Upgrading to KDE 4.2 in your favorite Linux distro
Sathya | February 1st, 2009 - 12:26 am
Couple of days ago I’d posted about KDE 4.2 being released. As much as I wanted to upgrade KDE 4.2, I couldn’t do so immediately as it was not available in official Repos, the community repos had the RC version. Everyday I would do a equo search kde-meta hoping that I’d see the KDE 4.2 branch, and guess what it was available today 
Here’s a quick roundup on installing/upgrading to KDE 4.2 on some popular distros:
Sabayon 4:
First switch to root. For that, type
su root
next,
Just open up the terminal and type
equo update
That updates the repo to have the latest packages. Now most probably you’ll have to update equo since the update has the latest version of equo. So next type
equo install equo
This will update equo, entropy and Spritz to latest version. Certain config files will have to be updated, so just type
equo update conf
And now, finally update to KDE 4.2 by typing
equo install kde-meta-4.2.0
And that’s it! Your KDE will be updated to KDE 4.2.0!
openSUSE:
Click on the below 1-click links to upgrade:
openSUSE 11.1 | openSUSE 11.0 | openSUSE 10.3
Fedora:
From what I gather, KDE 4.2 is not yet available as an update to Fedora 10. You’ll have to enable the testing repos by typing
yum --enablerepo=kde-testing,kde-testing-all update
at the terminal followed by
yum groupinstall "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"
Do note you need to be root to do so.
Debian Lenny: Check this post
ArchLinux:
>pacman -Syu
Warning: This installs KDE 4.2 pkgs alright, however, kdm will not start
now. Forums have no solution yet.
Thanks to RollMeWay for the inputs
Some pics:
WARNING: While Upgrading to KDE 4.2 on Sabayon, wireless will be broken. This isn’t KDE 4.2′s fault, I’m inclined to say its because of PolicyKit since PolicyKit was installed as I installed KDE4.2 and I know PolicyKit can be a _real_ pain.
Update: The wireless breaking is a result of Network. Here’s a post on getting this fixed.
Update: As mentioned by lythandrel, changed removed references to sudo
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Which is the best overall distro for using KDE 4.2. I have it on Ibex. Its not bad but there are bugs to deal with
Best overall KDE distro – I’d say openSUSE. Sabayon (my current system) is pretty darn good too but openSUSE is more tweaked
I havent tested all the 4.2 but as of 4.1 (and before) Mandriva was still the best KDE out there.
Their 4.2 version looks like it will be what I will upgrade my folks comptuers that run PCLinuxOS w. KDE3.5.
Sorry, I dont trust Novell>OpenSuse. Nice distro though.
Kubuntu hasnt been in my top 3 KDE distro in quite a while, let’s hope 4.2 brings them up to the quality of their Gnome counterpart.
Sabayon 4.2 is very nice. Im gonna run it for the next week and see how it holds up.
So this is where all the Gentoo freaks hang around
I was waiting for the same .. It was saying already latest version installed when I tried through yum ..
should try this now..
Cool let me know if it works
I tried 11.1 GNome and KDE 4.1 discs both had a LOT of irritating packaging problems :’(
Irritating package problems as in ?
It took lots of time to install software and even worse was updating which kept hanging and stalling. did you have those problems?
Well I’ve moved away from openSUSE. Had no such problems in Sabayon
So you recommend Sabayon?
One more thing for general use do you recommend 64 bit
ok thank you I’ve started downloading Sabayon 4 r1
ArchLinux:
>pacman -Syu
will get KDE 4.2. Easiest yet?
For Debian users, KDE 4.2 is in experimental repository already.
Info at http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/experimental.html
ArchLinux update:
Installed KDE 4.2 pkgs alright, however, kdm will not start
now. Forums have no solution yet. So put this at the bottom
of the list.
Thanks for the update!
@Rey Very much so. you won’t have to install any drivers or codecs with Sabayon. And Sabayon is my first full 64-bit OS. I see no difference for my casual use
[...] Upgrading to KDE 4.2 in your favorite Linux distro [...]
“WARNING: While Upgrading to KDE 4.2 on Sabayon, wireless will be broken. This isn’t KDE 4.2’s fault, I’m inclined to say its because of PolicyKit since PolicyKit was installed as I installed KDE4.2 and I know PolicyKit can be a _real_ pain.”
I had the same problem, downgrading networkmanager 0.7.0.0 to 0.6.6-r1 solved the problem
emerge =net-misc/networkmanager-0.6.6-r1
Yup, I’ve posted the solution here: http://sathyasays.com/2009/02/02/networkmanager-070-breaks-wireless-for-intel-3945-users-on-sabayon-heres-how-to-fix-it/
Could you please change the sudo in the sabayon 4 references to something akin to becoming root using su? While sudo exists on sabayon, it’s not the brightest habit to get people into, especially when so many of the howtos on the sabayon and gentoo wikis contained chained commands. Most people don’t realise that sudo will only execute the first portion of a chained command with root privileges and don’t think to add sudo before each portion of a chained command, so it comes back to bite them on the butt quite badly. Those of us who are an active part of Sabayon’s support team do our best to convince users out of using sudo just due to the howtos alone, though many of us have more personal issues against sudo, but the sudo habit gets users into all kinds of trouble when following instructions from the sabayon wiki.
I have done so
Im sorry but how can you talk about KDE4.2 and not even mention Mandriva which has been top 3 best KDE distros for a long time?
Until PCLinuxOS adds 4.2 to their 2009 release, id have to say that Mandriva does the best job of KDE4.2.
Kubuntu underwhelmed me again.