[kde-solaris] KDE 3.4.1 for Solaris 10 IA32/AMD32 and UltraSPARC Released

[Stefan Teleman]

i am very happy to let everyone know that KDE 3.4.1 for Solaris 10
IA32/AMD32 and UltraSPARC-II is now available for download from your
favorite KDE mirror. the mirrors take anywhere from 4 to 12 hours to
sync.

you can see screenshots of this release here: 
http://impliedvolatility.blogspot.com/

from both Intel/AMD and UltraSPARC builds.

quick and dirty release notes and install instructions:

- the IA32 binaries are built for Pentium IV
- the SPARC binaries are built for UltraSPARC-II
- this entire release is built with the SunStudio 10 compilers.

- the installation is the usual pkgadd. the file PACKAGE_LIST contains
a list of all the packages, in the order in which they should be
installed.

- please patch your system up-to-date before installing.

- the IA32 binaries are linked against the nVidia hardware accelerated
OpenGL (Solaris nVidia drivers). it is very likely that these will not
work on a non-nVidia video card. i will build a set of patches/updates
for the non-hardware accelerated Xorg/Mesa/OpenGL, and these will also
be available for download here.

- please make sure that you add the appropriate entries in 
/etc/pam.conf, /etc/rpc and /etc/services (samples are in a directory 
named CONFIG.SAMPLE).

- if you want sound (which i imagine you do), you must install 
kdemultimedia (KMix). otherwise, you will have to configure an 
external sound player for any KDE events (i.e. artsplay).

- for Xine and Kaffeine, you should create a /dev/dvd symlink to
/vol/dev/aliases/cdrom[?] (whatever it happens to be on your system).
otherwise they both complain.

- for amaroK, you should download the win32 codecs from the mplayer 
site, and install them in /usr/lib/win32 (if you have not done so 
already). otherwise, amaroK complains on startup. amaroK and Kaffeine 
are in kdemultimedia.

- for SuperKaramba, the latest version of LiquidWeather++ (6.2) works
very well on both IA32 and SPARC. KBear, SuperKaramba and three nice
looking styles (qinx, newstep and grover) by David Johnson are in 
kdeaddons.

- Xrender/Xft/Freetype2/Fontconfig support on both IA32 and SPARC.

- xglobe and xplanet are in the kderequired package (with maps). 
xplanet works fine with KDE, clouds and stars included.

- icecast 2.0
- dante (SOCKS5)
- silc
- glut 3.7
- full SDL
- many other goodies

Known Annoyances:
- kicker dumps core when exiting KDE. this looks like a destructor 
order problem which i will fix very shortly (i ran out of time, and 
it's not something which gets in the way during normal usage, since 
it works fine).
- ksysguard does the same thing, very likely for the exact same 
reasons.
- kbear messes-up the systray. i don't know if i will fix this. kbear 
3.0 has been in alpha for a while and i am waiting for it to be born 
and graduate to release status. :-P
- scribus works fine on IA32, but i ran into a dependency problem on 
SPARC. this is a few-days-fix problem.

Things i have not been able to test:
- DVD playing. the DVD player on my Opteron box is SATA. this makes my
box DVD-challenged on both Solaris and Linux.  so, i'm out of luck on
this one, until we get better support for SATA DVD's.

Things i have planned for the very near future (next couple of weeks):
- vanilla Xorg OpenGL build (for QT, kdelibs, kdebase and kdegraphics)
- KOffice 1.4
- K3B (it's half way there, i have to spend some time testing the
SCSI stuff)

I would like to thank the following engineers at Sun Microsystems for 
their help (in alphabetical order):

Eric Boutilier
Alan DuBoff
Simon Gordon
Jim Grisanzio
Mike Riley
Matt Simmons
Glen Weinberg

Administrivia:

Please bear with me for a few days while i put together a better set
of release notes, install instructions and so on. as always, i will
upload the source code patches here within the next two to three days
(that's the first item on my ToDo list right now). the source patches
will be found in a directory named SOURCE.PATCHES. this time around
there are *very many* patches, including for QT. the KDE source code
patches are not the same for UltraSPARC and IA32. there are 
differences, and the wrong set of patches will cause things to 
misbehave.

If you have questions or run into trouble, please email me directly:
stefan dot teleman at gmail dot com. unfortunately i can only answer
my personal emails in the evening, from home, so there might be a few
hours' delay before you hear back from me. Please let me know of any 
problems or suggestions for improvement. my goal is to bring KDE on 
Solaris on par with Linux.

Have fun with KDE!

--Stefan

-- 
Stefan Teleman          'Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition'
steleman at nyc.rr.com                          -Monty Python