Installing Plasma Active

Balsam Professional Live Image

open-slx creates regularly updated packages of Balsam Professional for Plasma Active. These can be used as testing base and to track progress. You can either install these on top of an already running openSUSE 11.4, or try the Live ISO from a USB stick. Download the Balsam Professional live image, which is based on openSUSE here.

Installation on openSUSE

In order to install the latest development snapshots on openSUSE 11.4, you have to add two repositories to your system. These update kdelibs and kde-runtime to a post-4.6 development snapshot which contains additions in QML bindings and improvements needed to run the development version for Plasma ACtive. If you would like to try it in a virtual machine, we recommend Virtualbox, which provides accelerated graphics capable of "desktop effects".

Important: this procedure will upgrade your KDE installation to snapshots of various 4.7pre development branches, replacing any stable KDE packages you have installed. Some versions of these packages, for example kdepim4 and kdepim4-runtime, are built for a mobile target and the desktop versions of their apps will not run properly. Running a newer version of KDE may update users' configuration files in a way that is not backward-compatible with previous versions of the applications, so it is advised to use a development installation or backup your KDE configuration. If you don't know how to do this, stay with the Live image.

Installation Recipe

As you are going to install packages from a different source, or so-called "vendor", you can make your life easier by telling zypper to automatically resolve packages across vendors. In /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, change the following line

solver.allowVendorChange = false

to

solver.allowVendorChange = true

Register KDE:Unstable:SC and KDE:Active repositories:

zypper addrepo --refresh \
   http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Unstable:/SC/openSUSE_11.4 kusc
zypper addrepo --refresh \
   http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Active/openSUSE_11.4_KDE_Unstable_SC/ plasma-active

Increase KDE:Active packages' priority relative to KDE:Unstable:SC, because the git snapshot versioning is otherwise lower than those in KDE:Unstable:SC, and we want the KDE:Active versions that are built with Active-specific options:

zypper modifyrepo --priority 110 plasma-active

Update all packages to the latest versions, trust the keys for the repos. NOTE: if you have other additional repositories than these registered in your system, YOU are responsible for making sure they are compatible.

zypper dist-upgrade

Finally, install the Plasma Active specific packages:

zypper install --force plasma-active:kdebase4-runtime plasma-tablet-config plasma-declarative-widgets

This will install the "plasma-mobile" packages, and a few others on your system, which is contained the plasma-mobile package. (plasma-mobile has different sets of QML user interfaces per UI profile). zypper will ask you to accept the key. It will also suggests vendor changes for some packages. Accept these options.

In order to make sure that plasma active works, check if the kdebase4-runtime package comes from the plasma-active repo, (zypper if kdebase4-runtime), if it doesn't:

zypper in --force plasma-active:kdebase4-runtime

(If this is not the case, the shell will complain about qtextracomponents not being found.)

Running Plasma Active

From a full Plasma Desktop (or Netbook) user experience, you can switch to Plasma Active as follows (as user logged into the the X11 session):

# Quit your plasma session
kquitapp plasma-desktop
or
kquitapp plasma-netbook

# Start Plasma Active
plasma-tablet

# It is also possible to run Plasma Active in a window,
# this is useful for testing purposes:
plasma-tablet --nodesktop

Installation of Plasma Active from sources

While the recommended way to test Plasma Active is with the above recipe using the binary packages, it is possible to build Plasma Active from the source repository, who wants to try the bleeding edge repository can build plasma-mobile from sources. The recommended way is to follow the usual kde from sources build instructions. It is also possible to use the binary kde packages as a base.

It is necessary to install some packages (and their dependencies) to have a working development environment: sudo zypper install gcc gcc-c++ git cmake, kdelibs-devel

Now clone the plasma mobile source repository and build:

 git clone git://anongit.kde.org/plasma-mobile

 cd plasma-mobile

 mkdir build

 cd build

 cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr

 make

 sudo make install

MeeGo / ARM

A repository of most of KDE components, including Plasma Active for MeeGo is at http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/mkruisselbrink%3a/kde/meego_1.1_core/home%3amkruisselbrink%3akde.repo

i586 and ARM repositories available

Other Systems

If you have installed Plasma Active on a system not yet listed here, please add detailed installation instructions in a new section.