This document was originally written around September 2001 and originally
published on Userlocal.com.
It is archived here in its original form (except that I've applied a bit of
HTML formatting) and won't be updated.
Installing KDE 2.2 from source on Slackware Linux 8.0 (quick guide)
I've had my eye on KDE 2.2 ever since it's release, but unfortunately binary packages for Slackware 8 are not currently available, so the only option would be to build and install from source. After thinking about it for a few days (it is a major download after all) I desided to go ahead with it instead of waiting for Slackware packages to be provided by someone else. I also desided to write this short guide for the bennefit of other people wanting to this as well.
I want to point out from the start that this is no in-depth explanation of all
the various compilation options and switches that can be applied to this
proccess, it is merely a description of the procedure I used to get it running
on my box. If you are a very inexperienced with building programs from source
or are affraid of messing up your existing (nicely configured) system, then I
suggest you wait for binary, pre-build packages to become available.
You should also know that during the cause of this document I deliberately
remove my previous version of KDE and all it's settings to start with a
completely clean slate, so if you do not want to do that then don't follow
these
instructions.
And remember: Always have an up-to-date backup of any existing files before
doing a major update such as this one - you have been warned!
I also assume a few things about you, dear reader. I assume that you are
familiar with the Slackware Linux package tools to remove and install
packages,
I assume you know basic UNIX/Linux commands such as 'cp' and
'rm' and that you
are comfortable working from a console (as opposed to X), and I also assume
that
you are comfortable editing system configuration files and such.
This is not a difficult procedure, but I don't explain basic tasks in detail.
I suggest you read through the entire text at least once before you begin to
ensure that you are capable of handling the tasks I present.
Are you still here? Good, then let's get started.
Before we begin I'd like to tell you a few things: I assume that you already
have a copy of all the KDE 2.2 source packages(in bzip2 format) downloaded to
a directory called KDE2.2 that is located in your homedir (~/KDE2.2/).
There are a few other files that you will need in addition to the KDE sources
(as KDE 2.2 depends on them and they don't come with a default Slackware
install) - the files you need in addition to KDE are these (I've listed
download locations for your convenience):
libxml2-2.4.3.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/stable/sources/libxml/libxml2-2.4.3.tar.gz
pcre-3.5.tar.bz2
ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre-3.5.tar.bz2
audiofile-0.2.2.tar.gz
ftp://oss.sgi.com/projects/audiofile/download/audiofile-0.2.2.tar.gz
SDL-1.2.2.tar.gz
http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.2.tar.gz
Not all of the above are strictly nessesary, but as I've said previously, this is a description of how I did it, and you will have to deside for your self whether or not you want to install them (they all provide nice extra features and I strongly recommend you install them - I'll go through the nessesary steps later). KDE 2.2 also depends on a few other libraries such as 'libssl' and 'qt' but for these (and other dependencies) Slackware 8 already comes with the required versions (make sure you have the OpenSSL, Lesstif and QT libraries from your Slackware CD installed as well as htdig - having the oggutils package installed is also be a good idea if you want support for the Ogg Vorbis sound format in KDE).
The first thing we want to do is to remove the version of KDE that came with Slackware 8 (KDE 2.1.1). When you do this you should _NOT_ be running KDE at the same time and I'd strongly recommend that you don't run X at all during this procedure. Drop to a normal console and do all the work from there.
The easiest way to remove KDE is by using either 'pkgtool' or
'removepkg'. The
packages you want to remove are (you'll need to be root to remove packages):
kadmin, kdebase, kdegames, kdelibs, kdepim, kdesdk, kdetoys, kdeutils,
kdevelop, kdoc, kgraphic, kmedia, knetwork, koffice, ksupport,
kdi-ca, kdi-cs, kdi-da, kdi-de, kdi-el, kdi-eo, kdi-es, kdi-et,
kdi-fi, kdi-fr, kdi-he, kdi-hu, kdi-is, kdi-it, kdi-ja, kdi-ko, kdi-lt,
kdi-nl, kdi-no, kdi-nony, kdi-pl, kdi-pt, kdi-ptbr, kdi-ro, kdi-ru, kdi-sk,
kdi-sl, kdi-sr, kdi-sv, kdi-tr, kdi-uk, kdi-zhcn, kdi-zhtw
You probably don't have all these packages installed (especially not all the
language 'kdi-*' packages), but remove the ones from the list that you do
have.
