Test Latest Builds with KDE4Daily

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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Comments

by SSJ (not verified)

Eep - yes, I've had second thoughts about the partition sizes in the two weeks since I released the image, and think both / and /home are too small.

I think the only way to handle it is to grow the virtual disk image itself (I believe Qemu has tools to do this) and then try and use qparted to resize the partitions :/

Sorry about that :(

by ossi (not verified)

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.

by SSJ (not verified)

I've heard this being reported for users of(K)Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10). If this is the distro you are using, please search the KDE4Daily page (http://etotheipiplusone.com/kde4daily/docs/kde4daily.html) for "Gutsy" to find instructions for how to resolve it. Good luck!

by ossi (not verified)

Thx for the quick answer. That solved the issue. I got a running session now. But my mouse is not working in qemu. Besides the keyboard layout ist not working, but that's not such a big problem. Without a mouse it is hard though. I did some surfing with new Konqueror. Anyway a nice project ;-)

by Rolf (not verified)

Can someone please post the magic hint here? The kde4daily homepage is still down.
Thanks,
Rolf

by SSJ (not verified)

Should be back up now, but for future reference, see here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=3660695&postcount=10

by Quique (not verified)

I had the same problem on Debian Etch.

Fixed installing bochsbios_2.3+20070705-2 from Debian Lenny.

by akonrad (not verified)

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 kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img

by anonymous (not verified)

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.

by apokryphos (not verified)

Nothing wrong with that approach too, and you can certainly do it by installing any openSUSE distribution (including KDE Four Live, though that would only really be suitable in a VM atm), which contain quite regular KDE4 package updates (and via 1-click-install). See http://opensuse.org/KDE4

by anonymous (not verified)

Yeah, but weekly updates are not quite the same as daily updates. Especially for bug hunting.

by Diederik van de... (not verified)

> What would be wrong with this approach?

Nope it isn't wrong. It just creates an unnecessary barrier for people to participate with testing. The more ways people can test, the more people will test.

Packages in repositories is good for a certain group of people, VM's are good for an other set of people.

by Ben Morris (not verified)

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?

by SSJ (not verified)

Unfortunately, I am unable to host this myself, and I'm not sure if the KDE servers have recovered from RC1 :)

If someone else has some bandwidth to burn, an HTTP download would be very much appreciated!

by SSJ (not verified)

Thankfully, "sandsmark" has stepped up and provided this direct download - sincere thanks, Martin!

URL is here; please only use if you can't use the torrent:

http://iskrembilen.com/kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img.bz2

by martin (not verified)
by SSJ (not verified)

Also, Kiyoshi Aman has provided this mirror - much obliged :)

http://kde4.aerdan.org/

by Kiyoshi (not verified)

I didn't expect a link to the main page, so I apologise for everyone who went there and got a 404 from my [typo'd] URL. It has been fixed, however.

by Laurent Bonnaud (not verified)

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?

by SSJ (not verified)

"In about 5 minutes of use I got 3 backtraces"

Nice work - thanks for putting up with the slow backtrace generation!

"Is there an automated procedure to submit them to the KDE bugtracker"

I don't think so, no - sorry :/

"Should I submit them manually? If so, how do I get the exact revision number?"

That's probably best. I've just added your revision number question to the FAQ; here's the answer:

"Your current SVN revision number is stored in the text file:
$KDE4DAILY_UPDATER_DIR/data/kde4revision.txt"

You are very welcome to come and help out in #kde4-krush, too!

http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute/Bugsquad/KrushDays

by SSJ (not verified)

Oh, and thanks for the CD-ROM suggestion!

by Bernd (not verified)

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

by SSJ (not verified)

I'm very interested :) Can I link to your post in the KDE4Daily homepage?

by Bernd (not verified)

Sure, go ahead. Thanks for all the work, it is great to explore the upcoming KDE4 with KDE4Daily.

by gttt (not verified)

what are the parameters for qemu-img? I did not make it work. I have tried:

qemu-img convert -f qcow2 kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img -f vmdk kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.vdmk

But this only brings the error:
(VMDK) image open: flags=0x2 filename=kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img
qemu-img: Could not open 'kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img'

by Daniel W (not verified)

The second "-f vmdk" is wrong. The right operand is "-O vmdk"

And the first "-f qcow2" is not really neaded - it is guessed correctly. so the command should look like:

$ qemu-img convert kde4daily-0_0_1_r734472-qcow.img -O vmdk kde4daily.vmdk

hth
Daniel

by gttt (not verified)

Ok, thank you, this works.

