Monday, August 9, 2010

KDE Software on Windows

Why do I need KDE Software on Windows? Use Linux instead! That's much better anyway.
Yeah, that's right. But there are situations where that strategy does not work.

I am sitting in the office and are still fascinated by RKWard (as I blogged before). So I kindly asked our IT guys to give me an old notebook to install Linux onto it. And because they are great colleagues they gave me one. (Yes, I come to the point soon.)
So I started to download openSUSE 11.3. But the network connection was so poor that after an hour or more the download was aborted and I had to start from the begin. If I only had a nice torrent client. (Now I come to the point.) ktorrent!
(Yes, there are other programs as well but perhaps I was searching for a reason.)

That was my chance to give KDE on Windows a try.
After downloading the installer (http://windows.kde.org/download.php) I clicked through the wizard until I came to the packages. What packages do I need? And where is ktorrent? I installed the network pack. The installation went well but it took a while.
No. tkorrent :-(
Hey, but there is KGet. This one can handle torrent files, too. After adding the kdebase-apps (konq.dll was needed) I could download the openSUSE iso.

Resumée: The installer is easy to use and works very well. The packages are not really small and it was not totally clear for me, which packages I had to install to get my favorite apps on windows. All in all it works and is easy to use. Kudos to all KDE on Windows dudes. You did an amazing job!

It is so good to have gwenview, konversation and at least some of my other favorite KDE apps around.

2 comments:

Fri13 said...

Next time when you are downloading a big file from source what gives you direct link (or HTTP link) to the file and your connection is lost you can resume the download easily with wget.

Just copy the address where the file is and then set

wget -c address.com/where/file/is/image.bin

wget continues downloading it. Or you can use somekind download manager (Kget) what allows you to resume as well. I just find wget best for that purpose and then when you have downloaded, check MD5sum (SHA1) and if it is different and same file is available with torrent, just place torrent to download same place and it does recheck and redownloads broken parts only.

On me the wget has not failed ever.
And because wget, I always avoid torrents because they are slow and unrealible for downloads. The old fashion FTP/HTTP are faster and easier to actually use.

Thomas Thym (ungethym) said...

Thanks Fri13 for the hint.
You are right. I could have used KGet and download it directly via HTTP.

The fun part was installing KDE on windows. I haven't invested any thoughts if I should use HTTP or torrent. With KDE I could resume the download with a single click. But not with Windoof.