You should also notice that I remove koffice but I don't reinstall it later,
that's simply becourse it is not a part of the official KDE 2.2 distribution.
If
you need koffice then I suggest you get the latest version from
http://www.koffice.org/ and follow the installation instructions on that site,
or you could try reinstalling koffice from your Slackware 8 CD after you've
got
KDE 2.2 running - it might work, but I haven't tried that.
Now KDE 2.1.1 is almost out of the way, we just need to remove all the
personal
configuration files that it drops in your homedir.
Log in to the console as your normal user and delete the files
'.kderc' and
'.kxmlrpcd'. The '.kde' dir will also have to go as well as the
'Desktop' dir
(warning: this erases any KDE configurations you've made). You should actually
be able to keep the 'Desktop' directory, but to make things as smooth as
possible I removed everything.
Now, we'll install the various extra libraries that KDE 2.2
"require". These
are, as I've said before, not strictly required, but if you enjoy things like
sound-support, good regular expression support in JavaScript and the ability
to
use the XML based help system, then you'll be glad you installed them. I
assume
you install the libraries and if you run into trouble later go back and
install
these and try again.
For the four packages libxml2-2.4.3.tar.gz, pcre-3.5.tar.bz2,
audiofile-0.2.2.tar.gz & SDL-1.2.2.tar.gz installation is simply a matter of
uncompressing the files (use 'tar zxf' for .gz files and 'tar
yxf' for .bz2 files) and then as a normal user running the command
./configure && make
in the newly created directory. Followed by
make install
as the root user.
I'll give you one example, the others are identical:
jesper@sleipner:~/KDE2.2$ tar zxf audiofile-0.2.2.tar.gz
jesper@sleipner:~/KDE2.2$ cd audiofile-0.2.2
jesper@sleipner:~/KDE2.2/audiofile-0.2.2$ ./configure && make
...
...at this point a lot of configuration and compilation info will scroll by...
...
jesper@sleipner:~/KDE2.2/audiofile-0.2.2$ su
Password:
root@sleipner:/home/jesper/KDE2.2/audiofile-0.2.2# make install
...
...at this point a lot of installation info will scroll by...
...
root@sleipner:/home/jesper/KDE2.2/audiofile-0.2.2# exit
If you follow this procedure for the four libraries and don't encounter any
errors then they should now all be installed in /usr/local/lib. Make sure that
the /usr/local/lib directory is present in the file
/etc/ld.so.conf - when
you've added it or verified it's existence, then run the command
'ldconfig' as
root. Running 'ldconfig' will update your systems database of shared library
locations so that the newly installed libs can be found by other applications
(KDE in our case).
You should also verify that the KDEDIR environment variable
is set from /etc/profile and that it is set in your current environment. A
line
like this should be in /etc/profile :
export KDEDIR=/opt/kde
also run that command from the commandline while loged in as your normal
user.
