MEPIS Community Forum

How long will KDE 3.5 be supported by Mepis?

I tried KDE 4, even with other distros, and I just don't like it.

I guess it depends on what supported means.

When Debian Squeeze is released (possibly by late December) I believe support such as security updates will cease for Lenny and KDE3.x.

The Lenny repos will become "oldstable". Judging from prior releases the Debian.org oldstable/Lenny repos will remain available for approximately a year after which they will be removed.

After the Lenny repos are removed from Debian.org they should then become available at http://archive.debian.org.

Since the Lenny repos will be at archives.debian.org that portion of Mepis 8.0/KDE 3.5 will still be viable. (it will require some minor changes to your sources.list).

The other part of the puzzle is Warren's Mepis 8.0 repo.

I don't know how long Warren intends to keep it around, hopefully at least as long as the Lenny repo remains at Debian.org.

I also wonder how long the 8.0 Community repos will remain available.

There are currently no plans to delete the 8.0 Community Repo anytime soon. In fact the 7.0 Community Repos are still available although nothing new has been added in a very long time.

However it is inevitable that very few new packages will be built for 8.0 now that 11.0 is under development. I tried to build two different twitter related packages for 8.0 a few weeks back and neither was really feasible. Too many libraries would have to be backported and a core system library upgraded (upgrading core libraries can lead to side effects). Lenny is getting too old to build the new apps against.

Would that be the reason that apps such as GIMP 2.6.11, Digikam and K3B to name a few are not yet backported to Mepis 8.0 repos? Though Digikam and K3B would be more to do with KDE4 libraries being use I guess.

Any plans by the Community to attempt a hybrid Kde3/4 distro?

And lastly, how does the Trinity Project fit into this if at all? They are saying that they will maintain KDE3. But if you point to their repos, that might destroy your Mepis install.

Perhaps a Mepis on Trinity base release?

I don't think Trinity is going to be an option. Mepis will move with KDE.

While I'm not sure they're quite "ready for prime time" yet, I've been tinkering a bit with the LXDE and XFCE desktop environments on a "testbed". To me they show a lot of promise, and I like what I'm seeing with them as an alternative to where I see KDE heading. (Mepisuser: I too find that I prefer 3.5 to 4.)

(Bear in mind that these comments are also "skewed" by the facts that 1) I'm dealing with less-technical users who in some cases are bouncing back and forth between Linux (mostly Mepis) and Windows [i.e. Mepis at home, Windows at work] and 2) are mostly running older hardware which performs better with a lighter desktop environment.)

Al

Trinity has come up a couple times before:

http://www.mepislovers.org/showthread.php?t=27617&highlight=Trinity
http://www.mepislovers.org/showthread.php?t=27526&highlight=Trinity

Granted, my own thoughts on Trinity basically consist of confusion over what the Trinity developers think they can accomplish:





My opinions expressed in previous posts continue to be the same opinions I have now. Users who loved KDE3's user-interface are going to be better off re-implementing that user-interface in KDE4. Maintaining the KDE3 source as a viable desktop enviroment simply isn't happening.


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Good post Saist

I'll add that unless Pearson plans on maintaining every single KDE3 application - then it's going to get very stale very quickly.

KDE / Trinity may be the DE - but if the actual application developers haven't forked as well - then ultimately Trinity won't last.

In that case you're better getting onboard with KDE4 or switching to a different DE.

My 2c

A while ago I built deb packages of Gimp 2.6.11 on a Lenny virtual machine, so they will install on a 32-bit Mepis 8.0 system.

https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B1UMhse3gjfPYTg2NDIzMWItMzI3Mi00N2U2LTk2N2MtMTk4MjliMmMwOTVl&hl=en

The modified source files are also included so the packages can be rebuilt easily on a 64-bit system...

Thanks Stevo, now have gimp 2.6.11 working in M8 32

One (usual) question on the repos. I have not had anything other than the odd Debian security update for ages. Can you confirm this is still a valid sources list. I do have mepis enabled as the prefered distro in synaptic and hit the reload button with monotonous regularity

-------

# See sources.list(5) for more information

# This file should be edited through synaptic

# MEPIS improvements, overrides and updates--the MEPIS magic
deb ftp://ftp.mepis.com/mepis/ mepis-8.0 main

deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ lenny main
deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free
# deb-src ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free


# deb http://volatile.debian.org/debian-volatile/ lenny/volatile main contrib non-free

# Some Debian Multimedia software might be illegal in some jurisdictions

# Some extra packages that are maintained by the MEPIS Community

# deb http://www.backports.org/debian/ lenny-backports main contrib non-free

deb http://restricted.mepis-deb.org/mepiscr/testrepo/ mepis8cr test-restricted

# Mepis Community Main, Restricted, and Test Repos
deb http://main.mepis-deb.org/mepiscr/repo/ mepis8cr main non-free
deb http://restricted.mepis-deb.org/mepiscr/repo/ mepis8cr restricted restricted-non-free
deb http://main.mepis-deb.org/mepiscr/testrepo/ mepis8cr test

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Apart from that, still not very happy with 'KDE 4.anything' and not planning on changing from Mepis 8 anytime soon. Although E17 (pclos2010) is looking very good even as a beta.
I think that Mepis8 will go down as a 'classic'