our fault... Ubuntu upgraded Network Manager to the latest stable release (0.7) but a KNetworkManager frontend compatible with NM 0.7 hasn't been released. We were forced to upgrade to an unstable svn snapshot of KNetworkManager to get it working *at all*. Sad

Bluetooth was also updated to 0.4 without anybody testing to see if it would break KDE. Needless to say nobody at Kubuntu is/was amused.

I hope this issues are also adressed at the UDS. Were all the QA-guys sleeping here? Imagin' kdelibs devs would change a part of their API a week prior to release. Such stupid mistakes really make me wonder.

Anyways, thanks for the detailed answer. You should consider distributing this info over channels like kubuntu.org news or the dot. Those issues really caused some confusion and it is really hard finding infos on the topic on the net. I talked to some Kubuntu users these days and all where quite **** of by the 8.10 release because of the above mentioned issues. I'm glad I have some more (partly) good news to tell, as I'm used to be a real kubuntu promoter (I'm glad my mom speaks pretty good english. Otherways she would be really **** of now, as I installed Kubuntu 8.10 on here PC last weekend *g*).

I wish you guys good luck to get the issues clarified at the UDS.

Well, to be fair to the Ubuntu-ites, they uploaded bluez 0.4 because the old bluez wasn't fully compatible with the kernel Intrepid has. So they were trying to fix Ubuntu bugs, but unfortunately now kdebluetooth4 doesn't work at all...

The Network Manager stuff is a bit of unavoidable bad timing, I think. KNetworkManager is historically a SuSE tool, and they don't have to have it working with NetworkManager 0.7 until their next release. Since the next KNetworkManager is going to be a plasmoid, very little focus was put on making the old KDE3 interface NM 0.7 compatible, leaving us with a crippled KNetworkManager for Intrepid. (Not that this is an any way OpenSuSE's fault) If KNetworkManager 0.7 gets in to KDE 4.2 as a plasmoid, then we'd probably be able to offer it with our KDE 4.2 packages.

QA is good at catching these sort of things-- both issues were caught very quickly, but resolving issues is harder than finding them. This is especially true when Bluetooth is broken a few weeks before release and when caught in a transition period for KNetworkManager.

I am currently using kubuntu 8.04 and KDE 3.5, but very seriously considering moving up to KDE 4.1 and maybe Kubuntu 8.10 as well.
Would there be immediate benefits to doing this, or would I be worse off if I did upgrade my KDE and Kubuntu choices?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

John

Personally I'd recommend sticking with 8.04 unless 8.10 has anything you desperately need. Apart from the fact (well documented on this and other forums) that KDE4 isn't ready for the mainstream yet, the 8.10 installation was one of the worst experiences I've had in nearly 10 years of using Linux. The installer itself is a total pile of crud that falls in a heap if it finds anything it doesn't expect (like for instance, if you've got a separate /home or /usr/local parition) and want to keep it.

If my old setup hadn't accumulated so many problems through several upgrades and cock-ups on my part, I would have restored 8.04 from my backups and given up on 8.10.

It probably won't be as bad as beermad described. If everything works, after an dist-upgrade you will have a Kubuntu 8.10 with a KDE3.5 *and* a KDE4.1 and everything is fine. When I upgraded the main problem was that the translations were still missing, but that's fixed...
It may happen that you won't like KDE4 as seen with a number of other people who would like to stay with KDE3 because of it's feature richness and stability. You'll find enough information on how to keep KDE3.5 with Kubuntu8.10 in this forum, for example...

I would recommend you to try out a live cd first, or perhaps a dual boot in a special partition of your hard disk.

And about the immediate benefits: I don't know which applications you use. Take a look at http://packages.ubuntu.com to see which versions are included in 8.04 and 8.10

It sounds very interesting what you propose, running Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE3.5, as I am with Kubuntu 8.04 now.
I already run a dual boot system, with XP and Kubuntu 8.04. I much prefer Linux to Windows of ANY description, but need to keep it for the wife and kids!!

I am going to copy the download of Kubuntu 8.10 to CD and run it live to see what I make of it and KDE4 before going any further.

John