Debian and KDE4: Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

Apr 01, 2009

Debian developer Ana Guerrero, as spokesperson for the KDE team, has announced that KDE4 will appear during the first week of April 2009.

Guerrero's announcement on the Debian-KDE mailing list indicated that KDE4 is moving from the experimental to the unstable repository, although the exact date is not quite certain.

A special tool in KDE 4.2 called kaboom will aid in a flawless update from KDE 3.5 as well as from existing KDE4 installations. The issue is adopting user settings in the hidden .kde and .kde4 directories. Up to now it had been unclear which directory would be used in the final analysis. The kaboom tool does not support KDE4 installations from the Debian backport.

Debian had left itself quite a bit longer development time with KDE4 than other distros. For about a year adventuresome users could install from the experimental repository, with often problematic results. Some consideration was even made for a short while about releasing KDE4 together with Debian 5 (Lenny), although that idea was quickly scrapped. Now, after Lenny's release and a lot of preliminary work, KDE 4.2 is finally ready for exposure to a wider circle of Debian users.

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Comments

  • kde4 backports and kaboom

    regarding the comment from Raúl i did some more investigations:
    answers to my question on debian-kde list can be followed at:
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2009/04/msg00019.html
    and
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/2009/04/msg00020.html

    greetz
    devil

  • kaboom and backports

    I'd like to comment out on the following sentence:
    "The kaboom tool does not support KDE4 installations from the Debian backport."

    I'm afraid this is a misunderstanding. You should look at [0] KDE4 backports for Lenny and [1] the information about kaboom. Once you read that you will notice..

    KDE4 backports aren't officially supported by Debian, you can read in [0]: "Please, do not file bugs in the Debian BTS, these packages are not official packages". Besides, there's no restriction from kaboom in any way to have this unsupported.

    Regards,

    [0] http://kde4.debian.net/
    [1] http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/kaboom.html

  • A good approach

    A reasonable approach to KDE 4. The Debian people have a better way of delivering KDE 4 than other developers.
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