LinuxPlanet Reviews KDE 3.0

fabiolrs writes "LinuxPlanet has a cool review on KDE 3.0. You can also view a changelog of version 3.0 here." Still no debs, but I'm looking forward to checking this thing out. I'm hoping that some of the rough edges on Kmail have been smoothed out. Update: 04/09 16:58 GMT by M : EWeek also has their own review.

Comments

My mini review...

[Matts]

A few days into using KDE3. Here's my opinions.

Overall this desktop kicks ass. It's really really sweet.

Kmail - a lot better than earlier attempts. IMAP actually works, and works well. There are a few wierd bugs - like their filters don't allow you to filter to IMAP server folders. And there is no LDAP support, so I have to use mozilla mail for sending internal emails to people I don't know yet.

Konqueror - A very good browser. Fails to correctly render a few sites (sadly perlmonks home page is one of those). Doesn't support tabbed browsing. But it's nice to have a browser properly integrated with KDE, so I'm giving up hope on tabbed browsing for a little while - so far it's the only real thing I miss from Mozilla.

Noatun - sorry, but this MP3/Ogg player is still far inferior to XMMS. And it crashes a lot for me.

Kate - this is a really nice editor. With great syntax highlighting, and now has all the features I missed from TextPad, bar one (macros).

Ksirc - still sucks compared to xchat, but better than last time.

Korganizer - nice. Keeps me organised, and integrates nicely with the desktop, alerting me of appointments. Haven't tried the shared appointments stuff, but it looks kinda cool (if a little clunky being ftp based).

Konq (file manager) - as a file manager Konqueror is actually really nice. The auto-previews are great (but can be turned off) - I find them really useful when searching for source files. Cervisia integration is just incredible - I can totally manage a CVS project from konqueror now, including doing visual merges and diffs, checkins, tagging, etc. Wow.

Styles, themes, look and feel - Awesome. Red Hat's latest rawhide comes with Keramik, which makes KDE look absolutely gorgeous. This desktop even makes my windows using buddies jealous :-)

All in all so far I'm very happy. It's a bit crash happy, but I expect that from this early release, and because of the fact that I'm running a snapshot. Anyway - I recommend it. Try it if you can.

KDE and RPM installation dependencies

[Zocalo]

I for one am not surprised that the installer and reviewer had such a bumpy ride - what an ugly way of resolving RPM dependencies, and judging by the comments elsewhere other people must be using a similar approach. The simplest way I've found so far to upgrade or install a package such as KDE that is packaging into lots of individual RPMs is as follows:

1. Get all your downloaded .RPMs into a directory together and sort them out - do you really need all that stuff installed? Fewer RPMs = fewer dependencies.
2. Run "rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm" - this will give you a list of all the dependency issues (if any) without actually touching your stuff.
3. There are two types types of dependency to resolve - the first to deal with is packages you need but do not have installed, usually libraries and so on. Generally I go to RPMFind and find out what I need and then grab and install it.
4. Next up is stuff that is incompatible with the new software - in this case, if you are removing KDE2x then anything that specifically requires KDE2x is probably broken and is best uninstalled, at least until the new version is up and running. Uninstall these packages with the command "rpm --erase <package>" and either get updated versions later or add them to your install directory now.
5. Having sorted out the obvious dependency problems try another test install ("rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm")
6. You should now have a much smaller dependency list (or even none). Simply repeat the last two steps a few more times and the test install command should eventually return you to the prompt with no errors after a lot of disk thrashing.
7. Time to install! Make sure you are root, or can at least update the files, the run "rpm -Uvh *.rpm"

It's slightly oversimplified (but functional), and there are other cases and tricks not covered, such as the "--nodeps" and "--replacefiles" switches for example, but this will resolve most dependency issues with the minimum of fuss. Hope that helps!

Re:What I'd really like to see in a review

[Rich]

These numbers are extremely misleading. You need to consider the fact that most of this memory is in fact shared. You can't actually measure memory usage of anything but the simplest application using top, as it takes no account of which pages are from shared libraries.

Rich.

Re:Installing kde3 on rh7.2

[MSG]

What a day to be without moderator points...

You should *never* use --nodeps to install packages. The only time that is reasonable is if you've built a particular dependency from source, yourself (which you should avoid).

Certainly, you should never advise new users, in a public forum, that --nodeps is the correct way to go. They *will* end up with non-functioning installations.

...because RPM can't do something like "a.rpm needs library X, let's see if any of the other RPM's in this directory have library X in them."

That's total bull shit. rpm absolutely, positively does resolve dependencies against both the packages already installed in the system and the packages given to install.

New users should not follow these directions. Other replies to the parent post give proper installation instructions. Moderators should lay down the crack pipe, and decrease the score on the parent post.