In the past few days, the openSUSE KDE team has been working hard, following the footsteps of the nice work done by the Kubuntu and Arch Linux communities, to provide Qt5 packages for the distribution. In fact, work was already done in the past, but the packages were not coinstallable with the existing Qt4 installation.

Thanks to a renewed effort, the OBS holds now Qt5 packages that won't overwrite the existing Qt4 install: they currently live in the KDE:Qt51 repository (Factory and openSUSE 12.3) and they have been submitted to Factory itself, with the plan of having a full set of Qt5 packages for the next version of the distribution. PyQt5 was also packaged, for those who are interested in using Python with Qt.

These packages are deemed as stable and usable without issues (although, not being part of the distribution, not supported): if you spot a problem in packaging, file a bug to Novell's Bugzilla.

Up to this point we have talked about stable releases. But as KF5 depends on the yet-unreleased Qt 5.2,  new repositories were created:

• KDE:Qt5, which hosts snapshots off the current Qt tree (5.2);

• KDE:Frameworks, which contains snapshots of the current state of KF5.

In particular KF5 is installed to /opt/kf5, ensuring that it won't overwrite your current install. Bear in mind that these packages are absolutely not meant for end users (we're talking pre-alpha here!), but only for people who want to help developing KF5. For those daring enough, there is even a kf5-session package to start a whole KF5 + frameworks workspace session.

Credit where it's due: the packaging work is mostly the effort of Hrvoje "shumski" Senjan and Raymond "tittiatcoke" Wooninck, the two major KDE packaging powerhouses in the team. ;)

Happy hacking!