Digikam 2.5 on Ubuntu Natty

Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (11.04) is almost a year old, but if you, like me, are not brave enough to upgrade to Oneiric, sometimes you find yourself forced to use outdated software. Fortunately, for many programs, backports from newer Ubuntu releases are available. Today, I am trying to install DigiKam 2.5.

A DigiKam backport is available from Philip Johnsson’s kubuntu-backports PPA. However, it is built for KDE 4.7, while Natty’s KDE is still at 4.6. So, we upgrade, using the Kubuntu Backports PPA. Now we’re almost there, except for some dependencies of DigiKam, that are not available in either PPA. These can be found in Philip Johnssons ‘extra’ PPA, but we have to be careful, because this PPA contains a lot of packages, and we surely do not want to upgrade all of those.

So, here we go. First, add the necessary PPAs:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:philip5/kubuntu-backports
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:philip5/extra

Then, make sure we don’t upgrade to packages from philip5/extra by default. Add the following to /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-philip5-extra
Pin-Priority: 1

Now you can just upgrade your system:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

or use aptitude so review what will happen before you go ahead.