This weekend I’ve been upgrading my system to KDE 4.1.3 (from 3.5.10). This post is to document a few niggles and workarounds I’ve found in doing so.
- Automoc is missing from one or two of the Dependencies files, so compile it first.
- Either disable all the KDE 3.5.x programs first or be prepared to SymlinkProgram -f the 4.x versions during the upgrade. KDE-Base-Workspace was the one I ran into problems with here, specifically, but a couple of others might too (probably -PIM-Libs). If you don’t, you get some pretty obscure compilation errors that are difficult to track down.
- The default kdmrc doesn’t run, and will cause you to get a message box saying “No greeter widget plugin loaded. Check the configuration.” To fix that, update /Programs/KDE-Base-Workspace/Current/Shared/config/kdm/kdmrc to uncomment the “PluginsLogin” and “PluginsShutdown” lines, and give them the value “/Programs/KDE-Base-Workspace/Current/lib/kde4/kgreet_classic.so”, and things will all work nicely. The recipe should be fixed to do that automatically sometime – it seems the problem arises because of the build process’s automatic configuration, which looks at your existing kdmrc file, so it won’t come up all the time, which makes it a bit hard to deal with.
- KDE-PIM doesn’t compile at all for me. I gather others haven’t faced that, so I’ll look into what causes it. The error is something about QSplitter.
- IRC has been removed from Kopete upstream, which is a pain.
- Strigi’s default plugin search path doesn’t include /S/L/L, so you have to create a symlink in /P/S/C/lib/strigi->/S/L/L/strigi/strigiindex_sopranobackend.so to use it with Nepomuk.
- You also have to create a link .kde4->.kde
Altogether though, the upgrade went much smoother than I expected. Everything works fairly cleanly with just a few niggles so far. Some things are different (bad!) in KDE4 itself: Konsole doesn’t save my tabs any more, for example. I will get used to that and probably script around it.