Do we want to
bother with making sure KDE3/Trinity can
sit on the same PC?
KDE
No.
Do we want to support running both concurrently? I agree, no. Yet there is one important
reason to run both: KDE3 remains the baseline to which we know when TDE is working
incorrectly. For example, my recent threads and bug reports about the Kaffeine DVB OSD.
A check list of cautions will help people run both in order to use that baseline for
testing.
Currently I am dual booting KDE3 and TDE with mirror partitions of my base Slackware 13.1.
Dual booting is, um, annoying. I have a couple of user accounts dedicated to testing.
Installing TDE on my primary system would allow me to test under the exact same conditions
without rebooting. I have a virtual machine with TDE installed, but I can't test
everything there --- such as the video issues I discovered with the proprietary Nvidia
drivers.
I need to run both with reasonable safety. Hence my desire to encourage some conversation
about the topic.
I think there is no problem with the packages as I built everything with a $PREFIX of
/opt/trinity. To avoid environment variable conflicts, I can write some snippets in my
testing account's .bashrc to test when to remove KDE3 or TDE environment variables
that get sourced from /etc/profile.d. As a testing account I can avoid conflicts with
~/.local by not modifying the menu and so forth.
My testing account does not use KMail. I login in from the command line and therefore
would avoid conflicts with differing KDMs.
I have not migrated completely to TDE because until recently, several significant bugs had
remained unresolved from before 3.5.12. Fortunately, recently I found solutions for most
and have submitted patches.
Yet I'm the slow and cautious type. :) The other day I considered moving to TDE full
time and then I run into more bugs like the Kaffeine DVB OSD glitches, the Nvidia driver
conflict, and of late, my inability to build KOffice.
I use KMail with my primary user account and won't migrate that account to TDE until
I'm comfortable I have the other significant bugs out of my way because as I
mentioned, the indexes in KMail get reworked in TDE. Although I can back out of the KMail
reindexing, doing so is a nuisance. :)
A check list of cautions is needed to avoid conflicts with KDE4. For example, I don't
know how to avoid both environments from conflicting because both use ~/.local. I have not
done any testing, but I wonder what happens when TDE KDM is used rather than KDE4 KDM. I
suspect using the TDE KDM to run KDE3 will cause problems.
I admit I don't test for KDE4 conflicts because, um, well, I stripped KDE4 from my
system. :) I did that last year when I rebuilt KDE3 to run on Slackware 13.1, and now that
I am close to moving to TDE, despite building all packages for /opt/trinity, I have no
real desire to install any KDE4 packages. I really do like the KDE3/TDE environment and
that is why I am involved here. :)
Darrell
