By Brian Proffitt,
Linux Today
Today’s long-awaited release of KDE 2.0 marks an important new
chapter in the life of the harried X desktop environment, and the
response by the various Linux distributions shows it.
When asked last week about their plans for making KDE2 binaries
available to their customers upon today’s release, most of the
distributions responded with definite plans for KDE2.
Debian’s Ivan Moore announced to the Debian developer’s list as
early as October 18 that Deb packages would indeed be in place for
KDE 2.0 today. Potato users may add the line
deb http://kde.tdyc.com/ potato kde2
to /etc/apt/sources.list for an apt-gettable KDE2
distribution.
Gael Duval of Mandrakesoft emphasized that the Cooker
development branch of Linux-Mandrake has always contained the
latest versions of the KDE 2.0 betas and the official release would
be no different. Though Duval previously stated that KDE 2 would be
part of Mandrake 7.2’s release, scheduled for later this month,
others within Mandrake have since said that it is too late for the
final version of the desktop environment to ship with the rest of
the distribution. [ed .note: since running this correction,
Gael Duval has responded in the talkbacks below to point out that
KDE2-final binaries are available for download for Mandrake 7.2, we
regret any confusion. ]
SuSE Linux also plans to have its own binaries up and available
on their FTP site, in addition to the SuSE binaries that will be
available on the KDE Web and FTP sites, according to SuSE
spokewoman Xenia VonWedel.
No representative from Red Hat Inc. or Caldera Systems, Inc.
responded in time for this article’s posting, but precompiled
packages for Red Hat Linux and Caldera OpenLinux 2.4 were available
for the final release candidate for KDE 2.0, so it is safe to
assume these final version packages for these distros will be made
available as well.