Monthly Archives: March 2015

Installing Kdenlive 0.9.10 on Linux Mint 17.1 (Rebecca)

In this post I’ll describe how to install Kdenlive 0.9.10 (or any later version) on Linux Mint 17.1 using the Kdenlive repositories.

When installing the default Kdenlive version from the standard Linux Mint 17.1 repositories I found the version was out of date at 0.9.8 instead of the current 0.9.10. I thought it would just be a matter of adding the required Kdenlive repositories to my software sources and the next update cycle would upgrade Kdenlive, but the default process didn’t work.

The problem is with the priority of the software sources. The Linux Mint repository is listed with a higher priority than the newly added Kdenlive repository. Thus, try as you might, Kdenlive 0.9.8 will always be preferred over newer versions in the Kdenlive repository. You can verify the priorities by running the following command:

apt-cache policy kdenlive

In the output you should see the Candidate version as 0.9.8 and see the priority of the Kdenlive repository listed as 500, while the priority of the default Linux Mint repository is listed at 700. Once you have fixed the priority and installed Kdenlive 0.9.10 the output of the command should look something like this:

kdenlive:
 Installed: 0.9.10-0ubuntu0~sunab~trusty1
 Candidate: 0.9.10-0ubuntu0~sunab~trusty1
 Version table:
 *** 0.9.10-0ubuntu0~sunab~trusty1 0
 800 http://ppa.launchpad.net/sunab/kdenlive-release/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages
 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
 0.9.8-1ubuntu2~ubuntu14.04~ppa1 0
 700 http://packages.linuxmint.com/ rebecca/import amd64 Packages
 0.9.6-5ubuntu1 0
 500 http://mirror.oscc.org.my/ubuntu/ trusty/universe amd64 Packages

To fix the priorities you need to add the relevant information into either official-extra-repositories.pref or official-package-repositories.pref located in the /etc/apt/preferences.d directory. Open your favourite editor and add the following lines (I used official-extra-repositories.pref):

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-sunab-kdenlive-release
Pin-Priority: 800

To update the changes you then need to run:

apt-get update

Now that you have overridden the default repository you will be able to install or upgrade Kdenlive to the latest version from the Kdenlive repository by using either:

apt-get install kdenlive
apt-get upgrade kdenlive

Compared to Kdenlive 0.9.8 on Linux Mint 17.1 the latest version 0.9.10 is a massive improvement. When I started 0.9.8 it kept on crashing during the start-up wizard and even if I made it past that point I couldn’t even add a clip to the project without a crash. As soon as I upgraded to 0.9.10 I was able to quickly get a video together and had no bugs during the simple editing process.

Hopefully the Linux Mint and Kdenlive teams will sort out the software sources priority problem and enable us to get the latest Kdenlive version installed without the above manual steps.