The KDE Team today announced the release of KDE 2.1-beta1. KDE
2.1 constitutes the second major release of the KDE 2 series. The
full announcement is available here.
KDE 2.1-beta1 offers a number of additions, enhancements and
fixes over KDE 2.0.1, the last stable KDE release which shipped on
December 5, 2000. The major additions are:
A new and much-anticipated theme manager has been added, and
many icons have been improved. In addition, semi-transparency
(alpha-blending) has been implemented on small images and
icons.
Pixie, an image
viewer/editor, has been added to the Graphics package.
KDevelop, a C/C++
integrated development environment, has been added to the core KDE
distribution. The version being shipped, 1.4beta, is the first
version of KDevelop to make use of the KDE 2 libraries and
integrate completely with the KDE 2 desktop.
Konqueror, the KDE 2
file manager, can now be configured to
provide thumbnail previews for text and HTML
files. In addition, the standards-compliant Konqueror now
stores bookmarks using the standard XBEL bookmark
format; a new bookmark editor complements the new standard.
Finally, auto-proxy configuration has been implemented.
KHTML, the
HTML widget, now has a special 'transitional mode' which greatly
improves its handling of malformed HTML pages. In additon, KHTML
now has greatly improved Java support and has added support for
Java security (JDK 1.2 or compatible is now required).
The panel (Kicker) has enjoyed significant improvements. An
external taskbar has been included (familiar to KDE 1 users),
support for sub-panels has been added (which can be separately
sized and positioned), an improved external pager (Kasbar) has been
added, and support for applets has been improved (including support
for WindowMaker dock
applets).
ARts, the KDE 2
multimedia architecture, now offers a control module to configure
sampling rate and output devices, increased performance, improved
user interfaces and a number of additional effects and
filters.
For developers, a number of classes have been added to the core
libraries, including a class for undo/redo support (KCommand) and a
class for editing list boxes (KEditListBox).
