KDE 4 Diary

eremini · Apprentice Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 157

Well,
I've been compiling KDE 4 once a week for a while now and from this weekend I decided to start a "diary" that hopefully will be updated every week on how KDE 4 is shaping up. This is the first "entry"

2 September, 2006

Did svn update on qt-copy, kdelibs and kdebase and got buisy compiling. Doing so is really a breeze thanks to cmake. As suggested on KDE wiki I added this function log time ago to my bashrc
function cmakekde { cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kde \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $@ && make VERBOSE=1 && make install
}
So now I can compile every package with one command. I also unmasked the hard mask on dbus-0.9* (it works fine with kde 3 as well, after revdep-rebuild).
Everything was now compiled and it was time to start it up. So it wont interfere with my current kdm, I use startx to start it up. I did it long time ago, so I can't remember the details right now, but I just had to create a session file for kde4 and edit Xsession I think.
Upon start up I was greeted with the usual KDE wizard, no new options there for now. Then I remembered, how am I gonna take screen shots?! Could use imagemagick, but thats not cool

So i checked out a copy of kdegraphics. Another dilemma: I don't want all of it! After a minute of thinking, I looked in CMakeLists.txt. Ah now we're talking! Commented out all the folder includes except ksnapshot. Run the magic function, all good and working. So here's the first one:
http://tvu.org.ru/kde4/snapshot1.png

Now let's see what Konqueror looks like:
http://tvu.org.ru/kde4/snapshot2.png

Exiting Konqueror I got this:
http://tvu.org.ru/kde4/snapshot3.png

Seems kinit still has some problems...
What I really liked is the new proggy KAppFinder. It finds non-kde apps and creates menu entries for them:
http://tvu.org.ru/kde4/snapshot4.png

Next I wanted to see what I can configure. Turns out nothing

Screen shot is self explanatory:

http://tvu.org.ru/kde4/snapshot5.png

Of course you'll be interested in Konsole:

http://tvu.org.ru/kde4/snapshot7.png

There was another new app KMenuEditor I think, but it refused to start

Well thats it folks, see you next week.

mark_alec · Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 12:53 pm Post subject:

This would be well suited to a blog, and you could get yourself added to Planet Larry so that a greater audience can view your progress with KDE 4.
_________________
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eremini · Apprentice Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 157

hehe thanks, I thought so too, but wanted to make sure gentoo forum readers follow this as well, I'll move this to a blog from now on and just update this post with new links

stobbsm · Guru Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 452

so far, kde4 looks to be the same as kde 3.5.....

Can't wait for Plasma to be integrated!
_________________
Sysadmin of Ubuntu systems and servers....
Although my own server is gentoo....

cheater1034 · Veteran Joined: 09 Sep 2004 Posts: 1558

stobbsm · Guru Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 452

what's the advantage of qt4 over qt3?
_________________
Sysadmin of Ubuntu systems and servers....
Although my own server is gentoo....

abhay · Apprentice Joined: 30 Jul 2005 Posts: 161

Tom_ · Guru Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 444 Location: France

This thread is a great idea! Thank you a lot.

cheater1034 · Veteran Joined: 09 Sep 2004 Posts: 1558

irondog · Posted: Sat Sep 02, 2006 9:30 pm Post subject:

Don't forget that Qt gives you a platform independent C++ API to create not only user interface's: There are tons of classes for things like networking, threading, XML handling, storage etc. The result is that KDELIBS will be made platform independent as much as possible as well. Maybe KDE will never run on Windows, but I'll bet I'm using Kopete and other nice KDE apps on Windows in about a year.

Platform independent means for Qt, that you can develop in Qt (C++) and deploy native applications for Windows, Linux X11, Linux FB (Qtopia) and MacOSX without porting. I've been using Qt for Windows, Qtopia and Qt-x11 side by side for some time now and I really love the API and the Tools like Designer and Assistant. Everything is documented so you can find out about all possibilities quickly. The Assistant tool helps you browsing the documentation during development. The version shipped with 4.2, which has find-as-you-type auto completion, is a pleasure to work with.

Also the thing called Signals and Slots, which is the main technology of Qt, has been improved much over Qt3. It's completely thread safe now, which meas you can emit signals from any thread, not only from within the event-loop. So, if you want to pass-around data among thread's safely, you can simply use the Signals and Slot's now.