Now we get to the interresting part; installing KDE 2.2 itself. Actually this part is no more interresting than the previous one, it is in fact a lot duller since the steps required for every single package are virtually identical, I just felt that an air of enthusiasm should be present at this point ;)
The KDE packages can be installed in almost any order, but there are a few
rules
you must obey. Since many packages depend on other packages, a few of them
must
be installed in a specific order. According to the official KDE instructions
the
kdelibs package must be the first one installed, then packages can be
installed
in arbitrary order, but the kdeaddons package must be the very last one
installed. At least according to the KDE installation instructions. I found
while building the packages that there are apparently a few other dependencies
on package installation order, so I recommend the following installation order
for the least amount of trouble:
kdelibs
kdebase
kdoc
kdeutils
kdeadmin
kdenetwork
kdeartwork
kdegraphics
kdepim
kdegames
kdetoys
kdemultimedia
kde-i18n-da (or a different language package depending on your choice)
kdebindings
kdesdk
kdevelop
The procedure for installing each package is very similar, they all consist of
running ./configure with a few parameters followed by make and then
make install
as root in the directory created when you extract the source package with
'tar yxf'. Since you should have no problems if you follow the
package order given above, I'll just list the various configure options I used
for each package - I'll give a full example for the first one (kdelibs)
though.
I encourage you to run './configure --help' in each of the package directories
to see if there are options you would set differently from me - If you are in
doubt go with what I've used, that should work for you as well.
Before you actually start compiling you should know one more thing; all kde libraries go in /opt/kde/lib, so that line must also be present in the /etc/ld.so.conf file, and every time a package installs a library you must run ldconfig as root before proceeding - I recommend that you just run ldconfig after you have run 'make install' for every package since it will do no harm if no libraries were installed, but it is strictly nessesary if libs were installed.
kdelibs (full example):
~/KDE2.2 $ tar yxf kdelibs-2.2.tar.bz2
~/KDE2.2 $ cd kdelibs-2.2
~/KDE2.2/kdelibs-2.2 $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/kde --with-distribution
~/KDE2.2/kdelibs-2.2 $ make
~/KDE2.2/kdelibs-2.2 $ su
~/KDE2.2/kdelibs-2.2 # make install
~/KDE2.2/kdelibs-2.2 # ldconfig
~/KDE2.2/kdelibs-2.2 # exit
~/KDE2.2/kdelibs-2.2 $ cd ..
~/KDE2.2 $
kdebase (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde --with-x --with-shadow
kdoc (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdeutils (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdeadmin (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdenetwork (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdeartwork (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdegraphics (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdepim (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdegames (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdetoys (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdemultimedia (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde --with-x --enable-gtk --with-tcltk --enable-motif --enable-slang --enable-ncurses
note: if the above configure line gives you problems becourse you don't have
gtk,
tcl/tk, motif (or lesstif), slang or ncurses installed, then just delete the
config.cache file and re-run ./configure without the --enable option for the
toolkit you are missing.
kde-i18n-da (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdebindings (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
note: if you have the Java development kit from Sun Microsystems installed and
want to use the Java bindings, you might need to add
--with-java=/path/to/your/jdk-dir to the configure line.
kdesdk (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
kdevelop (just configure line):
./configure --prefix=/opt/kde
Most people will probably not need the kdebindings, kdesdk and kdevelop packages, as the contain things mostly used by software developers. The kdebindings package contains KDE bindings to different programming languages, so if you need a KDE program written in a different language than C++ you may need that package even if you don't plan to do any software development yourself.
If everything has gone well up to this point you should actually be able to
run the new KDE, but it will not start by default when you type startx, and
KDE will not be an option in xwmconfig. This is easily fixed, just grab the
file xinitrc.kde from your kdebase.tgz package from the Slackware 8 CD-ROM
and copy it to your harddrive, then you'll be able to use xwmconfig as
usually to select KDE as your default desktop.
The xinitrc.kde file is located in the kdebase.tgz package in the following
dir: etc/X11/xinit/ and should be copied to the same location on your
harddrive. You can use a program like 'mc' to browse the content of a .tgz
package and extract just a single file - you can also use tar directly like
this:
( cd / ; tar zxf /cdrom/slakware/kde1/kdebase.tgz etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.kde )
That should be it, you should now be able to run KDE2.2 - enjoy!
I hope you have found this document usefull. Any comments you might have are very welcome :-)
