If anybody cares, these are my views on kde-4.2.0. Note that I have no use for a graphical mail client, so I don't use kmail (anyway, who needs mySQL for a desktop ? - it's a runtime requirement for akonadi).
1. fixes not related to 4.2.0 I'd had trouble with okular occupying all of my screen. Turns out 4.1.3 had written a width of 1601 and a height of 1201 into .kde4/share/config/okularrc - I think earlier versions also did that, but I was using .kde/ in those days. That's for a 1600x1200 physical screen. Removing that file fixed the problem, so 4.2.0 is ok. 2. thoughts on cmake For people who build from source on linux, this continues to be horrible. At best you will get meaningful error messages, at worst it picks up variable names which are semi-meaningful and not defined: SOPRANO_LIBRARIES (ADVANCED) : yes, I didn't install Soprano, but which part, and in particular what does advanced mean here ? It will also hurt your eyes with all of the capitalization, particularly if you have to grep after it fails. 3. akonadi As suggested earlier, as far as Boost is concerned this only looks for static libraries. I have Boost, but none of the static libs - it seemed quite happy to build like that, but maybe it's broken. I had similar cmake reports (Boost, but no libs) from kdelibs, kdebase-workspace, and kdepimlibs. 4. QTUITOOLS_LIBRARY (ADVANCED) : Qt builds libQtUiTools as a static library. Only people who mistrust static libs in their build will encounter this. I've been pointed to a patch for Qt, but I haven't built a system with it. Noted because if you have to upgrade Qt you'll need to rebuild kdelibs and kdebase-workspace. I suppose there is a possibility that they only get pulled in if akonadi is present. 5. kdebindings built without any problems (probably only Python bindings). It makes no attempt to determine if runtime dependencies are met - see previous post on system-config-printer (which needs a lot of gnome). 6. added dependencies Kdepimlibs now requires libical as well as gpgme, my previous notes suggest libical is a new requirement. Kdegraphics requires the notorious SOPRANO_LIBRARIES (ADVANCED) for gwenview, but only because I've built libexiv2. I didn't like gwenview when I tried it in the past, so I edited CMakeLists.txt to do without it (looks as if gwenview is not built if libexiv2 is not present). 7. Further thoughts Increasingly, I get the impression that kde4 is likely to fail to build unless everything possible is present (no --disable-foo options in cmake to build with reduced functionality). I'm also disturbed that QImageBlitz appears not to be officially released as a tarball - I grabbed 0.5, which has apparently been tagged in kde svn, from an Arch mirror. Because I'm intending to give up gdm, I tried kdm. It worked to an extent - create /etc/shells with bash listed ; note that my choice of UID for fcron causes it to be listed among the users ; after logging in to the default session I got a blank text screen with two inverse '?' [ presumably, invalid UTF-8 ] until xorg started ; desktop ok but not to my taste ; couldn't log out - used Ctrl-Alt-Del. Oh well, runlevel 3 for me in future. Got back to the login screen (I think I had to restart kdm). Noticed I could change the session type, selected icewm which is what I normally use. This was nasty, .Xresources was ignored (although it seemed to be used for the default session) so urxvt was tiny and black on white. Logout took me out of X, but gave me a text screen with 2 rows of mostly inverse '?' at the top. I was lost, used MagicSysRQ to sync, umount, reboot. For many people, it will probably be ok with a little tweaking. For myself, I'll probably scale back to kdebase (konqueror4 is a lot nicer for font usage than 3, but still as slow as a dog), kdegraphics (okular works ok, although sometimes it produces very thin fonts that are hard to read), kdemultimedia (dragon, which is usable, and kmix - the only graphical mixer I've found that works on icewm. ĸen previous threads on kde4: my thoughts on 4.1.0 http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-support/2008-September/064686.html Cliff McDiarmid's problems with kdeutils in 4.1.3 http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-support/2008-December/065048.html and http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-support/2008-December/065067.html on strigidaemon: http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-support/2008-December/065116.html on system-config-printer: http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-support/2009-February/065234.html -- das eine Mal als Tragödie, das andere Mal als Farce -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
