Ronnie Tucker

I’d been looking forward to the release of KDE4 for months then the developers announced that it’d be a late Christmas present and the release date was now early January. Bummer.

Today I decided to download the Kubuntu with KDE4 Live CD to give it a whirl on my laptop, a Compaq NX9005.

I downloaded the ISO and burned it to CD, popped it in to my laptop and booted it up.

My first impression was that the task bar looked unfinished. It has a black background with a grey border which has a black border round it! To me it looked like that outer black border wasn’t supposed to be there but, hell, maybe it’s a ‘feature’ (hope to God it’s not!).

I was eager to try out some of the much talked about widgets so added the analogue clock first, easy. Looks nice too. I’m on a laptop so I’ll add the battery meter. It seems, according to the battery meter, that I don’t have a battery in my laptop, which is nothing short of a miracle since the laptop is not plugged in to the mains! So what about the nice post-it notes I’ve seen in screenshots. Nope. It’s just the bog standard flat looking post-it notes in the RC2 Live CD. Boooo!

Also:

• You’ll notice there are no screen shots in this brief review. This is due to the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any sign of KSnapshot on the Live CD.
• I was going to write this post in Konqueror in KDE4 but after clicking Konqueror I get the bouncing gear icon below the pointer, a shaded box in the launch bar then nothing. Couldn’t even load Konqueror!
• After poking about in the Settings I found the Window Effects settings and enabled them to give me drop shadows et all. Nope, all I got was a light grey screen with the shadow of the window that should be there, but wasn’t. Couldn’t see anything, couldn’t click anything.

After that I turned the laptop off and had to take in the fact that KDE4 RC2 isn’t ready for the masses. I hope, I PRAY, that the developers can get all these little quirks ironed out in time for the January release date.

I can tell you this much: I will NOT be installing it on release day! I’ll wait for some other guinea pigs to step forward first!