Monday, October 31, 2011

How To Get Kubuntu 11.10 Akonadi, Nepomuk, and Kontact All Working Correctly

Kubuntu users using 11.10 for the first time will quickly discover that there are some serious issues with the indexing system. The problem affects Kontact significantly and can cause your system to come to a crawl. Fortunately, these issues have been addressed but are not available in Canonicals standard repositories yet.

To fix the problem you need to add the KDE Backports repository and activate experimental updates.

If you are upgrading from Kubuntu 11.04 you will have to do a fresh upgrade in order to get a proper upgrade.

IN 11.04 - Backup all your Kontact Files: There is a major change in how Kontact handles, indexes and stores data between Kubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 the updated version of Kontact cannot read your files from 11.04 and you will have to export everything to be imported to the new version of Kontact later.

Boot the 11.10 CD-ROM or USB Drive Into Try Kubuntu Mode - Your going to have to do some file maitainance here first.

If you have one Linux partition mount that partition. Then use Alt+F2 key combination to open the run dialog box. Type in 'kdesu dolphin' to have root privelages in it. Navigate to the Linux partition and remove all files and directories except for the home directory.

Once that task is complete go into the home directory and then into your user directory. Tell dolphin to show hidden files and directories. You will need to remove them all. Remember that all hiiden files and directroies have a leading . before them. Example; your hidden directory that holds your KDE configuration files will have the name .kdesu

This will keep all your persnonal files intact while allowing Kubuntu 11.10 to get a fresh install. This is important since an upgrade install does not work well between 11.04 and 11.10.

If you are like me and have a separate Linux partition for home (i.e. mount point is /home) then just go into it and remove all the hidden files and folders in your user directory. You can reformat the other partitions when you do the install.

If there is more than one user on your system make sure that all necessary backups for them are done and also remove all their hidden files and directories in their user directories as well.

Once you have backed up all necessary data files and cleaned up the system as described then start the Kubuntu install.

Once Kubuntu 11.10 is installed and you have booted into your system you need to do the following:

Install the Kubuntu KDE Backports ppa - sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

Go to Applications >> Settings >> Software Sources in the menu. Click on the "Updates" tab and make sure that Pre-released updates (oneiric-proposed) and Unsupported updates (oneiric-backports) are selected. All boxes ubder "Install updates from:" should be checked.

Open Konsole and use the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

You will notice that your entire KDE install from the CD or Flash Drive install is going to be upgraded to version 4.7.2 allow this as this version has several bug fixes, including the ones needed to fix Akonadi, Nepomuk and Kontact.

After all updates have installed and the system reboots you can restore all your Kontact Data and go about getting your system setup back to where you want it.

One thing you need to know, the new version of Kontact does not play well with clamav or with spam filters (yet) so you should avoid using them for now. Otherwise you will find yourself waiting on Kmail (Kontact) constantly as it filters email everytime you run it. Kmail filters all email in your inbox everytime you download, startup or setup your personal filters. The new version of Kmail is not probably tagging files as already scanned so if its in your inbox its going to get scanned everytime Kmail does something.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is it too late to do this fix if the update has already been done and this condition has become apparent since?

Unknown said...

If you mean you did the distro update from 11.04 to 11.10 and already had Kmail balk on using your older data, yeah as it destroyed the older files already. If you did a fresh install and are just having issues you can do the upgrade without further issues. (You can also do the upgrade even if you did the distro upgrade. It won't restore your lost data but it will fix other issues.)