Now Lenny has been frozen for some time and the necessary packages have migrated to Lenny (that remember is still testing); I have finally made the backports of KDE 4.1.0. You can find the repository and the instructions at:

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 :)

In the beginning of this week, KDE 4.1 RC 1 was released and, of course, there are Debian packages since the release day. The instructions I blogged about how to install the beta1 (and downgrade) still mostly apply, although the version of the KDE 4 RC1 is 4.0.98.
The Debian KDE Team website has finally been updated, so you have even more useful information about how to install KDE 4.1 packages from experimental, specially the bits about Apt Pinning.
kdeplasmoids has been renamed, again, and it is now named kdeplasma-addons, this means it is currently stuck at the NEW queue in Debian. I do not know when it will be available in the archive, but luckily current version of kdeplasmoids (post beta 2), works well with the RC 1 packages, you can use it until kdeplasmoids is accepted.

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.

There will not be Debian packages for KDE 4.1 beta 2. Last week, beta 1 was replaced in experimental by a snapshot of the revision 819867, and beta 2 was tagged at revision 821791, so it is not a huge difference.

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!