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  Test Latest Builds with KDE4Daily
Developer Posted by SSJ on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @06:48
from the delivered-straight-to-your-door dept.
We are now on the home stretch of the road to KDE 4.0, but KDE still needs extensive user testing to make sure everything arrives in the best possible shape for the release. There is a pressing need for users to be able to get hold of very up-to-date builds of KDE, especially if they want to participate in Krush days and pick up last-minute regressions, confirm proposed fixes, and avoid re-reporting recently fixed bugs, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.

KDE4Daily is an experimental attempt at accomplishing the above goals using the Qemu virtualisation technology. End-users download the initial KDE4Daily 0.0.1 image (containing the now somewhat dated revision 734472), run it in Qemu and use the built-in installer scripts to upgrade the KDE 4 install to the latest revision provided, so that they can always test-out bleeding edge revisions pulled straight from Subversion. Upgrades are intended to use up relatively little bandwidth (20-50MB for a day's worth of updates is typical; bridge updates which condense a week's worth into one package bring this down to an average of 10MB or so) and be quick to apply (5 minutes per update is common, although bridge updates can take 10-15 minutes).

Because Qemu is distro-agnostic, you do not need to worry about distros or libraries or dependencies or suchlike; in fact, you can even test out KDE 4 while running Windows! The downside is that eye-candy such as KWin's new Composite-based effects will not be testable as Qemu does not support hardware graphics acceleration, and everything will generally feel a lot more sluggish than is the case with a native install.

An extensive FAQ is provided at the KDE4Daily homepage, above; please feel free to ask any further questions in the Dot comments section. Also, note that KDE4Daily has not yet had any real testers apart from myself, so please be prepared for "teething trouble" such as botched upgrades and bandwidth issues! Enjoy, and remember that the more people test, the better KDE 4.0 will be. As an added incentive for trying it out, you can try out the rapidly-developing Plasma as it progresses too!



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Over 40 comments listed. Printing out index only.
Nice work!
by Simon Hürlimann on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @06:58
Will probably try this out soon. When using the binary releases of Kubuntu, I'm often not sure if a particular bug has already been fixed or not. This will give me more reason to file bugs;-)

Keep up the good work
regards Simon
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First post!
by SSJ on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @07:03
Hi all,

A bridge update to r739427 (~2 days old) is currently available; this is a 70MB download that takes (on my machine) about 10 minutes to apply. An update to r740406 is prepared (which I *think* contains Konqueror's new "Undo Close Tab" feature, courtesy of Eduardo Robles Elvira and David Faure!), but not yet uploaded. I'm going to wait around for some successful upgrade reports before making that available, and then hopefully settle into a rhythm of an update every day, depending on whether all targetted modules happen to be compilable at the time.

A few known issues:

- Sometimes logging into your new KDE4Daily session will crash the first time after an upgrade. Please re-try as it almost invariably works the second time.

- KSnapshot does not appear to function inside of Qemu, so if you want to take snapshots, please use the version of KSnapshot in your host machine.

- Krita does not start due to a missing dependency; from the command-line, within your KDE4Daily VM session please enter:

sudo apt-get install libglew1

and enter the password ("kde4daily")

- Processing of backtraces is very slow, especially the first time; please don't let this put you off submitting valuable backtraces!

Above all else, please download, help seed, play, test and have fun!
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Dugg
by Dolphin-fanatic :) on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @07:10
http://digg.com/software/Test_Latest_Builds_with_KDE4Daily_and_be_part_of_Krush_days
[ Reply To This | View ]
Fantastic Work
by kiwiki4e on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @08:13
Great work guys! Now I will have something to play with over the weekend. ;-)

On my desktop I'm used to VirtualBox. Is there any possibility to convert qemu into VirtualBox Files? Or will the qemu File work "out-of-the-box"?
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the release candidate ...
by /me on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @08:53
... needs more, umm, beta testers. ;-)
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Use KVM to speed it up!
by Amit on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @09:39
This is a brilliant idea. And you can always use kvm ( http://kvm.qumranet.com/ ) to speed things up!
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A Klick (or Glick) Bundle would be even better
by Joe Kowalski on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @09:40
It would be cool if kde4 could be rolled up into a klick bundle that could then be run in a Xephyr window. This would cut the overhead of the emulation and give people a better idea as to the performance of the environment. Is this even possible? I remember a coulple of years ago, one of the nifty klick bundles was a standalone E17 desktop that would load up in Xnest.
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Great!
by k on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @09:46
Good idea, but why not make it a standard distro that you can install on your hard drive?
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Wrong Reasoning
by Anonymous on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @11:04
Quote: "The KDE4Daily project was created to help people try out and test KDE4 without having to log out to boot from a LiveCD."

A LiveCD can be run in a virtualizer so I see no advantage of providing a virtualizer specific image file.
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Advice
by Artem S. Tashkinov on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @13:09
To quiet users' headache, please, follow this advice

1) Distribute VM images compressed with 7z with at least 64MB (I suggest 96 or 128MB dictionary - but it requires a 64bit version of Linux) dictionary using Ultra compression mode

2) Provide end users with xdelta binary diffs between daily releases.

3) Remove all unnecessary stuff from the image. I cannot believe KDE4 image takes so much space (I can compress my Fedora 8 with entire KDE3.5.8 to 500MB image)
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New update - r740406
by SSJ on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @14:02
Ok, looking at my logs, it seems that a few people have dared the upgrade procedure and, since no one has appeared here to berate me, I assume they went absolutely, 100% perfectly ;)

So I'll make the latest prepared revision available, and get a new one building while I go to bed. Enjoy!
[ Reply To This | View ]
Torrent file brocken?
by Mark on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @14:50
I have downloaded the file via torrent 2 times now, but unpacking with ark keeps failing with an error. Is the file brocken? Does anyone else have the same problem?
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why not use opensuse
by R. J. on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @19:35
why not just use opensuse. Their kde 4 repository is updated daily, so people can test and report bugs better with the full install
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Great work, one suggestion.
by Lucianolev on Friday 23/Nov/2007, @22:47
Awesome work!

