[CentOS] kdewebdev aka Quanta or

Fri Jan 20 13:31:49 UTC 2006
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu>

> does this exist for CentOS 4 ?

Yes, the EL4 repository works fine on CentOS4.

> taking a wild swing, I set up /etc/yum.repos/kde-redhat.repo and for
> S&G's, I ran the obligatory 'yum update' to see what would happen.

> It's an aggressive update to be sure.

Yes, it is.

> KDE 3.5.0 (and all the dependent stuff such as qt) but also samba and
> openoffice.

> Is anyone reporting happiness / contentment with their repo enabled and
> their updates installed?

I use it daily on multiple machines; I have a twin need for the stability
of CentOS (update-wise) on one hand, but the features of the later Kstars
(part of the 'edutainment' kdeedu package) on the other.  Kstars for KDE
3.4 and above has telescope control; see my .sig for why that might be
important to me.

The 3.5 update didn't really break much.  However, you will have
difficulty with things that use the kdesu utility, since, at least with
the latest updates, su is asking a second question (about the security
context) and that hangs kdesu hard (I'm sure there's a config somewhere
that will eliminate the security context question, but it hasn't been
important enough yet for me to look for it).  Those things include the
superuser mode konsole, the superuser mode konqueror, the administrator
mode KDE print manager, etc.  K3b, on the other hand, works perfectly.

The updates ARE quite large; a major version increase (or even a minor KDE
version increase) can weigh a couple hundred meg; if it includes an update
to openoffice.org (the KDE integration has to be rebuilt for each new KDE
version) double the size.

It is worth it to me; I use it, and like it, on my daily use notebook,
which boots into CentOS about 99% of the time.  But it will triple your
updates bandwidth usage, on average.

Mixing with Dag or ATrpms or Karanbir's Extras is hit and miss, though,
afterwards, particularly for KDE programs, since those repos are built
against the stock CentOS KDE 3.3.

KDE 3.5 is slower, unfortunately, so you don't want to do this on an old
machine; the machine needs to be recent and needs to have more than 256MB
RAM for sure.  On one machine, going from 256MB to 512MB doubled its
apparent speed; the further increase to 1GB added another 33% or so on
some tasks.

YMMV.
-- 
Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu