KDE 4.0 Alpha 2 Available Now

The second Alpha release of the most awaited project of this year, KDE 4.0, was released last night by the hard-working people behind the KDE project: "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first alpha release of the KDE Desktop Environment, version 4.0. This release is a basis for the integration of powerful new technologies that will be included in KDE 4."

Highlights of this release include:

• Plasma, KDE 4's new shell for the desktop, which provides a new application to directly launch programs and start other tasks, simply named krunner. Moreover, the applets that display information about date and time, hardware devices, and which show RSS feeds, images or provide dictionary lookup are called Plasmoids.
• KControl has a new and improved replacement called System Settings, which hosts various modules for configuring the desktop and other aspects of the system.
• The KDE 4 default file manager, Dolphin, is getting more and more polished.

The KDE 4.0 schedule:

1 April 2007 - Subsystem freeze
15 Apr 2007 - kdelibs Hackathon week
1 May 2007 - Alpha release + kdelibs soft API freeze
8 May 2007 - Usability and Accessibility review
1 June 2007 - Feature freeze
25 June 2007 until 24 September 2007 - Beta cycle, full kdelibs API freeze
25 September 2007 until 22 October 2007 - Release Candidate cycle
23 October 2007 - KDE 4.0 released

KDE is a powerful Free Software graphical desktop environment for Linux and Unix workstations. It combines ease of use, contemporary functionality and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system. KDE is a network transparent contemporary desktop environment for UNIX workstations. KDE seeks to fill the need for an easy to use desktop for Unix workstations, similar to the desktop environments found under the Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows.

For more details on this alpha release, please visit the KDE 4.0 Alpha 2 official webpage.

Enjoy some screenshots from the KDE 4 Alpha 2 LiveCD:



Until the final release of KDE 4.0 will be available in late October, you can download this first alpha version of KDE Four now from Softpedia and you can also download the KDE LiveCD version 0.1.0 based on this first alpha release, from Softpedia.

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