KDE 4.6 Will Be There in Debian Soon

KDE 4.6.2 SC is not available to the public, but has been made available to the packagers and the Debian team is actively packaging it. According to package maintainers, they are trying hard to bring KDE 4.6.2 to the official repositories within a week or two.

The packages will be launched to either experimental or sid or both, but testing (wheezy) users have to wait.

KDE 4.6.1 Released in the Debian Semi-Official qt-debian repository

After a long awaiting, KDE 4.6.1 has become available to the Debian users via the semi-official qt-debian repository. The release is said to be of experimental  quality, and not guaranteed to be compatible with the official 4.6.x releases which are planned for sid and testing.

KDE bindings are not packaged yet, and expected to take some more time due to their complex dependencies. This excludes a subset of the packages which are written in  non c++ and bound to kde by their respective bindings. For example any KDE application written in python is not going to work with this installation.

The packaging team has tried a new way of packaging KDE software so that it will not conflict with some of the third party KDE software like ktorrent and kmess. Previously it was conflicting.

Performance improvement is said to be the most visible improvement. Another change interesting to me is that the networkmanagement plasma widget of 4.6.1 not being compatible with 4.4.5. KDE network management plasma widget was not up to the level when it comes to Mobile Broadband support. Some decent work has went into this, and some other complaints are also fixed in the latest version. Lets hope and wish that similar improvements have gone to dual monitor support as well.

I personally had a bad experience with knetwork client when I once tried to do a presentation. The wireless network connection got deactivated accidentally using the function keys of my laptop and did not pickup after I re-activated it again. After some tries I got desperate and even restarted the laptop. Still it was not working. And in the same presentation, the projector detection was also not so smooth, and finally I had to use someone else's laptop to proceed with. (I did some experiment later and found out that I have to kill knetwork and start it manually to make it detect the changes)

Anyway, It is a good decision to break the long silence and provide something to the end users via the semi-official repository, rather than not producing anything at all. Though things are not perfect, people will have something.

What the package maintainers want is an early feedback, so that the quality official releases can be enriched. Brave souls are welcome to give it a try!

Dell Vostro 1014 Sound Issue in Debian Wheezy

When I plug my headphone into my Dell vostro 1014 (laptop) the laptop speaker was not getting muted. My laptop had Debian Wheezy installed.

The following Ubuntu forum threads shed some light on this and gave hope that it is possible to get things working.1. http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1467218.html
2. http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1457859.html

My guess was the problem was due to some driver issues as I was using the free kernel that was shipped with Wheezy. After some experimenting the following solved the problem.

1. Adding the line "options snd-hda-intel model=dell-vostro position_fix=0 enable=yes" at the end of the /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
2. Installing liquroix kernel, 2.6.38-2.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64, solved the issue

(Installing firmware-linux package did not solve the issue as of today.)

KDE 4.6 Getting Delayed for Debian

There is a lot of pressure being built up on why packaging KDE is getting so delayed. According to official sources it should have become available in the beginning of march, but now being the beginning of April, no signs yet.

There is a good news as well as some bad news. Good news is that the semi-official repository qt-kde will see the 4.6.1 by Saturday, we may expect one or two days of delay there, but it will make it there pretty soon.

Bad news is that it may get further delayed to land on one of the official repositories. According to a mail in the Debian mailing list, official archives will see 4.6.2 (which is scheduled at April 5th by the KDE upstream) or later. Users of the testing repository may have to wait sometime more.

According to the package maintainers, the KDE SC is huge, and each package has to be verified that it meets Debian's Free Software Guidelines. Given the complexity of the project, it is no more technically as easy as it was in 2.x series.  Once the major release is packaged, updating it to point releases is easier. So, even when users have to wait a little longer for 4.6.1 (the major version), they will notice that updates to point releases (4.6.x) are quicker.

All who are impatient should understand that all the work that goes into Debian is voluntary, people do it for fun on their free time, and do not want to be pressured. In an IRC chat with the package maintainers, I learned that there are much more packages they wish to get packaged into the repositories, and welcome any assistance. But the assistance is expected from an experienced person, and not a complete novice. If no one comes forward, those packages may not be included in Debian at all. For example, one maintainer wished he had semantik - a mind mapping tool - in the repository. I checked and found that it is an KDE extragear package which is currently missing in the repository.

I know that KDE 4.7 is going to be released in July (according to official sources). Again Debian will face the same delay in getting 4.7 in for the same reasons. But, I decided to learn some basics and get prepared from now itself so that I can be of some help at that time.

A good starting point would be the New Maintainer's Guide for anyone willing to join forces.