• More information about this live CD
• Torrent page at LinuxTracker
• Live CD configuration files at github

And remember this is only made with the purpose of take a look to current status of upcoming KDE 4.2. Enjoy!

I am calling this an experiment because we are not sure yet whether this is a good idea, there are several reasons:

• packaging can suffer big changes before the final release
• this is still code in development with some important bugs
• some upstream changes (like ABI bump) can make huge dependencies problems

All the above reasons are likely to generate a lot of demands from users asking for support that are surely too many for our time and, I am afraid, patience.
So, in short, these packages are being provided without any support from your packagers even if they are done by the people who usually package KDE.

You have the repository and all the information at:
http://kde42.debian.net/.

The current snapshot is post-beta2 and again, before installing the packages, please read all the information. I am sorry if the wording is read as a bit harsh, but we really wanted make clear the message.

Will be KDE 4.2 beta 1 uploaded to experimental? Or to another public repository?
No.

And KDE 4.2 beta 2?
Maybe. But notice if it is uploaded it will be replacing current KDE 4.1 in experimental, so we will upload it only if we are sure it is stable and mature enough to replace 4.1

Will be KDE 4.2 backports in http://kde4.debian.net ?
No, backports were planned only for the KDE 4.1 series.

If experimental starts shipping KDE 4.2 (beta or RC), will be updates in http://kde4.debian.net for 4.1.4 (and if released 4.1.5)?
Yes, there will be backports for all the releases of 4.1.x.

When will be KDE 4 uploaded to unstable? And to testing?
KDE 4 will replace KDE 3 in unstable when Lenny is released. After some time, it will migrate from unstable to testing.

Bonus question: When will be Lenny released?
When it is ready.

As well, I have uploaded a backport of Qt 4.4.3 (*), for AMD64, i386 and PowerPC. If you are using KDE 4.1.x, you definitively want to use this Qt 4 version with a bunch of bugfixes.

A lot of people mailed me in the last week asking about problems with the mirror, this was caused by kde4.debian.net being actually 2 mirrors in round robin and the secondary (and faster) one having some problems syncing.

(*) Yes, I know Qt 4.4.2 and 4.4.3 are equal just with copyright changes, but it was easier backport latest version from unstable, right? :)

Enjoy!

http://kde4.debian.net/

And remember, KDE 4.1 is pretty good but it still has some issues that are little to little being fixed. Do no expect something so rock solid as KDE 3.5.x yet :)

The important part about RC 1 in Debian is we finally have kde4libs, kdepimlibs and kdebase-runtime in unstable, and they are meant to be released in Lenny.
Together with those packages, some KDE 4 applications have been uploaded to unstable:

• okular, the KDE 4 document viewer, has been packaged separately, and if you try it, I am sure you will love it ;)
• ktorrent 3.1.1 is now the default ktorrent version (you still can install KDE 3’s version that has been renamed to ktorrent2.2)
• and systemsettings, split from kdebase-workspace with less modules have been package separately, so you can configure the settings of KDE 4 packages.

Continuing with experimental, there are some standalone KDE 4 applications in experimental you might be interested in installing: yakuake, adept-manager, gtk-qt-engine-kde4, konq-plugins, rsibreak and digikam.
You can find as well, the 9th alpha of KOffice that was released a couple of days ago. If you need an excuse to try it out, take a look to the visual changelog.

If you are a Debian user and you have not tried KDE 4 yet but you are curious, I think you finally should give it a try, that some packages are in experimental it is not because it is experimental software (well, once KDE 4.1 is out!), it is because full KDE 4.1 is not meant to the be released in the Debian stable release that will be shipping KDE 3.5.9 and they both are not co-installable. There will be backports of KDE 4.1 for Lenny, but that is a topic for a next post.

I have no idea when we will do the next update for the KDE 4.1 packages, I guess with the RC 1. My personal plans for the next 2 weeks are polishing all the possible KDE 3.5.9 for Lenny.

