They're finally released :)
I uploaded them this morning, but then I realized that the installer does not show them... so we had to fix the installer. Ralf then found another quick fix for the problem on the server side (our parser had problems with spaces in the path) and simply renamed the path.
Ralf did not told it to me and therefore the packages were released and I did not knew about :-D
Nevertheless I also fixed the installer and uploaded a new version (0.8.0-2) which you can grab here.
Here are some questions you might have when you're trying to install the packages:
Q: Why does the packager also downloads a lot of packages I did not select?
A: In contrast to linux there're no 'system' libs like libpng, libjpeg, ... available for windows. But they're needed by kde4 and therefore we packaged them too.
Q: Why does the kdewin-installer installs the 'Microsoft Visual Redistributable Package' every time?
A: Our installer is not complete yet and lacks support for 3rd-party binary installers. Therefore it can't know if this package is already installed or not
Q: I can't start an application because of missing dll's / crashes on startup
A: The problem is that some dll's are in kde\lib instead kde\bin. We already moved a lot to bin but get not ready for beta3. For now simply add kde\lib to your PATH environment variable
Q: Why does pop up a command line window named 'dbus-daemon' every time I start a kde app?
A: DBus is one of our bleeding edges and we had no time to make this app run as a service.
Q: An application is crashing - what should I do?
A: There are a lot of bugs in kdelibs4/win32 which can lead to a crash. Try to reproduce the crash on linux. If it's crashing there too, report the bug to bugs.kde.org. If you can't test on linux, also report to bugs.kde.org :)
Q: Hey your crap is constantly crashing - and this is named 'beta3'???
A: Although it's beta3, the platform specific source for windows is in early alpha stage. We currently plan a release for windows which can be called beta in the timeframe of kde 4.1. This is mostly due to lack of time from our site (we're all not paid for this work and do this in our free time)
Q: I get 'The program can not initialized correctly ...'
A: M$ is stupid. They do not ship the debug runtime with their vcredist package and therefore you can't start an application (you need to have VS 2005 SP1 installed). We're working on a solution.
Q: Why are there no packages for mingw?
A: I did not see a reason for this in this early phase of kde4/win32. The end user doesn't care and a developer should compile kde for themself. If you've problems compiling kde4 on windows, join #kde-windows and ask for help. There're outdated mingw binaries available for download. I don't suggest using them.
Q: My applications are crashing on startup!
A: I only tested the apps on my development system. Therefore some libs were available which you normally does not find on an end-user system. We've uploaded a new package named 'msvc8-runtime-msvc' in kdesupport section. After installing this package, all apps should start. If not let us know (#kde-windows or kde-windows@lists.kde.org)
Q: There are still missing libraries!
A: Our dependency system is not bug-free yet. Therefore sometimes the packager does not select all needed packages. You need at least all packages in win32libs and all packages in kdesupport.
And now start downloading and enjoy! :)
