Upgrading Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) to KDE 4.2

With KDE 4.2 officially released and in possession of quite a few positive reviews (unless I'm looking in the wrong places), I wanted to give it a shot but it hadn't been back-ported to Ubuntu 8.10 yet. I searched around and found that one can enable an experimental Ubuntu repository where one can install KDE 4.2 from.

Long story short, I ended up following this site on upgrading to 4.2. I ran the apt-get while I was away from my computer and when I returned, lo and behold, instead of finding a nice KDE 4.2 package install log I found an error with installing some packages. I did what anyone else would do - I didn't believe my eyes and re-ran the command hoping to brute force my way through this :) Here's what I saw:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
krita-data kword-data koshell kthesaurus kpresenter krita kugar kword ksysguardd kchart karbon compizconfig-backend-kconfig
kspread libpoppler-qt2 kplato libwv2-1c2 kexi libpqxx-2.6.9ldbl kpresenter-data
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
kde-window-manager kdebase-workspace-data libplasma3
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libplasma2
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libplasma3
The following packages will be upgraded:
kde-window-manager kdebase-workspace-data
2 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 73 not upgraded.
6 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B/10.0MB of archives.
After this operation, 12.3kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
(Reading database ... 252512 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace kde-window-manager 4:4.1.3-0ubuntu1~intrepid1 (using .../kde-window-manager_4%3a4.2.0-0ubuntu1~intrepid1~ppa7_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement kde-window-manager ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/kde-window-manager_4%3a4.2.0-0ubuntu1~intrepid1~ppa7_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/kde4/apps/kconf_update/plasma-add-shortcut-to-menu.upd', which is also in package kdebase-workspace-data
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/kde-window-manager_4%3a4.2.0-0ubuntu1~intrepid1~ppa7_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

After much searching and trying tools like synaptic and aptitude I went for the sniper rifle: dpkg. I removed the offending packages kde-window-manager and kdebase-workspace-data. Now my apt-get is running smoothly in the background. Let's hope it finished upgrading me to KDE 4.2 :)