14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE community has announced that the second release candidate of the upcoming KDE SC 4.6. This late in the development phase, the update only comes with last minute bug fixes and small changes. KDE SC 4.6 RC2 is the last phase before the final release of KDE SC 4.6 later this month.
"KDE has made available a second release candidate for the impending new version of its workspace, applications and development platform. The release serves as final test candidate before 4.6.0 is released on January, 26th," KDE announced.
KDE SC 4.6 comes with the usual array of under the hood updates expected with each major release.
One of the big updates was supposed to be the new KDE-PIM, based on Akonadi. However, remaining issues mean that KMail2 and the rest of the suite will be pushed back to future KDE SC 4.6 releases.
"KDE's release team has decided to not include the new release of KDE-PIM, containing the Kontact groupware client and the new KMail2 which is based on the Akonadi groupware cache in this release due to open issue with migration of large sets of data from the traditional client," KDE explained when the first release candidate was revealed.
Everything else is on track though, an updated Dolphin file manager, the "reintroduction" of desktop Activities and the other smaller updated features.
The KDE SC 4.6 release schedule:
· November 24, 2010 - Beta 1;
· December 8, 2010 - Beta 2;
· December 22, 2010 - release candidate 1;
· January 5, 2011 - release candidate 2;
· January 26, 2011 - final release.
KDE SC 4.6 Release Candidate 2 sources are available for download here on Softpedia. Remember that this is a testing release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. Please report bugs to bugs.kde.org. Please report any possible security issues to security [at] kde.org.