Trying out KDE 4.1.2 on hardened x86

Since coming back from OSD2008 (which was great btw) I've been ill and tried to stay home from work. On the bright side this have given me a bit of time to mess around with KDE 4.1 on Gentoo.

The packages are still masked and unstable but I encountered surprisingly few problems emerging it. I had to mask >qt-4 in order for qt-core to pull in the rest of the new qt ebuilds. See Gentoo Wiki Blockers for other blockers.

The only stability problem encountered so far is a few crashes when using some of the fancy new eye candy. Sometimes X crash and sometimes I just loose the mouse (I can get it back with ALT+F2->logout, but as soon as I close the logout dialog the mouse disappears again).

Also nepomuk sometimes get killed by Pax.

The new panel have been annoying me a bit, since it apparently still doesn't do autohiding:-(

Even more annoying is that several kio-slaves seems to not work (ie. daap, sftp).

Okular is the KDE4 replacement for kpdf and seems to be working a bit better than the predecessor.

To get sound to work it appears that you have to emerge phonon-xine. Amarok 1.90 still seems a bit bare, but works as advertised.

Install kdeplasma-addons to get User Friendly comic on your desktop. Use CTRL+F12 to show/hide your dashboard(formerly desktop).

But despite these problems I don't think I'll be looking back at KDE 3.5 on Gentoo again soon. At least not if I get some of the above issues fixed :)