Monday, March 28, 2005

KDE 3.4 has been released, and what better way to risk munging my fresh install of SUSE 9.2 than attempting an upgrade from the default 3.3.x?

The RPM packages for KDE 3.4 are available for installation / upgrade via apt; kde needs to be added to sources.list. The following steps enabled a (more-or-less) successful upgrade:

• apt update
• apt -s dist-upgrade
• apt --test dist-upgrade
  This downloaded around 150 MB of KDE-related files and tests installation; in this case no conflicts were reported by RPM.
• apt dist-upgrade
  This actually installed the packages.

Note: see here for a general overview of upgrading KDE with apt. This page describes the process for 3.1 -> 3.2, although the same process is valid for other versions. The specific problems described were not encountered while upgrading from 3.3 to 3.4.

startx blues

Following the successful RPM upgrades, startx brought up fvwm, which is very nice and fast and UNIX-like, but sorely lacking in the eye-candy department. Investigation revealed that the KDE start script was missing from /usr/X11R6/bin/. This is easily rectified with:

ln -s /opt/kde3/bin/startkde /usr/X11R6/bin/kde

kmail complains...

Following the upgrade, the newly installed kmail 1.8 gave up all attempts to send mail via an SMTP server with the message "SASL(-4): no mechanism available". The full error message was not particularly helpful and seemed to imply a problem with the mail server. However, it turns out kmail evidently now depends on external packages for authentication; installing various cyrus-sasl packages (cyrus-sasl-crammd5, cyrus-sasl-saslauthd, cyrus-sasl-digestmd5 etc.) solved this problem.

Posted at 9:18 AM |Comments (0)