For KDE Qt4 means that much, very much code has to be changed to make things work again. Qt4 is different (I'm not sure how different, because I've rarely used Qt3 as a programmer) and KDE is BIG!. The next problem is that those KDE devs want to do all their wish-list changes at the very same time as the porting work. This makes sense for most of the work, but It never makes it easier.
_________________
Alle dingen moeten onzin zijn.

irondog · Posted: Sun Sep 10, 2006 6:59 am Post subject:

Qt-4.2-RC1 is in portage. KDE4 can be built without qt-copy now.
_________________
Alle dingen moeten onzin zijn.

ArneBab · Posted: Sun Sep 10, 2006 10:07 am Post subject:

Would it be possible to write an ebuild for KDE4 to be able to test it cleanly?

Wishes,
Arne
_________________
Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

pkgcore: So fast that it feels unreal - by doing only what is needed.

eremini · Apprentice Joined: 27 May 2005 Posts: 157

If anyone is willing to help me with writing one.

ArneBab · Posted: Sun Sep 10, 2006 12:08 pm Post subject:

How can we help you?
_________________
Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

pkgcore: So fast that it feels unreal - by doing only what is needed.

ArneBab · Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2006 7:42 pm Post subject:

Any News?
_________________
Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

pkgcore: So fast that it feels unreal - by doing only what is needed.

Treborius · Guru Joined: 18 Oct 2005 Posts: 585 Location: Berlin

ArneBab · Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 10:32 am Post subject:

Anything new about providing an ebuild to facilitate testing?
_________________
Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it. - Arne Babenhauserheide ( http://draketo.de )

pkgcore: So fast that it feels unreal - by doing only what is needed.

Zephyrus · Apprentice Joined: 01 Sep 2004 Posts: 204

This is what I did, I hope someone could find it useful.
----------------- README ------------------
Description: This overlay includes the ebuilds needed to build a full, monolithic, version of the KDE 4.

%
PERSONAL NOTES

First of all, i would like to say to anglophone people that I'm sorry for all the English errors i put in this overlay

NOTE: I'm not responsible for any damage these ebuilds can do to your computer.

I wrote almost all of the ebuilds and they are somewhat based on their stable counterpart, in particular in their use/dependencies sections.
I also wrote an eclass which contains some useful functions to configure, compile and install the kde module, and included in this overlay
there's also a modified version of the subversion eclass.
The net-im/telepathy-gabble is a slightly modified version of the same ebuild found in the voip overlay.

Rember always to _NOT_ sync too often with the SVN.

Due to the highly unstable nature of KDE4 (as of 09/2006), if you only want to give a brief look at the new KDE, i suggest to build only the basic modules, which are
kdelibs, kdepimlib, kdebase.
As suggested in the kde wiki, it's always better to create a new user to test development version of kde 4.
Another thing to do, is , in my opinion, to enable the collision-protect portage system, via the FEATURES environment variable (see make.conf.example).
By activating this feature you will be warned if a package is trying to overwrite a file that it does not own.
A good source of information is http://developer.kde.org/build/trunk.html and obviously bugs.kde.org and kde-devel mailing list.
If you find a bug or any other problem in this overlay (because there are certainly some...), tell me

%
THE OVERLAY

* kde-cmake.eclass

This eclass provide the basic code used to configure, compile and install all the kde ebuilds, using
Cmake.
A general problem of this ebuilds is that they want to modify some cmake files installed by kdelibs on the live filesystem (to update them?)
and this obviously give a sandbox error. As a temporary solution i added an addpredict to the kde 4.0 install directory.
Some lines of code are take from the kde wiki - See the eclass file for all the details.

* subversion.eclass

This is simply the gentoo standard subversion eclass to which I simply added a somewhat dirty hack
which let you use this eclass even if you are/want to be offline.
To activate this feature, simply define the ESVN_SERVER variable to "offline" ( i.e. ESVN_SERVER="offline" ).
This is useful if you are playing with the ebuilds and you don't want to load the kde svn server with
useless connections.

* cmake-utils.eclass

This is an eclass which provide some useful functions for building cmake-based software with portage.
The cmake_with function is based on enable_extensioni_with from confutils.eclass

* x11-libs/qt-4.99.99

The qt ebuild provided in this overlay it's the gentoo portage qt-4.2.1-r1 ebuild modified to fetch
qt-copy from the svn ebuild. After it has fetched the sources, it also tries to run the apply-patches script
(as suggested in the kde wiki).
Sometimes this script fails and the user need to answer to some questions from the script.
Usually if a patch fails, i continue with the patching process and if a patch is already applied i don't revert it.

