Linux etc. » DigiKam

Installing Digikam with fewer dependencies in Xubuntu/ Ubuntu Intrepid

Marianne — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:42:49 +0000

If you do

sudo aptitude install digikam

on Intrepid, you will see that aptitude would install loads of KDE packages (Dolphin and Konqueror, yikes). Apparently, this is because aptitude now by default also installs recommended packages as “dependencies”. To avoid this, use the -R flag to aptitude (see also man aptitude):

sudo aptitude install -R digikam

If you prefer Synaptic for the GUI, there is a global option there under Preferences, in the General tab.

Addendum

One issue is that you will not be able to use the Flickr upload plugin without Konqueror, as this version of Digikam uses Konqueror to authenticate you on Flickr. A workaround is to get the lateste KDE4 version of Digikam, which you can do by adding the following four repositories to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/digikam-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-experimental/ppa/ubuntu intrepid main

You’ll also have to add the key for each repository using (substitute key number for “9999″):

gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 9999
gpg -a --export 9999 | sudo apt-key add -

Works fine here so far, use at your own risk.

How to use mutt to e-mail images from DigiKam

Marianne — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:49:49 +0000

DigiKam has a nice feature that lets you e-mail images; it’s in the Image menu. You can change the mail agent to use, in the Mail tab of the dialogue that comes up. That’s nice as well. However, you can only pick from a dropdown of predefined mail agents, and that list doesn’t include mutt. (I first tried to trick DigiKam, by picking Thunderbird and then entering exo-open into the custom path for Thunderbird, but this doesn’t work).

You can, however, pick the “Default” mail agent DigiKam’s dropdown. Note that this will not use the mail agent that you’ve set as default in Xubuntu (or Ubuntu) (which sucks — I wish KDE apps would just accept the system defaults for that). You can generally change such settings using …

kcontrol

… and on a real KDE system, you would look for KDE Components → Default Applications → Email Client. Unfortunately, if you’re using Ubuntu or Xubuntu, you’ll notice that you don’t have an item Default Applications. Here’s what worked for me on Xubuntu:

sudo aptitude install kde-systemsettings

Now you’ll find the entry in kcontrol as described above. I’ve just set it to /usr/bin/exo-open, as this always gets translated to the default mail app that I’ve currently set via Preferred Applications in the Xfce Menu (which conveniently has a default for Mutt).