The KDE Project announced the availability of KDE 3.1 Beta 1 today. This release, which marks the second test release
of the KDE 3.1 series, offers many improvements and bug fixes over KDE 3.0, which was release in early April. KDE, which stands for K Desktop Environment, is a popular desktop user interface for Linux and UNIX systems.
According to the release's announcement, features include “improved OpenPGP handling in KMail, handy tooltips that
provide details of files in Konqueror quickly, and even new ways to be less
productive (four new games).” Additional noteworthy improvements are tabbed web browsing, LDAP support in the address book, and remote desktop access. The final release is expected sometime in late October.
While OfB Labs does not recommend installing this release on production systems, you may find it useful to test the software on an extra system. Binary packages are available for Mandrake and SuSE systems; others can also try KDE 3.1, but they will have to compile the source code to do so.
For more information, we recommend this KDE Dot News story and the full announcement. Links to the appropriate places to download the packages are available on the KDE 3.1 Info Page.-Timothy R. Butler