Installation of KDE SC4

[erikr]

Hi,

 

[Edited]

 

Some of the KDE SC 4 packages and especially the meta packages has been removed from the Gentoo portage and as a consequence also been removed from Funtoo portage. IN this thread I describe how I managed to install KDE SC 4 after this changes was made. 

 

The process is as of now still dependent on mix-in KDE beeing available in Funtoo.

 

 

 

[erikr]

Some progress.

 

kde-sunset is not included in the layman list. You have to create an own record, which is fairly simple. The guide can be found here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Layman#Adding_custom_overlays

Seems like one have to run:

root # layman -L

before layman finds it (before layman -a).

 

The result is: /etc/layman/overlays/kde-sunset.xml

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<repositories encoding="UTF-8" version="1.1">
  <repo priority="50" quality="experimental">
    <name>kde-sunset</name>
    <description>KDE 3 and KDE SC 4 Sunset</description>
    <homepage>https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/kde-sunset.git/</homepage>
    <source type="git">git://anongit.gentoo.org/proj/kde-sunset.git</source>
  </repo>
</repositories>

Then run:

root #layman-updater -R
root #layman -L
root #layman -a kde-sunset

Viola, you will have the KDE SC4 meta-packages back again.

 

I am building right now but no starting problems so far. Follow the funtoo KDE SC 4 guide: http://www.funtoo.org/KDE_SC_4and things seems to work.

 

 

There are some minor problems with some old KDE3 ebuilds in this overlay that causes EIX to produce errors. Seems like it ignores some broken/out of date packages and continues with the ones that works. I have a eix db to search at the end.

[erikr]

Stumbled on an interesting commit to the kde-sunset overlay (https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/kde-sunset.git/commit/?id=7d12fbd4c22df5e401defb3da9aac619eaa85340):
 

 

kde-apps: import 4.14.3 from main tree

 

 

Seems like a lot of the KDE SC 4 stuff are available via this overlay. I will try it out.

[erikr]

KDE is now up and running on the laptop. I did not a full install (kde-metea) but instead installed kdebase-meta:4.

 

Since some time I have started to install kde-metas with the specific slot (:4) to avoid confusion with KDE 5 (:5).

 

Before I install KDE 4 I added the following in packages.mask (as suggested in the Gentoo forum):

kde-plasma/*
#kde-frameworks/*
kde-apps/*:5

I have decided to comment out the masking of kde-frameworks as some applications are moving over from KDE4-libs.

 

With the above mask I had no problems what so ever to emerge kdebase-meta, get the basic KDE4 system up and running, and beeing able to login and continue with user applications and a few other kde-metas that I like to have.

 

A few USE changes was needed by NetworkManager (add introspection on a depedency) and p7zip (either add wxwidgets or remove kde). Otherwise still no blocks or circular dependencies.

 

Then it is just the power saving left.

 

I expect to hand over the laptop to the wife this evening. She is hooked up on KDE4 and Kaffeine and I figure a sysadmin have to do what a sysadmin have to do :)

 

[erikr]

Apparently the KDE4 ebuild situation is not stable on the Gentoo side. A lot of things are moving around and some of the old kde-base packages are moved into kde-framework but with slot :4 instead of :5.

 

If you already have a KDE4 based installation and added kde-sunset you will find that some already installed packages that works just fine will all of a sudden depend on KDE Framework 5 components. So during mu just ongoing installation I had to do a few changes.

 

Firsts of all, the sugested kde5 mask above shall be changed to:

kde-plasma/*
kde-frameworks/*:5
kde-apps/*:5

Then I had to unemerge two packages that in the gentoo version have dependencies to KDE Frameowkr 5 but in the KDE Sunset version does not. Seems like the first one is moved from kde-base into kde-plasma.

root# emerge -aC kde-plasma/kactivitymanagerd kde-base/kactivities

When you perform the system upgrade they will be included from the KDE Sunset overlay with only KDE4 dependencies.

 

Mind you that I have btrfs on my root and every time I do an upgrade I make a snapshot of the running root BEFORE I sync portage. I want the snapshot to be consistent and to be able to remove stuff and emerge --depclean. I also may need to boot on the snapshot and live with it for a while thus I want to be able to emerges things with the version I have available.

 

Right now there is a high probability that I will in fact reinstall KDE4 based on the KDE-Sunset instead of Portage. On this computer I managed to complete the KDE4 installation two days before the troubles begun. I now expect to have a long troublesome period of packages moving around and start depending more and more on KDE Frameworks 5. The effort to reinstall is quite low in comparison.

 

 

This made the trick for me.