[CS-FSLUG] KDE 4 and SuSE

[David McGlone]

On Friday 04 April 2008 5:37:33 am Fred A. Miller wrote:
> Timothy Butler wrote:
> > On Apr 3, 2008, at 3:44 PM, David McGlone wrote:
> >> Does anyone here know what package I need to install to get KDE 4
> >> on SuSE
> >> 10.2?
> >
> > 	Select "gnome." That will let you skip over KDE 4 to KDE 5! ;-)
>
> Funny...........not! ;) You'll see KDE4, "gold" release," for openSUSE
> 10.3 before all that long....after that, maybe 10.2. In fact, I can't
> say for sure that you will see it any time soon......don't know. I'd
> upgrade to 10.3 if I were you David.

I made a mistake, I am running 10.3. My brain is going and going these 
days. ;-)

Kubuntu is my main enviroment, and I love it. I'm just checking out SuSE on an 
extra partition to see if it would be any better than kubuntu as far as ease 
of use. 

So far getting my wireless on my laptop working with SuSE wasn't too hard, but 
kubuntu is 1 click. With SuSE all the how-to's I read everyone is still 
suggesting using ndiswrapper which involves cleaning up all the bcmxx stuff 
first then hunting down the drivers to use with ndiswrapper, installing 
ndiswrapper and finally configuring ndiswrapper, but with kubuntu it just 
downloads the firmware automatically and wireless works.

I experimented with this, I found out where Kubuntu is getting that firmware 
and downloaded it and extracted it in /lib/firmware on SuSE and the wireless 
card instantly worked. Maybe SuSE should look into something like that. So 
far the way I see other suse users getting their bcmxx wireless working on 
SuSE makes me feel sorry for them. If only they knew that all they had to do 
was download 1 file and stick it in their firmware folder they would be set 
and ready to go. I wish I could tell *EVERY* bcmxx suse user about this.

Another thing is apt. Oh boy do I miss apt when working in SuSE. I know 
there's probably an equivilent for SuSE, like YUM or such, but I don't know 
how to use it as good as I do apt.

Anyway I'm rambling on and on. Back to my original question, the reason I 
asked about installing KDE 4 on SuSE was to again see how easy it was to 
upgrade KDE on SuSE. So far the instructions on SuSE's website was only 
adding the repository. So I did that, no problem. The problem is that as far 
as I can tell, using the software installer, I still have to hunt down the 
KDE core packages just to get a working KDE desktop and on top of that, most 
people, including me have no idea which package(s) is the core package(s). I 
chose a few packages in yast that I thought were the core packages to get a 
minimal kde 4 desktop, but I don't know if they were the correct packages 
because I logged out and there was no entry for KDE 4, so I suspect 1 of 2 
things,

1. I either didn't install the correct packages or
2. I installed the correct packages, but SuSE does not automatically put an       
entry in the menu on the login screen.

If the latter is the case, I would have no clue where to even start to add a 
menu entry. and if I did have to manually add it, that would be another show 
stopper for me with SuSE. With apt, I just installed the kde4-desktop and it 
installed everything for a working desktop, logged out chose kde 4 and logged 
in. It's that simple. Is this possible with SuSE? If so, what package would 
that be, because I can't seem to find the kde-desktop package in YaST.

-- 
David M.