Re: My experience upgrading to KDE4
* Sune Vuorela <nospam@vuorela.dk> [2009 Apr 11 02:02 -0500]:
> On 2009-04-11, Nate Bargmann <n0nb@n0nb.us> wrote:
> > Well, I took the plunge today upgrading to KDE4. I've tracked Sid for
> > several years and never has it broken like today. :-D
>
> Your breakage doesn't sound like being much KDE4 related, but general
> "lots of things happens in debian unstable, sometimes stuff
> break"-related.
This just seems to be more radical than at most times in the past.
I'll post my experiences in case someone else can benefit. I'm a
master at taking the wrong road and then backtracking. :-)
> You read about the splashy issue. Xorg vs hal also.
After removing splashy Aptitude finished the upgrade without an error.
Hal seems to be working fine and Xorg is mostly working fine except for
what seems to be an occasional hang.
> You either need desktop-base or you need to purge desktop-base.
I installed it and KDM came up working. Now, it seems to be hit or
miss, mostly miss, whether it will work on a system start. After the
last system restart I got dumped to a shell prompt and running startx
failed. It turned out that my almost ten year old ~/.xsession file was
getting in the way by calling IceWM programs that were no longer on my
system! I've been using XDM/KDM for many years now. Cruft is an
interesting thing with interesting consequences.
Phonon gave me no sound and it claimed my sound device was broken (or
some such language) while Audacious played just fine so the
hardware/ALSA stuff was working. I installed the Xine backend for
Phonon and now KDE sounds are working just fine and I purged the
Gstreamer backend. However, in Konsole all Bash beeps seem to be
suppressed.
Lastly, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to tell the panel to
only show the windows in a given desktop and not all at once. I know
it's doable as I configured it that way on my Kubuntu installation.
Also, KDE4 is much faster on my Debian installation than on my Kubuntu
installation and I think the reason is that on the Debian side
compositing is disabled and something is preventing it from working.
Meanwhile glxinfo says direct rendering is enabled. This is on an IBM
T41 laptop with a Radeon Mobility M7 graphics chipset.
I installed Kaboom and perhaps it migrated more settings than it seems,
but most of my KDE3 customizations seemed to have been lost. Still the
migration was probably as painless as could be expected.
- Nate >>
--
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."
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