KDE SC 4.4 was released few days back and it came with lots of improvement and some interesting new features including the much talked about and much anticipated - introduction of ‘Tabs’ (similiar to what we have on every modern day browsers) in to mainstream desktop window manager. Recently, the Kubuntu guys added this smoking hot KDE SC release into their Beta PPA. In this guide, we will show you how to get it installed on your existing Ubuntu/Kubuntu 9.10 installation.

Please Note : This is a beta release, recommended only for early adopters, use at your own risk, YMMV

Step 1 : Fire up any text editor and open the “sources.list” file by typing in the following command at Konsole / Terminal. If you are in Ubuntu, replace “kate” in the command with “gedit”.

 sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list 

Step 2 : Append the following line and save the file.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/beta/ubuntu karmic main

Step 3 : Import and add the GPG key by executing the commands given below.

gpg –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv 2836CB0A8AC93F7A
gpg –export –armor 2836CB0A8AC93F7A | sudo apt-key add -

Step 4 :  Update your repository source list.

sudo apt-get update

Step 5 : Now, upgrade your system to KDE SC 4.4.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

Thats it. You are now ready to run KDE SC 4.4 on your system. Do tell us what you think about KDE SC 4.4.