As I was hit by KDE4 due to the ~arch keyword on my gentoo box in october, I was playing with KDE4 for quite a while. I even had the two versions in parallel. But due to starting up wrong version of binaries due to PATH issues, I am pretty fed up with testing. Unmerging the whole KDE stuff would be a simple thing, but I want to keep KDE 3.5 as I am working on it.
As I am a gentoo user, I know about masking unwanted packages. For making it simple, I had to abuse eix a little:
eix -C kde-|grep “\[[IU]\]”|awk -F” ” ‘{print $2 “:4.1”}’ > /etc/portage/package.mask/kde4
Portage allows to split our package.mask files into several files. The reason why I am using a separate mask file here is that I might want to remove the whole KDE4 mask at once as soon as things are usable again. The procedure of emerge -C, emerge –depclean, emerge -uDNav world and finally revdep-rebuild takes quite some time, but cleaning up the mess is quite important for keeping the system alive.
As the cpu gets idle again, my system has lost quite some weight and the previous errors just disappeared. Sure, the whole experiment was quite some work, but I don’t look back in anger as it was a fine experience and a nice preview on things to come. KDE4 is on the way to grow up to be a usable desktop environment.
Andreas Nilsson says:
Well, I don’t think kde 4.1.* should have ever been unmasked. But it does have it’s place in the tree.
You might want to take kde4.2 beta * for a spin, a lot of improvements have been made. Gone is the sluggishnes now it is as snappy as compiz ;)
Stargazer says:
I am doing test builds from the trunk with Toei Rei to test btrfs as svn checkouts and compiles are quite fine stress tests.
But the KDE PIM stuff is still pretty alpha and not useable yet.
Rha says:
I don’t understand that kde4 hype anyways…
Rha says:
Have you tried the kde4live stuff already?
Stargazer says:
kde4daily images are a great idea, but I get a bad feeling about everybody testing the nightly snapshots. Also the emulation speed might give a pretty bad look of the desktop environment…
LXj says:
As a Gentoo user you could actually use sets
Stargazer says:
True, sets are nice but masking was a nice way of ‘downgrading’ the packages the easier way