Problem installing KDE4 on Debian sid

[saivin]

Hi,
I did a net install of Debian with lenny cd. Then changed my sources.list to testing. After a while wanted to use sid and accordingly changed the sources.list to sid. Then did update and dist-upgrades. Now if I type cat /etc/issue, I get

Debian GNU/Linux squeeze/sid \n \l

Does it mean I'm not pure Sid? Is that important anyway? Coz, I'm trying to install KDE4 on this system and it ends up showing dependency error.

I followed the method mentioned in The Debian KDE maintainers website. Edited sources.list to include 'experimental' and then again did apt-get update. But whether I try,

apt-get install -t experimental kde4-minimal

or

aptitude install -t experimental kde4-minimal

it gives dependency error as,

SV-V1400:/home/saivin# apt-get install -t experimental kde4-minimal
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  kde4-minimal: Depends: kdebase-runtime (>= 4:4.2.0) but it is not going to be installed
                Depends: kdebase-workspace (>= 4:4.2.0) but it is not going to be installed
                Depends: kdebase (>= 4:4.2.0) but it is not going to be installed

Those who I contacted on IRC had followed the same method and it had worked for them. Whats wrong with my system then? Could somebody help me out?

[saivin]

Ok friends,
Many of you have viewed this thread but may not be knowing the solution. For the benifit of you, let me add here that, I enquired with debian-kde developers on the IRC (#debian-kde) and got to know that the problem was with 'strigi'. To be more precise the problem is with a library 'libstreamanalyzer0' on which 'strigi' depends. The required version for kde4 should be >=0.6.3 but the one in the package repo is 0.5.11. It might have been there (thats when all those who are using kde4 were able to upgrade to kde4) but might have been taken out for some maintenance/build issue. I was advised that all I could do now was to wait till the 0.6.4 package was available again in the 'experimental'.

[MikeTbob]

Thanks for the update saivin, your hard work will surely help someone else having this problem.

[saivin]

Hi Mike (and whoever bothered to visit this thread),
Finally I have KDE4 on my Debian today!

I'm so happy that I cannot express it in words. All is not well though. I have a lot of tinkering to do. It shows lot of error messages (not affecting the functionality) during boot up. Says I have problem with my Intel sound card. etc etc... but thats ok.

Btw, I have a question. Each day I was trying both

apt-get -t experimental install kde4-minimal

and

aptitude -t experimental install kde4-minimal

apt-get would just say some dependencies were unmet, broken dependencies (?) something like that. But aptitude used to give a little more detail.

Today also I tried both. apt-get just said I still did not meet the dependencies. But aptitude today told I need to remove certain packages, upgrade some and newly install some packages. Not only this it also offered to do the job for me Asked if I agreed to this suggestion. Naturally I was more than happy to say 'yes' and got kde4 installed in return!

All these days I though apt-get was the most powerful program. But aptitude seems to be better!