I am proud to report that Kubuntu 11.10 now has KDE SC 4.7rc.
Over the last couple of weeks the better part of the Kubuntu team has been pulling all nighters to bring the greatness of KDE SC 4.7 to Kubuntu.
It was quite an initial effort to get packages ready due to some architectural changes with regards to distribution of sources (I suppose I should write about that at some point ;)). But now that we have almost all of them ready for 11.10 we will be able to bring you release packages of 4.7.0 in the best quality possible for both 11.10 and 11.04.
On a related note KDE SC 4.7.0 is supposed to be available on July 27.
Of course we would not be in that good a position for the 4.7.0 release without the excellent team of Kubuntu Ninjas, the elite release packagers working in the dungeon of our IRC channel.
Together they prepared 130 source packages for upload, 57 of those were new to the Kubuntu archive and therefore required special attention. Additionally 6 new scripts were created to help manage the increased amount of packages.
A big thank you goes to:
- Romain Perier – french reinforcement for the ninjas, though he is becoming a knight who says ni at the court of Phonon (or so someone told me)
- Rohan Garg – the ever so fearless licensing specialist and he is the one responsible for Kate still being broken (in case you were wondering)
- Michał Zając – apparently he won in the lottery and went on a skateboarding trip through Poland, he has not been the same ever since
- Philip Muškovac – not much of a blogger but otherwise a nice enough chap, also he coordinated the whole effort and might become Kubuntu developer some time soon (no idea what latter entails, but it sure sounds cool)
- Felix Geyer – I believe he is living in a data center as he uploaded half the packages in less than a day, also he came up with a build status overview web page (I guess that supports my theory?)
- Scott Kitterman – the man who actually gets new stuff into the archive, or not, depending on whether he gets enough cookies, sometimes proper licensing also helps
- Myself – the grumpy upstream developer who gets annoyed from not having packages 😛
💺 Blog 
Thx to all Kubuntu contributors for the hard work
Hi,
Thanks for the news, a question:
How can I upgrade to this version as soon as possible?
I’m sure they’ll post a PPA on Kubuntu.org, but yeah, I’d love to know, too. I want it NOW!!! 😀
Not before July 27 unfortunately. As I wrote, there is still some stuff not done (properly). In particular ensuring everything is accordingly licensed free software is a tedious but necessary process which takes time 🙂
I can’t wait to try this in 11.04, it has a number of fixes that I absolutely need ASAP.
Either way, a big thank you to all the ninjas and all others.
So this is the reason why there have not been any Beta/RC packages from 4.7.0? I already feared you ditched that beta PPA stuff in favor of Project-Neon, hope not 🙂
4.7 will once again revolutionize the Desktop 😛 (Sounds like an Apple keynote)
Oh and it this the new Kubuntu wallpaper? Like it, didn’t like the Half-life-2-like energy orbs from 4.6 which get distorted if you are using any oter aspect ratio than 16:9 ^^
That’s what the “Scale and Crop” and “Scale, Keep Proportions” are for.
If KSplashX supported them… but it doesn’t and that ruins the overall experience
It does something better, but…..
Since Kubuntu uses a CD for distribution there is only so much space, and it is a challenge to squeeze all the software worth having on so little space. Backgrounds in KDE software are usually deployed at every common resolution, so it should look decent no matter what and use as little CPU power for scaling as possible. BUT what we had to do to get all the stuff on the CD is remove everything but the biggest resolution of backgrounds and let KSplashX/Plasma/KDM fall back to that one version and scale it at runtime as otherwise we would be unable to get to CD size (as a matter of fact 11.10 currently is oversized exactly because of that ^^).
If you are sufficiently disturbed by this I would appreciate a bug report very much, because I personally dislike this approach absolutely and entirely.
The Ubuntu guys (halfway?) manage to sqeeue Qt AND stupid Unity AND more stupid Unity 2D onto a CD (okay, Oneiric is not yet CD ready but it will, I think) so a few backgrounds shouldn’t be the problem.
Also, KDM automatically scales using “Scale, keep aspect ratio” while KSplash just uses “Scale” and so we have a real ugly transition from KDM to KSplash and then to desktop.
KDM – Scale and crop
Ksplash – Scale
Plasma desktop – Scale and crop.
Really nice …
Oh and what about just using the Plymouth color gradient as KDM and KSplash background? this Blue-to-black background? It has no problems being scaled beyond any resolution or aspect ratio AND it will give a better user experience as the Kubuntu Plymouth theme will “follow” the user until he is on the desktop. That’s the first thing I do on my machines: Replace KDE’s KDM and KSplash background with this blue-black-color gradient 🙂
“Oh and what about just using the Plymouth color gradient as KDM and KSplash background? this Blue-to-black background? It has no problems being scaled beyond any resolution or aspect ratio AND it will give a better user experience as the Kubuntu Plymouth theme will “follow” the user until he is on the desktop.”
Big +1
“Oh and what about just using the Plymouth color gradient as KDM and KSplash background? this Blue-to-black background? It has no problems being scaled beyond any resolution or aspect ratio AND it will give a better user experience as the Kubuntu Plymouth theme will “follow” the user until he is on the desktop.”
++++1
I’m TOTALLY agree with you…
Who stays with the default wallpaper anyway?
Wonderful work! Kudos and thanks to all of you.
❤ to the Kubuntu Packaging Ninja's. It's not a glamorous job, but damn, I'm grateful you guys are doing it. You rock!
Thanks, very grateful for the work being done!
What will be the new features specific to Kubuntu (excluding Muon) on 11.10? I mean, not related to KDE or Ubuntu.
Thanks for packaging KDE!
Also FWIW, Muon is not Kubuntu specific: https://projects.kde.org/projects/extragear/sysadmin/muon
Wow! I follow the Jonathan’s work from the beginning in Launchpad. I did not know that Muon was now officially from KDE.
Another question. What will you do in Kubuntu if KDE does not resolve the following problem?
http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/06/need-an-ati-r300/
I think it’s a problem that affects many people. At least in Kubuntu should make the effects are disabled by default for these cards (In KDE 4.7 the effects are always enabled by default)
Well, should it not get resolved I trust that Martin will put r300 on the black list for desktop effects (or we will).
Nice one, looks awesome!
I like the new style, very sleeky, lookin forward to it! Is there any chance to download the new wallpaper? I like it, it’s similar to gnome3 but way more beautiful 🙂 would like to rebatch it with a kubuntu logo and use it on my netbook. btw very good work guys!
thx a lot! just found it a few hours earlier your post, but nevertheless thx. keep up the great work! happy KDE user
One word: beautiful.
and I love this wallpaper too, KDE stripes 🙂
4.7 is. simply. awesome. Good job, devs!