Currently there are no major bugs known. As already mentioned before, kio_sysinfo got replaced by kinfocenter because kio_sysinfo for openSUSE is unmaintained.

It is recommended to run nepomukcleaner to get rid of all legacy data. Beware though that it might take a long time. If you have nothing valuable in your nepomuk database, it is probably quicker to just remove its data from ~/.kde4/share/apps/nepomuk and start from scratch.

Another thing to note: if nepomuk crashes while indexing you might encounter an almost two years old Qt bug which according to the report, Qt devs are reluctant to fix. The problem of this bug is that after the crash virtuoso-t goes crazy. Thus you have to restart nepomuk via KDE’s systemsettings to make it behave again.

Please report packaging issues to the opensuse-kde mailinglist or #opensuse-kde on IRC. Bugs not specific to openSUSE should be reported upstream at KDE’s bug tracker.

The main reason for the replacement is that kio_sysinfo is basically unmaintained and hence bugs do not get fixed.

If you were using kio_sysinfo, please check whether kinfocenter provides all the info and functionality you used with kio_sysinfo. If not, post your suggestions here or to the opensuse-kde mailinglist.

Missing information from kinfocenter’s  summary I noticed so far:

• temperatures
• free hard disk space for each partition
• current CPU frequency

Most info is available, even in more detail than kio_sysinfo did show it, yet not as part of the summary. E.g. graphics info, memory stats etc.

The KDE release team has decided to ship a third RC for 4.10. Even though this makes the schedule for 12.3 a bit tight the openSUSE KDE team holds on to the plan to ship KDE SC 4.10 with openSUSE 12.3.

Big thanks to everybody who made this happen!

The latter is also where the next openSUSE KDE team meeting will take place, on Tuesday 8 January 18:30 UTC (19:30 CET).

Big thanks to everybody involved!

KDE:Release:410 aka KR410 will be set-up shortly and published as soon as KDE officially releases the final packages for KDE SC 4.10.

Those using KR49 will have noticed that KDE SC 4.9.4 got already published and 4.9.5 will follow at the end of this month.

The KDE team is also proud to congratulate Raymond Wooninck on his election to the openSUSE board! Given his constant commitment to packaging KDE SC and other apps for openSUSE over the last years, I am sure the openSUSE community will profit from his work as member of the board. Congratulations also to Robert Schweikert, the second candidate who got elected to the openSUSE board.

With those packages comes akonadi 1.8.1 which includes a lot of fixes from the recent KDEPIM coding sprint. It should improve performance and more importantly, KDE SC 4.9.3 and akonadi 1.8.1 should solve all known data loss bugs. A special thanks to all the PIM developers putting a lot of effort into improving KDE’s PIM stack!

You can find instructions on how to update on the openSUSE wiki.

Another news item to note is that the KDE repos at openSUSE are going to be re-organised, have already been respectively. Their structure does now fit the contributors’ workflow better. If everything goes as planned openSUSE is going to ship KDE SC bugfix releases as official updates, starting with openSUSE 12.3. If you are interested in that topic you can find the summary in the opensuse-kde archives.

They do already contain a fix for Bug 306260 - KWin freezes when navigating between windows.

For 12.2 KR49 now includes Tomahawk an alternative to Amarok. Packages such as digikam, calligra etc. were updated to their latest stable release.

UPnP support was disable for the KR49 packages since it causes lots of crashes (if Windows shares are present on the network) and seems unmaintained within KDE, i.e. no fix to look forward to.

Kudos

Packaging-wise kudos go to Todd, Nico and everybody else doing the packaging in KR49.  If you find any packages missing in KR49 compared to KR48 please submit them via the buildservice or  drop a note on the opensuse-kde mailinglist.

KDE-wise I would like to thank especially Laurent Montel who contributes a lot to fixing-up kmail2, including adding email backup and import functionality. András Manţia is another developer who helps to get kmail2 into shape and re-worked the filtering for 4.9.  (There are of course many more who contribute to KDE!) Since AFAIK both work for KDAB, it is good to see that there are still developers payed to work on KDE while most distros seem to overload their so called KDE-team with non-KDE stuff, resulting in little or no contribution to KDE and just enough time to get packaging done, if at all.

Things I noticed with KDE SC 4.9 so far

In dolphin one can now add extra information to the main view, i.e. next to each item. Actually a nice feature. The sad thing is that it only works for indexed folders. The user cannot know about this and is presented with lots of “-” below each icon instead of just not showing anything if there is nothing to show. Enabling the additional information will block dolphin’s GUI for some time proportional to the amount of items in the current folder. Indexing still has some issues, e.g. nepomuk re-indexes movie and some sound files after every log-in. On top of that instead of just checking the length etc. it reads the whole file, i.e. hundreds of MB just to  start all over again after the next log-in.

The places pane presents some new items, i.e. you can add searches to it. While some default searches do not seem to be of any use, i.e. e.g. just list all audio files or pictures from all over the computer, the time-related queries can be quite useful if you are willing to invest the GB needed to build up an index for 70 000 files.

Regarding mail loss, the bugs were unfortunately not fixed yet for online IMAP. There are two issues. a) You lose email if you move it to a local folder and the internet connection breaks down while kmail2 is still downloading the message. b) You also lose email if you pipe the emails in your imap folders through external apps such as bogofilter. For the latter a workaround exists. If you open the properties of the imap folders and enable “always retrieve full message” you will not lose emails because of piping unless a) kicks in.

Apper seems to become more stable. While it still suffers from a – let’s say – incomplete zypper backend for PackageKit on openSUSE, it lets PackageKit processes die within reasonable time and does not block zypper forever anymore.

See http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kde/2012-06/msg00034.html and http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-core-devel&m=133931384906792&w=2.

UPDATE: Issues seem to be sorted out by now.