Weekly Plasma 5 Live ISO

With KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 5 not too far away our awesome Blue Systems build crew now increased the cadence at which we publish new Neon 5 Live ISO images for you to test. I am very happy to announce that from now on there will be a new ISO waiting for you every Friday at:

http://files.kde.org/snapshots/neon5-latest.iso

Neon 5 provides daily built packages of the latest and greatest KDE software based on KDE Frameworks 5 based on Kubuntu, so what you get every Friday is most certainly no older than 24 hours. This makes the ISOs a perfect way to test and report bugs in the upcoming release, as well as track the overall progress of things.
If you’d like continuous (albeit, less trouble-free) updates for an existing Kubuntu 14.04 or Neon 5 installation you can of course use the PPAs directly. Beware! There be dragons 😉

If you would like to support future KDE Development please check out the current fundraiser for the KDE Randa Meetings 2014.

Starving Developers

Please help!

KDE‘s Randa Meetings is quite possibly the best large-scale developer sprint ever. And you can help make it happen.

Imagine some 40 developers cramped together in a house in the middle of the Alps, living of code alone. Nothing could possibly go wrong….

Phonon, a pillar of our multimedia solutions, was revived in Randa. Kdenlive, our video editor, became 302% more awesome in Randa. The KDE Frameworks 5 movement seeking to make our awesome libraries more useful to all the world started in Randa. Amarok 2 was planned in Randa. Approximately a godzillion bugs were fixed in Randa.

Donate to the Randa Meetings 2014 now and get more free awesome! I personally have set my heart on making multimedia more awesome with easier APIs for developers and UPnP streaming support, also other stuff ( maybe a wallpaper that shows kittens wearing hats? #kdekittenhat)

Neon 5’s Many PPAs & APT

Project Neon 5, the KDE Frameworks 5 version of Kubuntu‘s continuous KDE software  delivery system, has more than one package repositories balancing quality and update frequency in different ways. This post is supposed to help those of you who, like me, wish to use whatever works best and therefore need to switch PPAs from time to time.

APT really comes in handy for this. As it allows you to pretty freely move between versions of a package through increasing pinning priority on a different PPA.

First you add all three repositories and create a file /etc/apt/preferences.d/kf5 containing:

 Package: *
 Pin: release o=LP-PPA-neon-kf5-snapshot-weekly
 Pin-Priority: 350

Package: *
 Pin: release o=LP-PPA-neon-kf5-snapshot-daily
 Pin-Priority: 250

Package: *
 Pin: release o=LP-PPA-neon-kf5
 Pin-Priority: 150

Now all you need to do is increase the priority of any of the entries to switch to that snapshot and run

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

APT will then automagically move your entire KDE Frameworks 5 stack to the version in the PPA with the highest priority.

So magic.