<solved> can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

[goatimus]

Upgraded to Jaunty and running KDE 4.2 for about a month. As a personal preference I just can't stand KDE4 and want to install 3.x, which I'm really used to and like very much. Will this work using Jaunty? I assume I can find 3 in the repos, just thought I'd ask before committing major package breaking. :P

[Teunis]

Re: can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

I assume installing KDE3.5 in the existing Jaunty will be daunting.

So why not reinstall the Jaunty Remix?
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty

Personally I think KDE4.2.9 (pre 4.3) is quite nice and workable though still a lot slower than 3.5.

[lmilano]

Re: can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

Here:
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/Kubuntu/Kde3/Jaunty

However, please backup ~/.kde before the upgrade, I am sure some things could break because all your settings were upgraded to the KDE4 formats. In the worst case,you'll have the .kde backup so you can go back to KDE4 if KDE3 is broken for that reason ...

[Update: Teunis already typed the same]

[goatimus]

Re: can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

Thanks for the replies.... I would have done the upgrade from the remix but decided to throw myself into kde4 and learn to love it... oh well.

Anywho, the reference link is down because the maintainer got hit by a lovely thing called lightning and is waiting on parts or donations.

I pulled the google cache of the page and repost it here for anyone else:

1. Add these lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
For Jaunty (4 lines):
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

For Intrepid (2 lines):
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

2. Add the GPG signing key:
wget http://apt.pearsoncomputing.net/public.gpg
sudo apt-key add public.gpg

3. Install KDE 3.5:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop-kde3

So, I'll start work on this and report my results.

Side note - I saw mention that although kde 3/4 can be installed side by side (my laptop has this and works fine) I saw that the knetwork manager applet is buggy. Not good if you switch between wired/wireless... but I'm doing this on a desktop that"s wired only. Curiously enough, my laptop runs the applet just fine.

[lmilano]

Re: can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

And you can always switch to wicd if needed (I always end up doing this, except on my eeepc which is still running Kubuntu 8.04 with network manager). Thanks for the great post!

[goatimus]

&lt;solved&gt; can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

Was able to get KDE3 installed using the info in this thread. What was interesting is that where you import the gpg key using wget, it blew up. The reason is that I'm using OpenDNS, and the saved text file included a ton of html code directly from OpenDNS servers wrapped around the actual PGP key sig, for a reason that I can't fathom at the moment. So, I opened the webpage link to the gpg key and saved the meat of the PGP key text as a simple text file and was able to import that using the apt-key command.

I didn't bother backing up the kde4 directory in ~ Home because 1) I've had KDE3 installed b4 on this box and 2) rebuilding s^&* from scratch on a windows box is old hat... sometimes ramming something through is faster than being a tad careful. Hey guess what - the basic KDE3 desktop is up because I'm banging out this post from it! :P Desktop icons are where they were before, just lost all the custom graphical settings (whatevs, easy enough to fix).

So, I've got KDE 3 and 4 installed at the same time and can switch between the 2 when I get bored... at least I have the latest Ubuntu to run and both window managers to hack up.

[lmilano]

Re: &lt;solved&gt; can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

I know, where have the days of broken things gone? Its getting boring

[KeithZG]

Re: &lt;solved&gt; can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

I know, where have the days of broken things gone? Its getting boring

Obviously you aren't running a TwinView setup on 4.3! "Boring" has certainly not been the way to characterize things for me (well, okay, I guess how Kontact keeps crashing every 5 minutes is boring, but I mean other than that).

[lmilano]

Re: &lt;solved&gt; can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

I know, where have the days of broken things gone? Its getting boring

Obviously you aren't running a TwinView setup on 4.3! "Boring" has certainly not been the way to characterize things for me (well, okay, I guess how Kontact keeps crashing every 5 minutes is boring, but I mean other than that).

Well my friend, that's a nice way to brake out of boredom: to install an unsupported build of a development software stack

[KeithZG]

Re: &lt;solved&gt; can KDE 3.x replace 4.x in jaunty?

I know, where have the days of broken things gone? Its getting boring

Obviously you aren't running a TwinView setup on 4.3! "Boring" has certainly not been the way to characterize things for me (well, okay, I guess how Kontact keeps crashing every 5 minutes is boring, but I mean other than that).

Well my friend, that's a nice way to brake out of boredom: to install an unsupported build of a development software stack

Welllllllllll, trust me, it performs far more stably than KDE 4.2 does on TwinView, which is in theory the "supported" and "stable" build for Kubuntu Jaunty..... With 4.2 if I so much as nudge the panel in any direction it basically explodes and becomes unworkable. Which itself is an improvement on 4.1 and 4.0 which tended to crash if I so much as looked at them wrong Point is, if I want to run KDE 4 with even remotely the same stability and features as 3.5 did as far as my multi-monitor setup goes, I'm entirely forced to use as recent as possible of a build. In fact, the difference between 4.3 RC1 and RC2 is quite pronounced.

It seems to have mostly stabled out, but plasma still crashes if I use the activity switcher to switch the activity on one monitor to the same activity as the other one is on (which is hard to avoid with multiple activities, since there's no way to make groups so that different monitors only have access to certain ones). On the plus side since activities are still just as awkward and buggy to create as they were in 4.2 I haven't felt the temptation to create more than just one for each monitor, so I can safely remove the activity switcher widget from my desktop and not worry about clicking the wrong activity.

Basically what I'm saying is that running the development+unsupported version of KDE 4 gets far better results than the stable+supported version, for my setup at least, so I really would have a hard time faulting my choices when I run into problems; I'm kindof backed into a corner here.

Plus most of my problems existed in 4.2 and just persisted in 4.3; anyone have any clue about my problems with Konqueror, for example? They started right after I followed Adept's advice and let it upgrade me to Jaunty, after all; if that isn't supported I don't know what is, but so far the support hasn't exactly helped me