KDE 4.0.2 with Arch Linux

Yeah, its been a while, I know. But I thought I’d kick back by talking a little about my current desktop. Its Arch Linux with KDEmod (unstable) or basically KDE 4.0.2. I was tempted to install KDE 4 from subversion initially. But I did want to keep my existing KDEmod setup and I didn’t have much time on my hands to get dirty. Then I saw that the KDEmod team had finally released 4.0.2 packages after sticking to 4.0.1 for a while. I can’t comment on stability improvements but I can say that the KDE 4.0.2 I’m using is pretty stable.

There are a few minor annoyances, however:

• Plasma rendering needs to be patched up a little. At this moment I’m seeing a few green holes under this Firefox window as I’m typing. This is most noticeable when I turn on desktop effects (which seem a little slow as well).
• I get a crash occasionally while logging out, I haven’t figured out the exact cause yet because it appears for a few seconds and the next moment I’m back to kdm.
• Juk refuses to remember my columns, so its a little annoying there since I don’t have Amarok2 yet.
• Kopete isn’t showing display pictures. Not sure if its a bug or just not implemented in 4.0.2 yet.

I’m not filing bug reports against anything related to the above points because 4.0.3 has been tagged as of March 26, so I’ll wait and see if there is any improvement in 4.0.3 which releases on April 2, 2008.

The latest gtk-qt-engine supports KDE 4, so be sure to grab the source or build from svn if you want your GIMP, Firefox and other GTK+ applications to use the Oxygen theme. There are a few minor glitches here and there though, so don’t expect it to be perfect. At the moment I don’t have Qt3 or any KDE3 application installed (yes, no Amarok or k3b, and I’m already missing them) but that could change soon.

I’ve already tried the 4.1 development version (4.0.66 at the time) through openSUSE’s livecd and its quite unstable as you’d expect KDE from the trunk to be. Amarok2 refused to start and there were a few other bumps as far as I remember. Plasma however, was a bit more stable than what I’m using. If you would like to install KDE 4, I’d recommend grabbing the livecd and installing it. SUSE’s done a fine job in polishing it up. If you have an openSUSE DVD then you can do a fresh install by noting down the KDE 4 Repositories and entering them as Additional Repositories during the install.

WordPress have really, really surprised me with a 3GB storage capacity. I think I’ll use that right now and then maybe play a little knetwalk.

Update: As of now I’m putting Firefox3 aside and sticking to Konqueror because pages look so much more prettier and load faster with Webkit. I can’t import Firefox’s bookmarks for some reason at the moment, but I think that should be fixed soon.

~ by SoftVision on March 27, 2008.