A suggestion: I notice that primary partition is about 1gb and I think that too tight. I installed kernel-headers for compiling Virtualbox's Guest Additions and i almost run out of space.Any chance for getting this bigger?

Btw, I've tested the update system and it works perfectly, great job :)

Bye.
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Not able to start up
by ossi on Saturday 24/Nov/2007, @02:22
Hi! Downloaded this yesterday, uncompressed and started with qemu. But all I get is this:

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2058716127&size=l

Can anyone help me? thx.
[ Reply To This | View ]
KVM
by akonrad on Saturday 24/Nov/2007, @03:18
On machines with a recent AMD or Intel CPU, the use kernel virtualization brings significant speed improvements. This is true at least for my machine equipped with an AMD Athlon X2 5600+ and running Ubuntu Gutsy.

A HOWTO for Ubuntu can be found at:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM

After completing the installation steps, run the kde4daily image:

kvm -m <vramsize> kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img
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Nah...
by anonymous on Saturday 24/Nov/2007, @04:09
I'd prefer a normal distro for speed and the compositing features. This could also be installed in a virtual machine if so desired.

Really. What would be wrong with this approach? Daily updates via a normal repository should not be a problem either.
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Non-BT download?
by Ben Morris on Saturday 24/Nov/2007, @05:23
I would love to try this out, but I am on a university campus network which breaks Bittorrent, presumably because they think it's illegal.

Is there anywhere this can be downloaded without Bittorrent?
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Remarks and questions
by Laurent Bonnaud on Saturday 24/Nov/2007, @08:04
Hi and thank you for this great work!

If you issue an update of the disk image here are some suggestions:

- remove the CDROM line in /etc/apt/sources.list
- apt-get update, dist-upgrade, clean

In about 5 minutes of use I got 3 backtraces. Now the questions:

- Is there an automated procedure to submit them to the KDE bugtracker (a bit like apport submits Ubuntu bugs to launchpad.net, or reportbug submits bugs to the Debian BTS)?

- Should I submit them manually? If so, how do I get the exact revision number?
[ Reply To This | View ]
Running under VMWare
by Bernd on Saturday 24/Nov/2007, @08:18
If somebody is interested, I am running the image under VMWare Server.

- The image was converted using the 'qemu-img convert' untility.

- I had to remove the shipped xorg.conf file. Autodetection of the X server works well enough. Then use krandrtray to switch resolution.

- To get network enabled, I had to replace 'eth0' with 'eth1' (bridged networking) in /etc/network/interfaces
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A bit homogenous, perhaps?
by SLi on Saturday 24/Nov/2007, @13:02
Don't you think that provides a bit homogenous environment and thus, well, rather poor coverage?

I wish there were .debs for Debian testing/unstable... or that the KDE packages compiled cleanly. Really, *always* when I've tried to compile it, I've got some mysterious (to a programmer) compiler errors. A bit frustrated, I admit I didn't always help by reporting the errors...
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runs on Windows XP!
by skierpage on Sunday 25/Nov/2007, @23:03
Amazing, a full Linux KDE desktop with Plasma running within a Windows desktop.

I ran it with QEmu and kqemu, using
qemu.exe kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img -m 384 -L .

The KDE4DailyUpdater took a while to download 73MB, but it completed.
[ Reply To This | View ]
Hosting Down
by SSJ on Monday 26/Nov/2007, @01:26
Hi all,

My main webhost is currently down, so updates will not work. A workaround is to enter

export KDE4DAILY_SUBSTITUTE_MIRROR=http://home.kde.org/~kde4daily/

before trying

kde4daily-update

We are currently at revision 741659 which is approx 6 hours old.

Apologies for any inconvenience!
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Patch in order to update when behind a proxy
by Famelis George on Thursday 29/Nov/2007, @02:38
Hi all,

To update the kde4daily when behind a proxy, you need to change the
downloadutils.rb to use NET::HTTP::Proxy instead of NET::HTTP

You also need to define the proxy host and the proxy port.

Here is a patch to the downloadutils.rb (#SCRIPT_REVISION:50)

--- cut here ---
7a8,12
> $proxy_host = nil
> $proxy_port = nil
> # uncomment these lines if behind a proxy
> #$proxy_host = 'proxy.name.or.ip'
> #$proxy_port = 'proxy_port'
56c61
< Net::HTTP.start(@host, @port) do |http|
---
> Net::HTTP::Proxy($proxy_host, $proxy_port).start(@host, @port) do |http|
63c68
< Net::HTTP.start(@host, @port) do |http|
---
> Net::HTTP::Proxy($proxy_host, $proxy_port).start(@host, @port) do |http|
144c149
< Net::HTTP.start(@host, @port) do |http|
---
> Net::HTTP::Proxy($proxy_host, $proxy_port).start(@host, @port) do |http|
180c185
< #SCRIPT_REVISION:50
---
> #SCRIPT_REVISION:50a
--- end cut ---
[ Reply To This | View ]
Plasma panel clock
by pepe on Thursday 29/Nov/2007, @14:16
Whoops! I removed my plasma panel digital clock. Any ideas which config file I can tweak to get it back?

Pepe
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Can't perform update
by Andrew on Sunday 02/Dec/2007, @02:01
Always I get error with filehash. Like:
filehash = <bla-bla-bla>
required = <another bla-bla-bla>
update aborted, could not download <URL to diff> - hash failed.

Is there another way to download update and apply him?
[ Reply To This | View ]

 
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