Test KDE 4.1 Beta 1 with KDE4Daily
I’m primarily a GNOME user, but I was interested and followed along with the development of KDE 4.0. It’s time to start testing again now the KDE 4.1 Beta 1 has been released.
KDE 4.1 is the first major feature-update to the KDE desktop environment since 4.0. The Plasma desktop shell has been greatly improved and can now be easily configured. The KWin window manager supports more fancy features, including wobbly windows. More KDE applications, including the KDE PIM apps, have been ported to KDE 4.
The KDE 4.1 packages for Ubuntu are not ready yet. Until they are, you can run it in a virtual machine. The KDE4Daily virtual machine image can keep itself up to date with the very latest KDE every day. You can download the VM on BitTorrent. The download size is 700 MB.
[update] You can now download a VirtualBox hard drive image directly from the KDE4Daily site.
Extract the download (be warned: it extracts to a 4 GB file) and you’ll have a hard disk image that you can run using QEMU emulator. I prefer VirtualBox, but it’s possible to convert the file to a compatible format. Note that you’ll need a lot of disk space (~45 GB) for the conversion because in the intermediate stages the disk image will be completely uncompressed. You’ll need to install QEMU to do the conversion:
sudo apt-get install qemu
Use QEMU to convert the image to a BIN file (this could take a minute or two):
qemu-img convert kde4daily_4_1-final-qcow.img kde4daily_4_1-final.bin
And convert that file to VirtualBox’s VDI hard disk format using one of VirtualBox’s tools (this will take several minutes):
VBoxManage convertdd kde4daily_4_1-final.bin kde4daily_4_1-final.vdi
Compact the VDI to a more reasonable size (you need to give the full path to the VDI):
VBoxManage modifyvdi ~/VirtualMachines/kde4daily_4_1-final.vdi compact
My final VDI file was 6.3 GB. Don’t forget to delete all of the kde4daily files except the VDI to free up your disk space again!
Now you can create a new virtual machine and add the VDI file as a hard drive. To update your VM to the latest KDE, select the KDE4DailyUpdater session on the login screen.
Archived Comments
Anonymous
Now there is a virtualbox image ready to download on that page
Ross
I didn’t like the KDE 3 series for that reason as well, but my main gripe was that it looked childish. KDE 4 looks SO much better. It’s like a professional looking environment now. As for the apps, the Office stuff looks promising, and so does Kontact. ALOT of bugs in Kontact right now, but it is bleeding edge, so I’m sure they’ll have all that fixed before the final release.
John
Sorry to say that after much battling with corrupt images and such I’ve given up on this.
The virtual box “image” is a disk image from VMWare, in fact.
Nice idea but it “just” doesn’t “work”
ttfn
John
Jeff
@Ross
I couldn’t think of how to phrase what I thought about KDE3 before, but I agree
with you. KDE4 is visually impressive, and conceptually innovative. When it
matures, I think it will be excellent.
Nik
@John: Works here great, actually I’m posting from inside the kde4daily-image.
@KDE3-critics: eh, and I couldn’t stand gnome, so what? With the a more
kde-centric distri like mandriva KDE3 looks and works great out of the box - at
least for me. And the big plus of KDE is the easy to change look and behavior of
the desktop. So to say it looks “childish” or “to big” make me laugh.
Myke
I may give KDE a try again. My main gripe with KDE is that (out of the box) it looks like it was designed by people with serious visual impairments. I mean, seriously…everything is HUGE. I really hope that they tone that down a little in the future. Every time I try it I feel like I have some kind of accessibility zoom option turned on by default.