Monday, November 3, 2008

KDE-Nightly (Neon) - For the Thrill Seeker in You

Well, thanks to Harold (apachelogger) our resident packaging savant, we have the ability to test drive KDE 4.2 trunk daily. Remember, this is trunk we are dealing with and many things break, and possibly break quite often and maybe for extended periods of time. For this reason, you should never install this on your production machine.

I decided to give this a test drive, and figured the best way to do so was via a VM. So, I installed Virtualbox first and set it up. I won't go over all the details here, as there are a wide variety of docs available for setting up virtual box (aka google for it).

Once I had a VM drive all setup and installed with the latest Intrepid, added the KDE Nightly Neon repository (the PPA for KDE Nightly) to a new sources.list.d/neon.list file. The PPA is enabled by adding this entry:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/project-neon/ubuntu intrepid main

The next thing you need is to update your repositories package info. Either using your favorite package manager, and hit their update option, or from the command line execute the following:

sudo apt-get update

Now, you should have an updated package list which contains the Neon packages.

Next, using your package manager, locate the kde-nightly package and select/mark it for installation and apply it or execute the following from the command line:

sudo apt-get install kde-nightly

This will install the required files and setup a new kdm xsession for KDE Nightly (Neon). Once you logout and end up back to KDM, you can choose this new session (rather than the default KDE session).

Reference post can be found here.

Many thanks to apachelogger for this.

5 comments:

  1. Hi,

    Thanks for this great service, I can not believe no one has thanked you for doing this. thank you.

    Just a quick question, Does update manager tell you when there is a new update or do you have to do apt-get install kde-nightly every so often?

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  2. Once you install the package and have added the repo to sources.list, then any updates will appear in update manager or whatever you use to monitor updates.

    Also, you can sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade if you want to check for updates at anytime (rather than wait/trust update manager :> ).

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  3. Hi, Thanks

    Could you please help me with a problem with KDE nightly. There are no applications in the start menu, and no file is associated with a program.

    I have tried looking at KDE techbase, but cannot find what folders/files to copy to get the menu to populate.

    Thank you in advance.

    Also I have sudo apt-get update / upgrade a couple of days after installing KDE nighly, however there is no new update - is there be one nightly?

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  4. I get exactly the same thing. No apps in the menu. And the dolphin menus all say no text

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  5. To get the applications in the start menu (kickoff) then do the following command (without quotes) in the terminal/konsole:

    "cp /etc/xdg/menus/kde4-applications.menu ~/.config/menus/applications.menu"

    then run (also without quotes)

    kbuildsycoca4

    That should get your apps in the menu. No idea on the dolphin menus and the no text thing.

    ReplyDelete