Switch to Debian stable for KDE3.1?

Hi again!

After downloading a Knoppix CD and doing the knx-hdinstall (the story so far: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=741) I have a nice working copy of Debian Testing running on my machine.

The KDE3.0.4 that came with Knoppix3.1 is eating my system resources alive. With nothing running besides KMix, I've only got about 50MB of my 512MB DDR-RAM free. The system is responsive enough until I try to do some heavy multitasking (ie GAIM, XMMS, Konquerer file browser, Konsole, and 3-4 instances of Mozilla) and then the latency becomes kind of noticable.

I've been seeing alot of positive comments regarding KDE3.1, especially about its increased speed and more efficient memory usage, and I'm eager to try it out. Unfortunately, as we all know, doing an apt-get won't get you the latest KDE because of strange file dependancy issues with some of the "testing" programs included with Knoppix.

Now here's my questions for all you Linux gurus: Is it worth my reinstalling with a pure copy of Debian Stable instead of Knoppix in order to get KDE3.1? What would be the disadvantages of doing this?

I've also found that only a couple of MB of my 1GB swap partition is ever in use. Would I be better off resizing the swap to something like 256MB or even 128MB? It seems to me that if I just doubled my physical memory (for a total of 1GB DDR-RAM) the system would NEVER use the swap.

Thanks in advance,
Willis

ok, I'll describe how I installed KDE 3.1 for woody on Knoppix.
first read the readme http://ktown.kde.org/~nolden/kde/

Add that sources line ( in the readme ) to /etc/apt/sources.list
comment out the unstable sources in /etc/apt/sources.list

change "default release" in /etc/apt/apt.conf from testing to stable

do a apt-get update

remove ALL kde, qt, and arts packages

to find :
dpkg -l | grep kde
dpkg -l | grep qt
dpkg -l | grep arts

not all packages from above commands need to be removeed, only the arts/libarts/libqt etc..
It will remove all your kde apps. ( kind of a risk if this doesn't work huh ?)

then apt-get install kdebase kdm konqueror kmail etc...

*worked for me*

I will try this tonight. Thanks!

well, it took an hour or two but I got KDE3.1 installed.

I TRIED to follow your instructions, but I guess I'm just too dumb. I removed my old files using dpkg (maybe I should've used apt-get remove?) with the --force-all switch, but when I did an "apt-get install kdebase" debian spat out all kinds of dependancy errors.

Luckily I was able to download everything anyways using a combination of "apt-get -f install", "apt-get upgrade", and "apt-get dist-upgrade". I had to remove and add some packages manually but overall it was fairly painless.

I noticed that my old KMenu settings were all farked, though. Pretty much all third party icons have been removed.

Oh well. KDE3.1 is more beautiful than 3.0.4 and it cut down on my memory usage by about 200MB(!).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by robelanator

Oh well. KDE3.1 is more beautiful than 3.0.4 and it cut down on my memory usage by about 200MB(!).

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That is amazing! KDE 3.1 also works fine on a P150 with 80mb ram.. wtf?

I've been following several stories on KDE 3.1, and see that some are willing to nuke their current installation of 3.0.4 to get it. I'm not ready to do that. My installation is the machine on which I do my work, so I'm not willing to take the risks. Nor do I have the means to get the mini-beta release of Knoppix just for KDE 3.1. In fact, I'm quite willing to wait until something is available that is compatible with what I have.

I just ran apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, which took 5 days working off and on via dialup. Will there be a version of KDE 3.1 that is compatible with Knoppix 3.1? I'm new enough to Debian/Knoppix to have no idea how close it is to testing, unstable, etc. I'd hate to have to compile from source, and I'd hate to have to tell folks I've already persuaded to try Knoppix that they are stuck with KDE 3.0.4.

If there's a link to something that will explain it to me, I'll be glad to read if for myself.

I've got a sort of hotch-potch of systems on here at the moment, and by no means classify myself as a linux Expert.... more intermediate than anything else.


i've got my main O/S running as Debian 3.0 in the unstable brance, KDE 3.1.1 and Gnome 2.2 etc, having loadsafun trying to break it and find faults... none serious so far.


I've also got Knoppix running on a scsi drive in my system, and i'd like to share some little titbits of info with the gent above asking about stable, testing and unstable versions, kde, etc....


You need to get a couple of programs, i've tested this with my knoppix install and it works for me. Dunno what version of knoppix it is, but it's got a 2.4.19-xfs kernel....

Firstly you want to do an

apt-get install synaptic

This will bring you a nice package browser that acts as a GUI for apt-get basically.

just run 'synaptic' from a command prompt


The version in unstable is the best one i've tried, it released tonight... well, sometime over the past few says, i'm on a modem and a dist upgrade takes a while.... ;-)

another handy package is this...

apt-get install apt-spy

this is an ace idea... it queries the central debian database for registered mirrors, so you might want to try the following:

apt-spy -d unstable

if you wanted to see the goodies in unstable using apt or synaptic, etc.

Likewise, apt-spy -d testing or apt-spy -d stable if you are less of a nutter than I.

It'll update your /etc/apt/sources.list to the fastest download sites. this obviously takes a while, so put the kettle on and watch a DVD while it's runing ;-)

Sorry for topping an old thread, but it seemed unanswered so far.

/me goes off in search of kernel-headers to install Nvidia drivers


Regards...


Ed


Oh, i'm also paying to beta-test a third operating system on my PC, Windows XP, but TBH after experiencing Debian for about 5 months i've used it only a few times.