KDE SC 4.7 release candidate arrives for testing

The KDE Community has announced the arrival of the first release candidate for version 4.7 of the KDE Software Compilation (KDE SC), a development version of the next major release of the popular Linux and Unix desktop manager. According to the developers, the team is currently focusing on fixing last-minute bugs, as well as completing translations and documentation; the final release of KDE SC 4.7.0 is planned for 27 July 2011.

KDE SC 4.7 offers improvements to KWin, the window manager for the KDE Plasma Desktop, adding support for OpenGL-ES 2.0 and improving its overall performance on mobile devices. User interface changes have been made to the Dolphin file manager which have improved file metadata searching. KDE's login manager, KDM (KDE Display Manager), now works with the Grub2 boot loader. The Marble virtual globe application, which is similar to Google Earth, now supports offline address search.

The KDE Plasma Desktop Workspace.
Source: kde.org As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find.

Further information about this first release candidate for KDE SC 4.7 can be found in the official release announcement and on the KDE SC 4.6.90 Info Page. Source code for self-compilation and binary packages for various Linux distributions are available to download from the project's web site.

KDE is licensed under a combination of the LGPLv2, BSD, MIT and X11 licences for core libraries and the GPLv2 or GPLv3 for applications. The latest stable release is KDE SC 4.6.4, a maintenance update from earlier this month to the 4.6 branch.

See also:

• GNOME and KDE 2011 Desktop Summit call for participation, a report from The H.

(crve)