The instructions I blogged about how to install KDE 4.1 beta 1 still apply, the only changes are: extragears-plasma package is now called kdeplasmoids and the version is 4.0.82+svn819867 instead of 4.0.80.
In the case you are installing in a clean environment, you can use directly the metapackages: kde4-minimal for a minimal KDE 4 environment: kdelibs, kdepimlibs and all the kdebase packages; or kde4 that will install everything.

As important note, if you are using these packages, remember before reporting a bug that the issue could be already fixed in the beta 2 or later.

And, by the way, hi planet KDE!

Some days ago I sent a proposal to the Qt/KDE Packaging Team discussion mailing list proposing to ship KDE 3.5.9 in Lenny.
You can read my email and the whole thread generated from here.

I would love hearing opinions, specially from stable users about what they expect/want in stable.

Below, follows an edited version of my email with my personal opinion.

—
My proposal is shipping KDE 3.5.9 with the KDE 4.1 development platform: kde4libs, kdepimlibs and kdebase-runtime.

No huge advantages in shipping KDE 4.1

Honestly, I do not see any advantage in shipping KDE 4.1 instead of KDE 3.5.9 besides of coolness and bleeding-edge stuff. I do see this movement more like a change of desktop than an improved new version of KDE. The KDE 4 series clearly represent a big change in innovation and improvement over KDE 3, something that has just started. KDE 4 will have a lot of to tell in the future (4.2, 4.3..), you only have to see how much it has improved from 4.0 to 4.1 beta 1. But I do not see KDE 4.1 still fully replacing all the necessities of our users. There is still a bunch of small details there and here, I will talk of some here further on this mail (for example, koffice), but what worries me here specially is that some are totally unknown for us, since we have a lot of users with very different use cases.

KDE 4.1 has not been released yet.

KDE 4.1 has not been released yet, looking at the release schedule, it is supposed to be released July 29th, this is already impossible with current Lenny’s release, and we would need an exception from the release team that will be only granted if it is really worth it. Then, a delay in this schedule from KDE release team would be bad for us, since we are so tight in time.
The sooner we could upload something to unstable would be with the RC1 that will be released on the 15th of July, 2 weeks before the final version. Lenny is supposed to go into full freeze in the mid of July, this could be delayed, but what is sure libraries will be frozen in 3-4 weeks, and we need ship a huge amount of new libraries. Besides, it is usually better ship an update of 4.1.x that contains fixes to the most important problems found in the 4.1.0 release.

Build dependencies we need to take care of

And then, it is not only the KDE 4 desktop, there are a set of build dependencies we have to maintain and not all of them are already in unstable, those dependencies are: akonadi, automoc (already in unstable, but it is a snapshot), decibel, soprano, tapioca-qt and telepathy-qt.

Some widely used apps of the KDE desktop are not ready

Even if they are not shipped with the core packages, some apps belong to the KDE desktop and to the KDE project. We have here Koffice, kdevelop or amarok. Amarok is one of a lot of widely used apps in the KDE desktop that won’t have a substitute in KDE 4. There is a myriad of small apps in this situation.

Koffice 2 won’t be ready so we are shipping with koffice 1 that needs some parts of KDE 3 to work properly (like kcontrol), so it will need some hacking because it is not currently fully installable in KDE 4… and it won’t be properly integrated anyway. I’m not sure how well works kdevelop with KDE 4, but newer kdevelop (that needs now kdevplatform package) won’t be ready.
Quanta needs as well kdevplatform, but quanta is shipped inside kdewebdev and it is one of the modules we have not packaged yet (together with accessibility and bindings).

No positive feedback about shipping it

My blog post about how to install KDE 4.1 beta 1 had some feedback of other developers in planet and specially from users in several blogs and forums that linked my post. Most of the people seem to like it as in “it will be cool”, but everybody seems to agree that it is not still a replacement for KDE 3 in their daily tasks.
Basically, I see 3 kinds of users: developers, power users and average users. KDE 4.1 could be ready for developers who are able to cope with the lack of some apps, mixing kde3 and kde4 without risks etc, and the same goes to power users. But I do not see it ready for final users, they won’t like this (imposed) change.
We would be shipping the KDE 4.1 desktop just released, and usually in the community, average users wait until more advanced users are used to this new software then it is when they adopt it, because then, they have support and help from forum and mailing lists from this more advanced users.
With the current beta power users and developers still do not see it ready for daily use, so what you can expect for our average users.

