Updating Kubuntu to KDE 3.5

Kubuntu 5.10, the KDE-based variant of Ubuntu, normally comes with KDE 3.4.3. With KDE 3.5.0 just recently released, however, I wanted to update Kubuntu to use the latest version of KDE. Here’s what I had to do to make it work.

First, from this page, I downloaded and added the appropriate GPG key. Once that was done, I used apt-get update to download the latest package information and apt-get upgrade to upgrade packages. That upgraded most of KDE, but there were a few packages that still refused to upgrade (they were reported by apt-get as “held back”).

After poking around with apt-get for a while, I discovered that there was one missing file—libgnokii2—that couldn’t be found in the apt-get sources. I manually reviewed the apt-get sources and finally found this package in the universe section of the main Ubuntu apt-get source. I edited /etc/apt/sources.list to enable the other sections, then manually installed the missing file with these commands:

apt-get clean  
apt-get update  
apt-get install libgnokii2

I then edited /etc/apt/sources.list again to disable the other sources and upgraded the remainder of the KDE packages:

apt-get clean  
apt-get update  
apt-get upgrade

This last round of apt-get removed a few obsolete packages and then updated the remainder of the KDE packages.

I don’t know if this is the “correct” way of doing things, but it seemed to be the only way to make it work as anticipated. If anyone has a better way, please let me know.

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