epic fail!

With the 4.1 release of the K Desktop Environment, the development team has taken KDE 4 to the level where it is suitable for the end user. Of course it still has his flaws, but the new technology is really neat.

When I wanted to test the new release, I did an installation roughly the same as outlined in this post by tombuntu. However one thing keeps bugging me:

• The resulting system is kinda mixed up with KDE and Gnome. This is a problem with all dual installations. You either end up using many Gnome programs on KDE or vice versa. The alternative is to install many programs, which I am also not a big fan of. Everybody tries to keep his/her system as clean as possible.

I overcame this problem by installing KDE 4.1 from a fresh Ubuntu 8.04 Server installation. If you have your home directory on a seperate partition (which I would strongly advise), this is really simple. If you do not have this, there are many tutorials on how to do this on the net (Example).

1. Clean up your home partition. This step helps ensure that you don’t carry around unnecessary data and application settings from previous installs, while on the other hand maintaining the application settings you want to keep (like firefox profiles, pidgin accounts, ssh keys …). To do so, log out of your session, switch to the console and create a temporary directory (eg. ~/backup). Then, go to your home directory
   cd
   and type
   cd . When you now hit tab multiple times you get a list of items in your home directory starting with a “.”. Identify the items you want to keep and move/copy them to your backup folder
   mv .mozilla backup/. Repeat this step until the backup folder contains only the personal settings that you want to keep. When you are done, remove everything starting with a dot from your home directory (remember to be logged out and do not login after this until you did your install)

   rm -r .*

   You can add the -f switch if you are really sure what you are doing. You don’t have to worry about . or .., those will not be affected, but rm -rf is a dangerous command. Now that your home is wiped clean, copy the backup and optionally remove it.
   cd backup
   mv .* ../
   cd ..
   rm -r backup

2. Now to the real stuff. Donwload and burn the 8.04 LTS Server image from here. Insert the CD and boot. When partitioning during the install, be sure to set your old home partition as the new one without installing the file system. Further reading on partitions could start here (beware, german).
3. After finishing the install, boot, login, update and upgrade your system to the latest patchlevel. You probably don’t want to keep the server kernel, so install linux-image-generic or any kernel of your choice. Remeber to edit the menu.lst to set your default booting kernel. It is important that you reboot, update and upgrade again when you installed the new kernel.
4. Now we are ready to bring the bling. Add
   deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu hardy main

   to your sources.list with sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.Install the following packages

   sudo apt-get install kubuntu-kde4-desktop gtk-qt-engine-kde4

   and after the next reboot you should be greeted by a clean, fresh KDE 4.1 login screen.

Tags: (k)ubuntu

Dieser Artikel wurde am Mittwoch, 06. August 2008 um 19:55 veröffentlicht und ist abgelegt unter (k)ubuntu. Du kannst die Antworten zu diesem Artikel mit Hilfe des RSS 2.0 Feeds verfolgen. Du kannst eine Antwort hinterlassen oder einen Trackback von deiner Seite aus senden.