Now I do have the problem that I cannot get it to work in vmware. I thought I could use the vmware-player, but this requires a "vmx"-virtual-machine file. The vmware-workstation seems not to be free what I always thought it would be.

by Bernd (not verified)

The VMWare Server is also free (as in free beer). It is much nicer than the VMWare player, you can even create you own virtual michines.

If you want to use the VMPlayer, you might have luck by taking an existing image (google tells me that http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ looks promising) and then replacing the vmdk HD image file. But I never did that, so it is all just guessing.

by Maarten Th. Mulders (not verified)

You can use http://www.easyvmx.com. Just go for the "Super Simple" option and select Ubuntu as your virtual operating system. You should check the .vmx file in the ZIP-archive, because it refers to a hard disk file. You can either change the .vmx file or rename your hard-disk image.

by SLi (not verified)

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...

by SSJ (not verified)

"Don't you think that provides a bit homogeneous environment and thus, well, rather poor coverage?"

That's definitely a concern, and I've tried to compensate by compiling the apps with as many optional components stuffed in as I can - it's a homogeneous environment, but quite a big and rich one, and there seem to be plenty of "global" bugs that have been discovered to date.

by skierpage (not verified)

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.

by T. J. Brumfield (not verified)

Qemu and vmware should have no problems running Linux and KDE 4 in Windows.

I'm curious to see the first Windows-native builds of KDE 4. Now that Amarok uses libplasma, what does that mean for Plasma on Windows? I thought the KDE devs said the desktop components would not get Windows ports.

Personally, the moment that KOffice 2 is released multi-platform, and it supports MS Office imports/exports as well as OpenOffice, I'm dropping OpenOffice all together.

by skierpage (not verified)

I used kdewin-installer (see chehrlic's blog) to download all the pieces and got some KDE4 apps stumbling natively on Windows, details at http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation It's amazing that they run at all, but KDE4 on Windows seems pre-alpha to me.

I also tried using the emerge system to build from source on Windows, see http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/emerge . After downloading hundreds of MB and compiling for hours, I kept running into Python "file in use" errors and finally admitted defeat. There are helpful people making it work better on irc #kde-windows.

by Diederik van de... (not verified)

> Now that Amarok uses libplasma, what does that mean for Plasma on Windows?

Nothing. libplasma is cross-platform.

Only the workspace (/usr/bin/plasma) won't be portable, as it relies on X11 heavily.

by Tukon (not verified)

Confirmed working on Vista 32-bit as well.

Downloaded QEmu 0.90 (w 8/27/07 update) and Kqemu then used the above cmdline. I upgraded to today's version and it's working great.

GREAT WORK SSJ!

-T

by SSJ (not verified)

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!

by Nosemann (not verified)

Well I just run the update before reading this and it worked fine so I guess it's back up again.

Should I change to that mirror anyway to spare some of your bandwidth?

by SSJ (not verified)

Thanks for your consideration, but the main hosting only serves up small pieces of info (hashes, etc) so is not bandwidth intensive, and the KDE hosting usually only contains bulky stuff (but no info, hashes, etc), so it won't really work from day to day. The workaround is just for emergencies - and won't work well in the (hopefully long) times of non-crisis :)

by Famelis George (not verified)

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 ---

by Famelis George (not verified)

Some other things needed when behind a proxy:

If you need to use apt-get to install some pkgs
you have to create a new file named 02proxy in
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d with contents

--- cut here (/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02proxy) ---
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://proxy.name.or.ip:port";
--- end cut ---

by pepe (not verified)

Whoops! I removed my plasma panel digital clock. Any ideas which config file I can tweak to get it back?

Pepe

by Andrew (not verified)

Always I get error with filehash. Like:
filehash =
required =
update aborted, could not download - hash failed.

Is there another way to download update and apply him?

by SSJ (not verified)

Hi! I need more info: What revision are you currently on (contents of $KDE4DAILY_UPDATER_DIR/data/kde4revision.txt), what mirror are you using, and what URLs are failing the hash check?

Cheers!

Remember, there is a support channel on #kde4daily on irc.freenode.net.

by Andrew (not verified)

Sorry, it seems that I have problems with my hardware.