Keep up with KDE 4 development with the KDE Four Live CD

Although they sometimes get a bad rap because of Novell’s agreement with Microsoft, stuff which I could care less about - partly because I’m a MS consumer as well, and I make my living largely by Administrating Windows Server Operating Systems, openSUSE does some great things for the Linux Community.

Personally, on several occasions, I have tried and failed to run openSUSE as my personal distro. I’m not going to get into those reason here, but we are simply not a “match”. That aside, there is a great tool given too us by openSUSE and that is the Build Service and the “KDE Four” Live CD.

The KDE Four Live CD comes in two versions, and both are installable, based on openSUSE 11.0 and are a handy tool to keep up with KDE 4 development.

Both versions are available here, and let me explain the differences.

The first CD is based on KDE 4.1.1 (I’m sure soon to be updated to 4.1.2) and represents the latest “stable” build of KDE 4. The second CD is based on the KDE 4.1.64 development snapshot, which will become KDE 4.2.

Since I’m running Mandriva 2009 with KDE 4.1.2, I opted for the “development” CD to download, and install in VirtualBox. Now, since it’s a LiveCD, I don’t have to “install” it, I could simply boot the ISO up in VirtualBox. My purpose for installing it is to keep it up-to-date over time.

Although I’m using VirtualBox, you could choose to use VMware, KVM, QEMU or any other Virtualization program you choose to check this out, or you could boot up a PC with the live CD, or if you really like living on the edge, you could install it onto your PC.

Once you decide how you’re going to use the CD, head over to the link I provided earlier and download one of the ISO files. I’ll wait…

Ok, now that you have the ISO, for sake of simplicity, let’s just say you’re using VirtualBox, so go ahead and make your Machine, mount your ISO and power on the virtual. Once at the desktop, you’ll notice it’s a plain jane KDE 4 without any openSUSE customizations (this raises a question for me later).

Now, the “installer” isn’t really visible anywhere, and I had to dig a little to find it, but go into YaST, and go to Miscellaneous and you’ll see Live Installer - click that, and go through the install, and reboot your Virtual Machine - again, I’ll wait…

OK! Now you have it installed. By default the standard openSUSE 11.0 repositories are configured, along with the Build Service repo’s for the KDE 4 “Unstable” builds. You can go ahead and do a full system update with YaST, and if you do this regularly, you’ll have an isolated test enviroment to keep up with KDE 4, and where it’s progressing on it’s way to 4.2!

Remember two paragraphs ago when I said the vanilla KDE 4 I got initially off of the CD ended up raising a question for me? Well here it is. After doing the update, and rebooting, I was greeted with KDE 4 with the Aya Plasma theme rather than Oxygen. I’m thinking this is an openSUSE customization (since the little openSUSE Lizard guy is hanging out on the Window Title Bars now), but I can only hope, wish and dream that the KDE 4 team has decided to make Aya the default for 4.2 - I know openSUSE 11 used Aya, and Mandriva is using it as well. I hate that black panel that’s there by default (trying to look like Vista?), and Aya takes on the system wide selected color scheme, which looks far more professional and polished to me. This is personal taste, but I can only hope that distro’s follow openSUSE and Mandriva’s lead by using Aya, although Kubuntu and Fedora so far have been using the ugly black panel. I did like this look I got after I updated the LiveCD, see here for how it affected my personal Mandriva setup.

And now, the obligatory screenshot: