Install Quanta plus web editor on ubuntu 13.04

Quanta Plus

Welcome to another great post on how to install quanta plus on ubuntu. Quanta plus is my favorite php web development tool simply because its too simple compared to all the alternatives out there. But most important is that its built with qt, which makes it a native, fast and efficient application on the KDE desktop, which I have been using for over a decade now.

So since quanta plus is not developed anymore, which each passing ubuntu version it gets more and more difficult to install. Till version 11.04 it was there in the repository in the package called kdewebdev. After that it was removed. Till version 12.10 it could be installed by downloading the packages from the older ubuntu repositories. It was simple till that point.

However with ubuntu 13.04 some dependencies of quanta plus conflict with kde libraries making it difficult to install straight away. So it took me some time to research and make it work. And in this post I am going to reveal the secret.

Trinity packages

KDE 4.10 onwards (ubuntu 13.04) onwards would not allow you to install quanta plus from the packages directly. So we have to install it from the trinity desktop packages.

Lets do it now.

First install the following packages

$ sudo apt-get install gdebi-core
$ sudo gdebi libqt3-mt_3.3.8-b-8ubuntu3_amd64.deb
$ sudo gdebi libavahi-qt3-1_0.6.30-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb
$ sudo gdebi launchpad-integration_0.1.56.2_all.deb

Where are those deb files ? Those deb files can be found at http://packages.ubuntu.com/. Search for them and download the correct deb matching your system architecture.

Now its time to add the kde3 maintainers repository. It contains modified build of packages for kde3 desktop that will not conflict with kde4 desktop

Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the following 2 lines

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kde3-maintainers/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

Update the apt cache with data from new repositories

$ sudo apt-get update

Now download and install a package called libaudiofile0

Download from
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/precise/amd64/libaudiofile0

$ sudo gdebi libaudiofile0_0.3.2-0ubuntu4_amd64.deb

Note that if you have kdelibs-data version 3.5.10 installed, then remove it.

Now finally install quanta plus

$ sudo apt-get install quanta-kde3

Quanta is ready

Installation is complete and quanta is ready to run. Run quanta from

/opt/kde3/bin/quanta

No menu entries would be created for quanta, like it happened in earlier versions. You have to manually create shortcut links and menu entries. On kde its easy. Right click the kde icon on bottom left and click "Edit Applications" and add the menu entry in the relevant section.

Also note that the appearance of quanta might look slightly different from your kde desktop, like the fonts , mouse behaviour etc. To fix this, simply edit the following file

~/.kde3/share/config/kdeglobals

Fill it with values from the kde 4 kdeglobals file which is located at

~/.kde/share/config/kdeglobals

Copy the font settings, mouse settings etc.

Then restart quanta and it should look like the other kde applications.
Happy web development.