KDE Frameworks 5 Beta and Plasma Next preview on Fedora!

The Fedora KDE SIG brings you all the new and cool stuff from KDE Frameworks and Plasma Next worlds!

First, our Copr repository with KDE Frameworks has been updated to 4.99.0 release, so go get it! All frameworks are co-installable with KDE 4, so you can develop against KF5 without needing any special setup. Also KDE Frameworks 5 were approved as feature for Fedora 21, which means that in next Fedora release, we will ship all Frameworks in the Fedora repositories! There are already some packages imported into rawhide, the rest will follow in next weeks.

And now for the awesome news: we have a live ISO with Plasma Next preview!

Fedora Plasma Next Live ISO Login screen

We packaged as much as we could (but still not everything!), including Rekonq, Dolphin, System Settings, Baloo, Milou and more - all built against Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5 of course.

Download Fedora Plasma Next Live ISO or get it via torrent.

Fedora Plasma Fedora Plasma

If you are really interested in trying locally, you can check out all the additional packages from kde-frameworks-unstable and plasma-next COPRs, but remember that all packages from those repositories install to /usr, so you will get conflicts with KDE 4 packages.

KDE Frameworks 5 and Plasma 2 on Fedora

Fedora logoFirst technological preview of KDE Frameworks 5 has been released few weeks ago, a clear signal for us in Fedora KDE SIG to roll up our sleeves, heat up the builders and start packaging. For the last few days Martin Bříza, Jan Grulich, Lukáš Tinkl, Siddhart Sharma and I were working on bringing KDE Frameworks and Plasma 2 to Fedora. Now we are done and you can try out current technological preview of KF5 and Plasma 2 directly on your system without having to compile anything or messing up your default profile.

If you are a KDE developer, a Qt developer interested in using KF5 in your application or just a curious user, all you have to do is adding kde-frameworks repo to yum and install the packages! The repository is available in Copr, just download the repo file to /etc/yum.repos.d and you can start using Frameworks and Plasma 2. All Frameworks packages are prefixed with kf5- to prevent conflicts with regular packages and at this point they are installed into /opt/kf5 prefix instead of /usr

If you install kde5-workspace package, you can also have a sneak peek at what Plasma guys are doing for Plasma 2! Your display manager should have "KDE Plasma Workspace 2" entry in session types list, which will log you into Plasma 2 session. Just remember that Plasma 2 is still under heavy development and not yet ready for day to day use.

We will now start making the KDE Frameworks 5 packages co-installable with KDE 4 into regular prefix and hopefully we will ship KDE Frameworks 5 as a feature in Fedora 21 available to everyone.

Btw if you are coming to Brno for DevConf (February 7th - 9th) and want to know more about KDE Frameworks and Plasma 2, make sure to visit "KDE Frameworks 5" talk by me and Siddhart Sharma ;-)