Revision as of 06:46, 23 August 2011

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 try the Live ISO from a USB stick. Download the Balsam Professional live image, which is based on openSUSE here (use the highest version numbered iso file).

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 patched 4.7 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 4.7, replacing any 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

Preparation

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

Repository Setup

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

zypper addrepo --refresh \
   http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Release:/47/openSUSE_11.4 kr47
zypper addrepo --refresh \
    http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Active/openSUSE_11.4/ plasma-active

Increase KDE:Active packages' priority relative to KDE:Release:47, because the git snapshot versioning is otherwise lower than those in KDE:Release:47, and we want the KDE:Active versions that are built with Active-specific options:

zypper modifyrepo --priority 90 plasma-active

Package Installation

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 plasma-contour-config

This will install and setup the Plasma Active shell, which is contained in 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.

Running Plasma Active

If you have installed the plasma-tablet-config package, your system will automatically start into Plasma Active. Just make sure you have autologin enabled in Yast and restart your system.

From a full Plasma Desktop (or Netbook) user experience, you can also switch at runtime 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

Installing Additional Software

There are a few KDE projects that have created touch friendly versions of their applications already. These versions are included in the plasma-active repository. Currently, these are:

Calligra Active - Install package calligra-active
Kontact Touch - Install package kontact

In addition, some applications already work quite well together with active. The following is a list of applications that work ok on a touchscreen:

Okular - For viewing documents.
Marble - Virtual globe, includes routing support.
Bangarang - Media player, uses Nepomuk for listing media.
Dolphin - File manager.

Some of these applications, like Bangarang, are not included in either the KDE:Release or plasma-active repositories. Instead, they can be installed from the KDE:Extra repository by adding it to zypper with the following command:

#Add KDE:Extra repository
zypper addrepo --refresh  http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/KDE:/Extra/KDE_Release_47_openSUSE_11.4 kde-extra
#Install Bangarang
zypper install bangarang

MeeGo / ARM

A repository of most of KDE components, including Plasma Active for MeeGo is at http://repo.pub.meego.com/Project:/KDE:/Devel/Trunk/Project:KDE:Devel.repo and is available for both i586 and ARM, which is added by running the following command

zypper ar http://repo.pub.meego.com/Project:/KDE:/Devel/Trunk/Project:KDE:Devel.repo

To install the software run the following command:

zypper install plasma-active

Finally, to switch to using the plasma tablet UX in MeeGo, use the uxselector project, following the instructions found here: http://wiki.meego.com/MeeGo_Desktop/Changing_Desktops#UXSelect_Switcher_Tool_.28alpha.29 - edit the /etc/xdg/aard/uxselect.conf file to include the following section:

 [plasma]

 name=Plasma Active

 description=The Plasma Active Tablet UX

 path=/usr/bin/startkde

and add the text plasma text to the uxlist property in the General section.

This will allow you to run KDE, instructions for switching to Plasma Tablet from the standard Plasma Desktop which is the default will be forthcoming.

MeeGo system image

a complete ready to go image of Plasma Active with the Contour UX is provided at the basysKom image repository

Other Systems

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