K3b 2.0 Alpha Preview - First Alpha of the KDE4 Port Is Out

I was pleased to hear a while ago that K3b got two new developers assigned by the Mandriva project and that work at the KDE4 port is going well now. Although K3b was inactive for a pretty long time (the last stable release was 1.0.5 for KDE3 on May 27, 2008), it looks like development goes at a fast pace and the first alpha of the KDE4 port was put up a little earlier this month.

It's a well-known fact that K3b is one of the most popular CD/DVD burning applications for Linux (if not the most popular) and sometimes the burner of choice for GNOME users too, not only KDE ones. So I decided to compile and install this alpha preview on a Debian Sid system with KDE4 and see how it looks by now.

Currently K3b 1.65.0 alpha1 does not include any new features over its KDE3 version, but it has been ported to KDE4, which is just great news.

Here are several screenshots of the new alpha:

The interface hasn't changed much, and the menu structure is the same.

Usual instance of K3b 1.65.0 alpha1

K3b settings

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K3b comes with the features which it already had in KDE3, and they were plenty: on-screen display, support for themes, the ability to burn CDs/DVDs and ISO images, Konqueror integration (by the way, I think Dolphin integration is required too), notifications, CDDB support and more.

Overall, I was extremely enchanted to see this port of K3b and I'm sure it won't be long and the official 2.0 release will be out. Although there isn't much to say at this point because currently it does not seem to include new features (K3b was kind of full-featured already in the KDE3 version), they will surely come.

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