I’m sure you’ve heard about it, KDE 4.0 has been released!

I can honestly say it looks damn sweet! Unfortunately I quickly learned that KDE 4.0 wouldn’t make it into Fedora 8, it will be made available in Fedora 9 which is scheduled for an April 2008 launch.

If you’re adventurous like me and don’t like to wait that long, here is what you could do.

The Fedora Core Development Repository, called Rawhide, has the latest packages to make it possible to run KDE 4.0. What I basically did was enable the Development repository, removed some dependencies and ran a yum upgrade.

I have to warn you, the following commands may harm your system and leave it unbootable causing you to reinstall your system. You are effectively upgrading half your system to Fedora Core 9 Alpha(!). Proceed at your own risk.

As the Rawhide repository is ALPHA and constantly in progress it might work one day and be broken the next day, for me today was a good day.

3 Simple steps to run KDE 4.0 on Fedora Core 8 (9)

1. Enable the Development Repositories $ sudo vi /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-development.repo [development] name=Fedora - Development failovermethod=priority #baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/$basearch/os/ #mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=rawhide&arch=$basearch mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=rawhide&arch=$basearch enabled=1 gpgcheck=0 gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-test file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

   NOTE: Be sure to set gpgcheck to 0, not all packages are signed. Normally do NOT do that (!)

2. Run yum update, to see the conflicting packages. $ sudo yum update kdebase <snip> Transaction Summary ============================================================================= Install 15 Package(s) Update 144 Package(s) Remove 0 Package(s) Total download size: 384 M

   I have the LIVNA Repository enabled, I had some conflicts with some packages there. You can remove them using yum:

   $ sudo yum erase package-name
3. After all packages have been installed, reboot and (hopefully) enjoy!

I’m currently running in KDE4.0, half my system is Fedora 8 the rest is Fedora 9. This will most likely cause some issues, however so far i’m enjoying myself with KDE 4.0. It’s worth it

Ivo