Blogospheric Refraction

I just heard a beauty Captain Obvious moment on the radio a moment ago.  I know I’m guilty of stating the bleeding obvious on occasion, but this is unbelievable.

In Brisbane (this show is also broadcast to Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide) there’s a late night talk show called “The Spoonman“.  I like listening to it, as there are often some interesting discussions and viewpoints being put forward.  Anyways… it seems one of the people behind the scenes was digging around on the computer system, and dug up, this sound byte.

I know some people lack a little bit in the common sense department, but damn… where has this reporter been in the last few thousand years?!

I’ve been a KDE user since installing SuSE Linux 5.3, and seeing KDE 1.0 in all its glory. I later tried Gnome 1.0/Enlightenment, when Red Hat 6.0 was released, and numerous other desktops, but I always found myself moving back to KDE. Prior to this, I had been using window managers like AfterStep, WindowMaker, FVWM and Red Hat’s FVWM95 clone, AnotherLevel.
The other day, I was looking around on the KDE news site, and noticed KDE 3.80.2 had been released for testing. This is a prerelease version of the upcomming KDE 4 desktop, intended for developers to take the desktop for a spin, port their applications to it, etc… Given my interest in the desktop, I figured I’d download a copy and take it for a spin.

The new KDE uses a different build system to previous releases. KDE 3.5 and earlier used GNU autotools, but not anymore. You’ll need cmake 2.4.3 or above to compile KDE 4. You’ll also need Qt4.2, and dbus, which means fun-and-games with masking, modifying ebuilds to disable some tests, and in general, lots of nasty hacks. Unless you know what you’re doing, I wouldn’t recommend anyone try it.

Anyway… after much fiddling, I managed to get it building. Already, I notice something new. The new build scripts actually show the build progress, as KDE builds. This is handy if you’re running on slow machines, and the first time I’ve seen such a feature in use. Here (right) is what the start of the build looks like (low resolution, full resolution).
I shall upload some pics of the desktop the moment I get kdebase installed, but so far, this is prooving very different to previous releases of KDE.