Some arches do not like KDE 4

Let’s keep this short: KDE 4 needs to be built in all the release archs, and it actually does not.

You can have everybody happy

My proposal is release with “old” reliable KDE 3.5.9 not forcing anyone to update to KDE 4.1, and just provide 4.1.x “official” backports. So whose who want to use KDE 4.1 will just use the backports and besides, these users will have these backports updated through the KDE 4.1.x (x=1,2,3..) updates. I am willing to work on these backports.
By the way, Backports infrastructure is only for stuff in testing, but I’m sure we can find a nice solution here.

If you do not want to risk your system, you can use this instructions to install KDE 4.1 in a virtual system such as qemu or VirtualBox.

Some previous notes:

• Please, pretty please, report the KDE related bugs in the KDE bugzilla at: http://bugs.kde.org Report it in the Debian BTS only gives us extra work that we do not have resources to handle.
• Report in the Debian BTS the packaging problems you find. If you are not sure, ask in the users mailing list: debian-kde@lists.debian.org
  Archives at http://lists.debian.org/debian-kde/

Update to KDE 4

1 Add experimental sources to /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ experimental main 

2 Run:

aptitude update

3 Install minimal functional KDE 4 system.
This requires some polishing and if you are using non official repositories for KDE related stuff, your system might break badly. Then run:

aptitude install -t experimental kde4-minimal

It will need remove some packages like: kwin, kicker or ksmserver, that is fine.

4 Restart your system.

Assuming you are using kdm, after restar, you will get kde4’s kdm. Log in and voila! KDE 4.

5 Installing the remaining packages.

You still will have KDE 3 stuff in your system and plenty of KDE 4 to install. I would recommend upgrade module to module, for example, for upgrading kdeutils:

aptitude install -t experimental kdeutils

So you can see clearly what is being updated, what programs dissapear and what is new. And if you do not want to test all the KDE modules, you do not need to install it all.

Available KDE 4 modules are:
kdeadmin kdeartwork kdeedu kdegames kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdenetwork kdepim kdetoys kdeutils kdepim and extragear-plasma

6 You can see all the KDE 3.5 packages that are still in your system from a Konsole with:

dpkg -l | grep 4:3.5

Translations are in the package kde-l10n-XX where XX is your language code.

Once you have installed all the KDE 4 packages you want, I would suggest you comment out the experimental source line by adding a # in the beginning.

How to go back to KDE 3

1 Remove experimental from your sources.list

2 Remove all the base packages:

aptitude remove kdelibs5 kdelibs5-data kdepimlibs5 kdepimlibs-data
kdebase-data kdebase-bin kdebase-runtime kdebase-runtime-bin-kde4
kdebase-runtime-data kdebase-runtime-data-common kdebase-workspace
kdebase-workspace-bin kdebase-workspace-data kdebase-workspace-libs4+5
libphonon4

3 Install the minimal KDE 3:

aptitude install kdelibs kdebase kdm

4 Restart your system and the good old kdm should be on your screen again.

5 Now you can continue installing all the KDE 3 packages you like using.
You always can use aptitude install the meta package KDE, but since that installs a lot of packages I would recommend install the metapackages you really want.

The list:
kdeaccessibility kdeaddons kdeadmin kdeartwork kdeedu kdegames kdegraphics kdemultimedia kdenetwork kdepim kdetoys kdeutils kdewebdev

5 You can see the remaining KDE 4 bits on your system with

dpkg -l | grep 4:4.0.80

What KDE will be available in Lenny?

We do not know yet, we would like to ship KDE 4.1 but it is still early to know for sure.