Installing KDE-4.2 on Mythbuntu

I'm new to the whole *buntu scene, having recently abandoned planet Gentoo. So I'm not hip to all the package management tools yet.

The command-line tool I've been using to install packages is aptitude. I'm comfortable with its operational similarity to Gentoo's emerge, but I haven't learned all the ins and outs yet.

Anyway, I want to get KDE-4.2 going on my mythbox, so (with full realization of the futility of such naive ambition), I simply executed the command aptitude install -t experimental kde. And...it worked!

Ha, only kidding. Well, it did work, but it installed KDE-4.1. So I started looking around for instructions on how to get the New Hotness, and found this page. The most useful info there is (a) how to add a third-party repo, including GPG keys; and (b), that I should install "kubuntu-desktop" instead of "kde".

My first attempt to install the 4.2 packages failed due to conflicts with the 4.1 packages that I didn't mean to install. So, I next did sudo aptitude remove kde to wipe the 4.1 KDE packages off my disk, and then I did sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop. I'm unclear on the operational difference between kde and kubuntu-desktop as a metapackage name, but I suspect kubuntu-desktop pulls in non-KDE things like Open Office.

Anyway, things seemed to go fine installing kubuntu-desktop...until I tried to use it. First of all, aptitude had asked me if I want to use KDM as my login manager instead of gdm, and I said yes. But when I logged out of my XFCE session and restarted X (Ctrl+Alt+Backspace!), I was presented with gdm, not kdm. Worse, KDE was not present in the Sessions menu!

So, to fix this I simply repeated the installation command: sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop, hoping that it would find a couple of errors. To my amazement, it told me that over 100 packages needed to be installed! Whoa, that first install didn't go too well, yet it didn't complain. After that process finished, I repeated it again because this time I did notice that about seven packages had errors. After the third iteration of the installation command, it finally reported no errors. This was on a system that was ostensibly clean of any KDE packages.

Ok, all KDE packages are now installed. No errors reported. Log out, restart X...and we get KDM! Awesome, full steam ahead, right? Ah, sweet naive optimism...

Logging in, I get the gorgeous KDE 4.2 desktop. But when I try to open an application, I discover that there is no window manager running (i.e., the application window has no frame, and it won't accept keyboard focus. The usual googling producs no solutions for this problem, so I jump onto #kubuntu on IRC where Slartibartfast points me to the solution:
the command sudo aptitude install kubuntu-desktop installs all of the KDE-related packages, and there are well over 100 of these. It does NOT, however, install the library libkdecorations.so, on which kwin is critically dependent. This is the kind of bug that really should have been caught by the packagers, and I'm sure it will be fixed soon. For now, if you install KDE-4.2 on *buntu, make sure you also do sudo aptitude install libkdecorations.

After that last hoop-jump, I was at last released into the beautiful garden that is a fully functional KDE-4.2 desktop. It's very nice, but there's still some plasma fragility (e.g., I don't recommend attempting to increase the height of the panel!). What's he lesson in all of this? We have some incredibly cool Free Software available these days, and I am truly grateful to all of those who contribute their time to not only develop these programs, but to attempt to package them into an easy, user friendly system. We've made great strides on usability, but it seems we are not quite there, because I keep hitting these walls that require quite a bit of hackery to get around. Now, I will admit that I am usually trying to "push the envelope" when I hit these walls, so if I simply accepted what the packagers gave me by default, I wouldn't have half of my problems (i.e., if I had accepted KDE-4.1 instead of demanding the latest-and-greatest). Anyway, kudos to the KDE developers and the Kubuntu packagers alike.