KDE4 User Review : better than expected !!!

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Wed, 26 Dec 2007 12:31:41 GMT | 1 comment

I have been waiting for KDE4 for a while already.... And now it has gotten much closer to the goal and it's time for a real survival test...

Due to my old computer slightly lacking horsepower, I recently switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu. tried Gnome for a little while but wasn't for me, really. Then I installed kubuntu-desktop and followed the quick steps shown on kubuntu.org about KDE4 rc2. Really easy install...

From KDE 3.5.8 I could already see many applications in the menu which had got duplicate for their KDE4 counterpart letting me try them from within my desktop. but on the early morning of December 26th, without knowing if it would work at all, I decided to give the already installed KDE4 a try. Without expecting much it shine onto my screen promptly.

Fired up, I am looking at what is to become the next best and most popular desktop on the planet. Let see what Santa-san has in store... read on for more details ...

Read more...

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Trying out KDE4

Posted by Mathieu Jobin Sat, 17 Feb 2007 05:35:30 GMT | no comments

So I wanted to have a sneak preview at KDE4 and also have the development environment ready in case I find some time to fool around.

So I compiled KDE on my gentoo system. I simply followed the various instruction found on the developer website. I created a kdefour user. Installed cmake and Qt 4.2.2 normally using gentoo portage system. and from kdelibs into the user home directory.

that's what my .bash_profile looks like

kdefour@krypton ~/usr/build $ cat ~/.bash_profile
# /etc/skel/.bash_profile

# This file is sourced by bash for login shells.  The following line
# runs your .bashrc and is recommended by the bash info pages.
[[ -f ~/.bashrc ]] && . ~/.bashrc
export YACC='byacc -d'
#export QTDIR=$HOME/usr/qt
export QTDIR=/usr
export KDEDIR=$HOME/usr/kde
export CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull
export PATH=$HOME/bin:$HOME/unsermake:$QTDIR/bin:$KDEDIR/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$KDEDIR/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
function cmakekde { cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$KDEDIR \
-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull $@ && make VERBOSE=1 && make install
}

kdefour@krypton ~/usr/build $

and I created myself a small rebuild script

kdefour@krypton ~/usr/build $ cat rebuild
#!/bin/sh

source ~/.bash_profile

modules="kdelibs kdepimlibs kdebase koffice kdegames"
modules="koffice kdeutils kdenetwork kdemultimedia kdepim"
build_dir="/home/kdefour/usr/build/"
src_dir="/home/kdefour/usr/src/"

for i in $modules
do
        echo $i
        #echo $build_dir$i
        #rm -fr $i
        mkdir -p $build_dir$i
        if [ -d $src_dir$i ]
        then
                (cd $src_dir$i; svn up)
        else
                svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/$i $src_dir$i
        fi
        cd $build_dir$i
        time cmakekde $src_dir$i
        if [ $? -ne 0 ]
        then
                cd -
                echo $?
                break
        fi
        cd -
done

kdefour@krypton ~/usr/build $

and here is a small screenshot for the curious

kde4 snapshot 1

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