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KDE

This section covers the news surrounding the Fedora KDE Special Interests Group[1].

Contributing Writer: Ryan Rix

KDE SC 4.4 in kde-redhat and rawhide

KDE-redhat maintainer Rex Dieter lets us know that KDE SC 4.4 is currently in the kde-redhat/unstable and rawhide repositories for testing. The new iteration of the KDE desktop boasts many new features including a reworked plasma desktop shell designed specifically for netbook devices. The full list of new features, along with the full text of the release announcement can be found here. The KDE SC 4.4.0 release may only be released in the unofficial kde-redhat repositories, and the KDE SIG may elect to ship KDE SC 4.4 in the main Fedora repositories when KDE 4.4.1 is released along with Qt 4.6.2.

Upcoming virtuoso changes in kde-redhat

Those KDE users who have been running KDE releases from KDE-RedHat had the option of configuring the Nepomuk social semantic desktop to use the Virtuoso5 database engine. With the upcoming release of KDE SC 4.4, the Virtuoso5 database is being depreciated in favor of a newer version 6.1 of the Virtuoso database.[1] While this database has performance improvements, it is incompatible with the Virtuoso5 database. Sebastian Trüg has created a converter for the nepomuk data that, when virtuoso is updated, will need to be ran before KDE's nepomuk server will start, which is currently in review for inclusion in Fedora[2][3], and in kde-redhat/unstable. Dieter lays out the details of how you can convert the existing Nepomuk storage database.

  1. qdbus org.kde.NepomukServer /nepomukserver org.kde.NepomukServer.quit
  2. yum update virtuoso-opensource to get the latest version of the database
  3. yum install virtuosoconverter to get the converter tool. This will also install compat-virtuoso-opensource, the Virtuoso v5 database engine
  4. run virtuosoconverter
  5. start nepomukserver

This will update the data, and restart the nepomuk server to use the latest version of Nepomuk. Note that virtuoso-opensource has not yet been updated, and will be receiving updates when the converter tool is in Rawhide. Until then, Nepomuk will happily run with the virtuoso5-based nepomuk server. Future versions of the server may not, however, hence the requirement for this update. Sebastian Trüg has stated that he had never planned to support Virtuoso 5 and that this tool was written for early adopters and developers and may not work.[4] Indeed Dieter has had mixed results with this tool.

KDE SC 4.4rc2 live images available for testing

Ryan Rix writes on his blog[1] that Rex Dieter has composed KDE SC 4.4rc2 live images that are suitable for testing the new desktop without negatively affecting your current setup. These images are available via torrent[2] and are installable to a flash drive using either the liveusb-creator application or the command line livecd-iso-to-disk tool available in the livecd-tools package. Major issues should be reported either on the Fedora-KDE mailing list[3] or the #Fedora-KDE IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Please note that the images are now slightly out of date, with the release of KDE SC 4.4.