After months of hard work, the KDE Software Compilation (SC) suite reached version 4.4.0 on February 9th, 2010 – implementing over 1,400 new feature requests, new applications, new effects, eliminating over 7,00 bugs.  The KDE SC 4.4.0 is composed of the KDE Plasma Workspace, the KDE Applications and the KDE Development Platform and it introduces window tabbing, netbook interface, authentication framework and social networking support. With this said, the KDE SC 4.4.0 is still the most beautiful and modern desktop environment to date!

This is for those of you who don’t want to wait until late April for the Kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release, which will come with a default KDE SC 4.4.0 installation. With this guide, we will teach you, step by step, how to install the brand-new KDE SC 4.4.0 on your existing Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) installation.

Step 1 – Add KDE SC 4.4 Repositories

Go to: System > Administration > Software Sources…

…enter your password, and the Software Sources window will appear.  Click on the second tab, “Third-Party Software”, click the “Add” button and type the following:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu karmic main

then click on “Add Source”

We then want to go to the “Updates” tab and click on “Unsupported updates (karmic-backports)”

Right click [[HERE]] and choose “Save Link As…” and save the key to your desktop.  Goto the forth tab along “Authentication” and click on “Import Key File”, navigate to your desktop (/home/YOURUSERNAME/Desktop) and select the key you just saved.  You will see a new entry called: “8AC93F7A 2009-05-07 Launchpad Kubuntu Updates”…

Once you click close on the main window, it will ask you to reload the information about available software, so click on “Reload” and wait for the window to close.

Step 2 – Install KDE SC 4.4
All you need to do is to click on the link below:

Click to install KDE SC 4.4!

If you are using Firefox – It will ask you to select an application to launch the url – Just choose the first option which should be “apturl” and click OK.

Click on the “Install” button on the new window and it will install the KDE SC 4.4 packages (It may ask you to enter your password, do so if requested!

Just sit back and wait for the packages to download

Once complete, click the “Forward” button for Virtuoso configuration (Enter the required password if you already have an older version of KDE installed)

After that you will be asked to select a display manager (KDM or GDM) – Choose your weapon of choice and click on Forward (I’d prefer to keep my GDM if anyone is interested

It will then install the packages it downloaded earlier.

Once the installation is complete – Reboot!

At the login screen – go to Options > Select Session > KDE

Login and et voila!

Enjoy!