So I have a new computer. I have some new pictures I want to upload, so I cracked open Digikam for the first time. It was a pleasure to use on Xubuntu 8.04, so of course it would only be better than ever on Ubuntu 9.10. Right? Not quite.
On trying to import some new photos, you get to be acquainted with Bug 210462, “digikam crash select new download”. (KDE Bugs seems to use the title as a tag field rather than a terse English description…) Yeah, that bug already has some 150 duplicates. And the bug I filed? Well, it’s marked as a duplicate of one of the duplicates.
And that’s just all the people who bothered to install the debug packages, and actually follow reporting the bug all the way through. Sheesh. I wonder how many people in total have reported variants of this bug.
The Digikam Download page helpfully says,
Warning Ubuntu Karmic contains Digikam 1.0.0beta 5 which crashes while importing pictures.
You can install a more recent version (1.0.0) from backports.
Aha, I thought. Time to break out the ol’ add-apt-repository on their PPA.
That was hurdle #2. Although add-apt-repository worked fine, the apt-get update complained:
W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-backporters/ppa/ubuntu/dists/karmic/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz 404 Not Found
OK fine. Then I’ll just download the backporters .deb for Digikam, per instructions. dpkg claims to be upset, but it can be placated:
sudo dpkg -i /home/brianna/Desktop/digikam_1.0.0-1ubuntu1~karmic1_i386.deb
sudo apt-get install liblqr-1-0
sudo apt-get -f install
Finally I have Digikam 1.0.0 (no beta). And it all works seamlessly as I recall. But what an unpleasant jolt back into reality.
Oh, and in the time it took me to write this up, my precious bug report has already been marked as DUPLICATE. They must be well practised now.
