I wanted to upgrade my PC to KDE 4.6.2. It had 4.5.x and sid. qt-kde.debian.net was enabled, and I knew upgrading is not going to be a tough time since so many people have reported that to be smoother than expected.
So, feeling pretty confident, and not being upgraded for 3 months, I just issued the two magical commands.
Being disappointed, did some searching and found out that the qt-kde.debian.org repository explicitly mentions not to do what I exactly did above. So, the command I should have given, according to the site is
After beating around the bush for an hour, I logged into Debian IRC and asked for some help. My question was exactly which package should be properly configured to get KDE listed in my login manager. MoDaX answered it, and he pointed me to focus on getting kde-standard working. I knew it was a subset of kde-full. So, I decided to focus on getting kde-full installed properly.
I did not want to jumble all the repositories, so disabled the official experimental repository. Then tried the below.
The point is, if I just had read the release announcement before upgrading and given the correct command, I could have got it up and running without all these issues.
I hope someone who does/about to do the same mistake may find this experience useful in someway.
So, feeling pretty confident, and not being upgraded for 3 months, I just issued the two magical commands.
apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgradeThe upgrade did not go so smooth, it stopped at a certain point reporting some broken pacakages. Luckily it hinted that 'apt-get -f install' may do the trick. So, I followed the hint, and no errors reported after that though I noticed that some packages (konqueror, dolphin, etc) are held back without upgrading. I rebooted my PC as it was upgraded, and was very excited to log into the the new 4.6.2. To my surprise, the login manager did not list KDE as an available session. Only Default, Failsafe, and Fluxbox were listed.
Being disappointed, did some searching and found out that the qt-kde.debian.org repository explicitly mentions not to do what I exactly did above. So, the command I should have given, according to the site is
apt-get -t experimental-snapshots dist-upgrade and NOT apt-get dist-upgradeSo it was I, being foolish and blind, messed up the system. Now, I tried to remove and re-install kdm suspecting that it might fix the mess. After removing it, it refused to re-install due to broken dependencies. I figured out a newer version was available in the official experimental repository. So, I temporarily enabled it and got kdm installed.
After beating around the bush for an hour, I logged into Debian IRC and asked for some help. My question was exactly which package should be properly configured to get KDE listed in my login manager. MoDaX answered it, and he pointed me to focus on getting kde-standard working. I knew it was a subset of kde-full. So, I decided to focus on getting kde-full installed properly.
I did not want to jumble all the repositories, so disabled the official experimental repository. Then tried the below.
apt-get install -t experimental-snapshots kde-fullI was expecting to see some broken packages to be reported, and prepared myself for some troubleshooting. But, to my surprise, no broken packages were reported. The process went just fine. And I finally was able to login to KDE 4.6.2 without any issues.
The point is, if I just had read the release announcement before upgrading and given the correct command, I could have got it up and running without all these issues.
I hope someone who does/about to do the same mistake may find this experience useful in someway.
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