Friday, 3 July 2009

How-To: Install KDE 4.3 RC1 in Kubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope

The first release candidate of KDE 4.3, the next major version of KDE4, was put out on July 1st and comes with new features and a lot of Plasma improvements and bug fixes.

In this short tutorial I'll show you how to install KDE 4.3 in your Kubuntu 9.04 machine with the help of the Kubuntu Backports PPA (Personal Packages Archive) repositories. Just follow the steps below:

1. Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file with root privileges using your favourite text editor:

E.g.:
- for nano:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

- for Kate

kdesudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

And add the following line:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main

Make sure to save the file and proceed to the next step.

2. Update your sources lists
Type, using your user password:

sudo apt-get update

If you haven't added the trusted key of this PPA, don't worry about the warning, and type 'y' when it asks to continue the installation at the next step.

3. Install KDE 4.3

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If you don't have KDE installed and want to try this RC, then type:

sudo apt-get install kde

Or, better yet:

sudo apt-get install kde-core plasma

To get only the core KDE packages.

Notice that this command will replace your existing KDE 4.2.2 installation with the latest KDE found in the repositories. According to the Kubuntu website, X may die during the upgrade, but the upgrade will be performed, so just restart the computer after upgrading.

2 comments:

Daniel André said...

Nice tutorial, but why not instead point people to use the graphical tools available in kubuntu, such as software-properties-kde?

Craciun Dan said...

I guess that's OK too, depending on each person's preferences.