The first bunch of KDE 4.1.4 OpenSolaris IPS packages have been released and can be downloaded (if you check the mailing list archives). The reason I haven’t put out more fanfare for this is that they are hosted at the end of my own DSL line, which just isn’t good for having many simultaneous downloads. I could see four or five going on right after I announced the packages, which spanked my uplink for about a day. We’re now looking into a faster mirror elsewhere, which should improve availability.

The initial QA on the packages is sort-of encouraging. Some (well, just one) people are cursed and never get a working KDE, for some reason, but others are reporting reasonable success. It installs and runs; kded hangs some the alt-key grabbed; kcheckpass fails mysteriously about half the time. Those are the biggies which are going to need some engineering effort before we can call KDE 4.1.4 “good” on OpenSolaris.

I’m kind of torn between producing a really good KDE 4.1.4 and switching to KDE 4.2.0; the latter is, of course, quite a bit feature improvement over KDE 4.1.4, but it means diving back into the dependency tree and fixing compile errors across all the KDE modules. Libical is new – but already exists for OpenSolaris – and Phonon with xine is being a pain in the butt to the point of me thinking that we (= KDE-Solaris) should switch to the GStreamer backend by default. However, pinning this stuff down with the accuracy required for real bug reports is something that exceeds my current time budget for KDE-Solaris, so it will have to wait.

Our medium-term goal remains to get KDE4 (some version) into the official IPS repositories and some part of it onto the install DVD, but as yet it’s impossible to state dates or versions. That’s the downside of trying to work with a distro that doesn’t (yet) consider KDE4 a necessary part of the ecosystem.