[ale] KDE 3.4 alpha

[Jim Philips]

I decided to install this last weekend, despite its alpha status. I'm 
pleasantly surprised so far. The only consistently annoying bug I've found is 
that config screens flicker and wiggle, but they do work. 

The most noticeable addition is that KDE 3.4 now has built-in support for fast 
user switching. So, you don't have to kill your session for another user to 
log in. You could do it before 3.4, but it was much harder to set up. 

Kontact has added a journal feature, which is nice for some people, but I 
don't use it. The SMTP code for Kmail has been rewritten and it didn't work 
for me at first (using Speedfactory). But I soon discovered that if I turned 
off SMTP authentication, everything worked fine. 

Konqueror supposedly supports SubVersion as well as CVS now, but I couldn't 
get the SubVersion support to build and eventually skipped it. Konqueror is 
still an amazing file manager. I can configure, build and install Slackware 
packages right in the Konqueror window. This all requires some outside 
add-ons, but people keep writing them.

On the eye-candy side, KDE 3.4 supports SVG wallpapers and they look 
incredible. I know this won't matter to lots of users, but if you like this 
stuff, you can have a ball.

This will be the last major release before KDE 4.0. I'm sure there are lots of 
features and bug fixes that I'm not mentioning here. I'm just pointing out 
some of the obvious changes. And this alpha release is pretty damned stable, 
so the adventurous shouldn't be afraid to try it. I haven't had any 
showstoppers in a week of heavy usage.