To be honest, I am one of those troglodytes who hates KDE4 and GNOME, and I prefer some good ol' KDE 3.5.x. Until recently, I had been using XFCE4. It came closest in offering me the features I was wanting, but something still rubbed me the wrong way. I had known about the Trinity project for some time. Trinity is the continuation of KDE 3.5 and they've made a release. KDE 3.5.12. It's relatively stable and feature complete.
Packages are offered for Ubuntu, and as such I decided to grab the Ubuntu Minimal ISO. Booting the CD, I chose to go with a command line installation. The installer finished without fuss. Rebooting into my minimalistic environment, I went ahead and grabbed my favorite editor (ne - the nice editor; apt-get install ne). You need to add the Trinity Ubuntu repositories to your sources.list, which isn't difficult at all.
$ sudo ne /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.quickbuild.pearsoncomputing.net/trinity/trinity/ubuntu maverick main
deb-src http://ppa.quickbuild.pearsoncomputing.net/trinity/trinity/ubuntu maverick main
deb http://ppa.quickbuild.pearsoncomputing.net/trinity/trinity-builddeps/ubuntu maverick main
deb-src http://ppa.quickbuild.pearsoncomputing.net/trinity/trinity-builddeps/ubuntu maverick main
After adding the lines above, go ahead and ctrl+s then ctrl+q if you are using ne. Then add the GPG key for those repositories with the following command:
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.quickbuild.pearsoncomputing.net --recv-keys 2B8638D0
Now, using the minimal install approach, you will need to add root to your system again to use "su" instead of sudo, and then start the installation process. This isn't hard either.
$ sudo passwd
$ su - root
# apt-get update
# apt-get upgrade
# apt-get install xinit kubuntu-desktop-kde3
# reboot
Upon rebooting, you should find yourself in a KDE3 environment. There are some things that are going to be a bit off. First, the version of Kopete that is installed may not be able to connect to some modern jabber servers. Second, Konqueror is rather dated now as a web browser. Third, KMail is not going to handle any modern Exchange servers. To these ends, I found Psi to be a good jabber client. It's QT4, so your themes for KDE3 are not going to work with it, but otherwise it gets the job done. Firefox is always my go to browser, so I had no issue installing it. For Exchange support, I use Evolution. Through a simple apt-get you can have it up and running (apt-get install evolution evolution-mapi), and it will use your KDE3 theming (to a point). Otherwise, everything functions as expected. Once you have everything you need, you may want to peek at "apt-cache search kde3" to find packages not installed by default.
Sometime next week, I will be detailing the process with Slackware64. Stay tuned.
6 comments:
I have been putting off upgrading from Debian Lenny because of KDE4, and like you using XFCE instead. There are a few things "improved" that I would like to have, such as the latest K3b, but KDE4 is loathsome. I am very, very glad to hear that Trinity is working.
I would hate to have to give up Kmail, and the ability to type "sftp://" or "fish://" and use ssh to log into remote systems is just so astoundingly useful compared to the command line ssh.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Looking forward to trying it myself.
@Curt: I'm on Kubuntu and stfp:// works for me, but fish:// I feel your loss!
What's the "like whoa" part about? I thought you were going to lay out why it was so dazzling for you. Son, I am disappoint.
Good man! I have one bitch - WHY does the Trinity site use that stuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuupid Web Wiki system instead of a proper Forums tool. Its really hard to use and might even kill the project.
@Jon,
I was wondering the same thing.
I think 98% of what I most use in KDE is just konqueror as a file manager. You can tweak it relatively easier, and in KDE3 it was really powerful. On KDE4 it's still the best around (much better and more stable than the idiot dolphin... I could never picture myself killing dolphins, but now sometimes I have to do it), but on 3 it was better -- it had a better image browser functionality and more of the whole kioslave stuff, "media:/" and such things.
I think I could ditch KDE altogether if there was a "gtkonqueror" or something like it. Which is somewhat of a shame, I've heard that QT is actually technically better than GTK, but the larger user base winds up dictating what is the "rule", the most popular and reliable tools, as there is more testing and bug reporting. I hope it's not true and GTK isn't as inferior.
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