* x11-libs-qt-4.2.1-r1

This is the gentoo portage qt-4.2.1-r1 ebuild modified with patches from the qt-copy svn enabled by default.
Enabling use flags "vanilla" will build skip the patching process.

* app-crypt/qca-2.99.99

This ebuild builds the qca-2 library, needed by kdenetwork, from the svn code retrieved from the kde svn server.
It supports slotting with qca-1. The slotting mechanism is based on the qca-2.0_beta2 ebuild from the sunrise overlay.

* media-libs/taglib-1.4.99

This ebuild builds the taglib library, needed to compile kdemultimedia (with use flag taglib on),
from the svn code retrieved from the kde svn server.

* net-libs/telepathy-qt

This ebuild builds libtelepathy with qt4 bindings.It's needed by kdenetwork to compile kopete with telepathy plugin.

* net-voip/tapioca-qt

This ebuild builds libtapioca with qt4 bindings.It's needed by kdenetwork to compile kopete with telepathy plugin.i

* sci-libs/indilib-0.4

This library is needed to build kstars with telescope device support.

* lib-ml/facile-1.1

This library is needed by kalzium equation solver.

* kde-base/kdelibs-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdelibs package.

* kde-base/kdepimlibs-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdepimlibs package.

* kde-base/kdebase-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdebase package.
It tries to access /var/run/xdmctl, generating a sandbox violation error.
As a temporary workaround i added an "addpredict /var/run/xdmctl".

* kde-base/kdeaddons-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdeaddons package.

* kde-base/kdeadmin-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdeadmin package.

* kde-base/kdeartwork-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdeartwork package.

* kde-base/kdeedu-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdeedu package.

* kde-base/kdegames-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdegames package.

* kde-base/kdegraphics-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdegames package.

* kde-base/kdemultimedia-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdemultimedia package.

* kde-base/kdenetwork-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdepim package.
It requires >=qca-2.0. Included in this overlay, there's a qca-2.99.99 (svn version) ebuild
with slotting support.
To build telepathy (decibel use flag) support i also added to the overlay: tapioca-qt,
telepathy-qt.

* kde-base/kdepim-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdepim package.

* kde-base/kdesdk-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdesdk package.

* kde-base/kdetoys-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdetoys package.

* kde-base/kdeutils-3.99.99

This ebuild builds the kde 4 svn trunk version of the kdeutils package.

%
DEBUGGING THE EBUILDS

Well, there isn't much to say, these are simply ebuilds and all the standard things apply here

However there are a few CMake relate thing to remember:
1)Give a look at the CMake man page and its website.
2)To see cmake variables, cd (after the unpacking stage),
into /var/tmp/portage/${PN}-{PV}/work/${PN}-{PV}/ and then
type "ccmake ../${PN}_build". You will be greeted with a simple and intuitive
ncurse GUI that will show Cmake variables (configure switch, include dirs etc...).

Rember to export ESVN_SERVER="offline" if you are playing with the ebuilds.
As i already wrote, this will avoid making useless connections to the SVN server.

%
SESSION ENTRY
(Note: now it should be automatically handled by the kdebase ebuild, but I leave the howto just in case)

To add kde-4.0 to kdm, put a file with the following code in the directory
defined by the SessionsDirs entry in /kde/${KDE_KDM_VER}/share/config/kdm/kdmrc.
Usually, or at least on my system, it's "SessionsDirs=/usr/share/xsessions"

brot · Guru Joined: 06 Apr 2004 Posts: 322

Zephyrus, thank you for your work

After some sleep, and afterwards some school i will test these. So we will speak again in aprox 13 hours

ArneBab · Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 8:08 am Post subject:

You'll also have to unmask in /etc/portage/package.unmask

Zephyrus · Apprentice Joined: 01 Sep 2004 Posts: 204

gelbasack · n00b Joined: 11 Mar 2004 Posts: 19 Location: Austria

Worked fine for me.

Two little problems:
the filesize of the qt ebuild was too large

Logging in onto KDE4 didn't work because ksmserver could not be started. Running KDE4-applications from a KDE3-environment seems to work (more or less stable

)

batistuta · Veteran Joined: 29 Jul 2005 Posts: 1384 Location: Aachen

Do you guys know what is supposed to be available in the Technical preview supposly to come end of this month? Is the TP on time? Most importantly, I'd like to know when we could see some screenshots of plasma

Zephyrus · Apprentice Joined: 01 Sep 2004 Posts: 204

ArneBab · Posted: Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:47 am Post subject: