On Seg, 08 Mar 2010, lrhorer wrote:
I loaded up an embedded system with Debian recently. I was having
problems relating to the older kernel in Lenny, so I want ahead and
installed Squeeze. I got things working, but I was mortified with
KDE4, which installed with Squeeze. It's horrible. I mean really,
really bad. KDE3 wasn't exactly spectacular, but it was good enough.
This hunk of junk, though, is really quite unacceptable. Ignoring the
fact that Kpackage was just plain broken - which I assume will be fixed
before Squeeze goes gold - the UI for KDE4 is brain dead. I have
several servers and a couple of workstations which will sooner or later
need to be upgraded to Squeeze, but I do not want KDE4 on them in the
shape it is now. Is there a way to allow everything else to upgrade,
but hold back KDE and its dependants? Barring that, is there a way to
get KDE4 to look and behave like KDE3?
Provived you can downgrade the packages to KDE3 (or reinstall and not upgrade), you can put packages on hold or use apt-pinning to prevent them from being upgraded.
But you'll not be able to keep that situation forever. One day, a (possibly huge) chain of dependencies will either force you to upgrade to KDE4 or not update other parts of your system anymore. Or programs you need won't work under KDE3, even if you can keep installed. And so on.
If you insist on KDE3, you could manually compile instead of using the debian packages to avoid the problem with keeping old packages installed. But even this is something you'll not be able to do forever: someday it won't compile anymore because of some library, or because it uses non-standard code that isn't supported by a newer compiler version, or some other problem. I believe KDE3 does not get much more developer atention now, and some day it'll be completely stopped - if you really want it, you'd have to maintain it yourself.
Basically, KDE3 is moribund, if not dead already. If you really don't like KDE4, I'd suggest looking for other alternatives (there are plenty of desktop environments out there), because hanging on to KDE3 is going to get more and more difficult as time passes.
-- War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ketchup is a vegetable. Eduardo M KALINOWSKI eduardo@kalinowski.com.br