KDE 4 Beta packages now available for Fedora 7

While Fedora 8 will not ship with KDE 4 as the default KDE version there will be all necessary packages available to provide a development environment. Now these packages also entered the Fedora 7 repository.

Fedora 8 will be released around 8. November. As already reported it will come along with a development environment of KDE 4.0.

Since 1. October these packages are also available for Fedora 7:

# yum install kdebase4
Loading "skip-broken" plugin
Loading "fastestmirror" plugin
Loading "changelog" plugin
Loading mirror speeds from cached hostfile

[...]

Dependencies Resolved

=============================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version          Repository        Size
=============================================================================
Installing:
 kdebase4                i386       3.93.0-4.fc7     updates            26 M
Installing for dependencies:
 kdelibs4                i386       3.93.0-10.fc7    updates            13 M
 kdepimlibs              i386       3.93.0-3.fc7     updates           2.0 M
 soprano                 i386       0.9.0-2.fc7      updates            94 k
 strigi-libs             i386       0.5.5-1.fc7      updates           336 k

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install      5 Package(s)
Update       0 Package(s)
Remove       0 Package(s)

Total download size: 41 M
Is this ok [y/N]:

The installation does not carry any updates, an existing KDE 3.x installation will not be changed. Also, there is only everything necessary for a basic runtime environment and development platform. All other major packages of KDE like the network or games package are imssing. These will most likely find their way into Fedora in the next months when KDE becomes more and more stable.

Now there is no more need for Fedora users to update to Fedora 8 just to have a loom at KDE 4. However, keep in mind that these KDE packages are not svn snapshots but the official Alpha/Beta releases. Since the next KDE release should be here any day now the currently shipped KDE version for Fedora is comparable old and does not deliver more than a first look at the upcoming KDE 4.0. The number of changes even between Beta 2 (the version in the Fedora repositories) and Beta 3 is very large and includes many important parts.