Redhatter’s Web Blog

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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 7th, 2006 at 9:34 pm and is filed under Gentoo Development, Linux Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.