Help! Wanna install KDE but how?

[Viro]

After re-reading your original post again, I think you're pretty much a newbie to UNIX and I'm guessing you probably won't find the information in my last post too helpful (source tar balls? dependencies? eh?). So I thought that I'd just help point you more in the right direction.

First thing you need to do is install XFree86. You already worked that out, just press 'y' and things should go as planned. But hey, with open source software who knows

Next you need to download the KDE source files. Get them from http://www.kde.org/download/. Just to be safe, download all of them.

Go to this page for information on the libraries that KDE3 needs. http://developer.kde.org/build/compile_kde3_2.html When you download the Qt libraries, make sure you download the X11 version and not the Mac OS X version. Also, you can safely disregard the bit about downloading autoconf and automake. OS X comes with those, so that's two less things to worry about. Ignore the bit about bunzip2 as well. OS X comes with it.

In the installation section, you need to set those variables in the file .profile in your users directory (e.g. /Users/viro). Here's a sample of what my .profile looks like.

QTDIR=/Developer/qt
PATH=$QTDIR/bin:/opt/local/bin:$PATH
DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$QTDIR/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH
export QTDIR PATH DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

Keep in mind, you need to set QTDIR, KDEDIR and DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (*not* LD_LIBRARY_PATH) to where you have or will install stuff to. Traditionally, this has been /usr/local. After editing your .profile, type the following command to update your paths without restarting your machine.

source .profile

Now set aside a good day to get all things compiled nicely. On my machine, KDE takes about a day and a half to compile. But since you have a G5, that should be much shorter. If all goes well and nothing untoward happens, you should have KDE up and running.

Looking at your comments about Linux and fink, you probably don't quite get why people just prefer to use fink. As someone who works on the UNIX commandline daily and writes code pretty much for a living, getting stuff like this to compile is just mind numbingly boring. But hey, you've got a fast machine and probably have way too much time, so good luck with all that. Post back if you need help.

[Hype.it]

Thanks.... Yes, a complete noob to Unix but not to Mac.
Now why couldn't you help me before?

i'm running 10.3.5 btw, dunno has anyone else experience problems after a OS update. I tried with Apple's X11 before, but it just died on it's ass once KDE was installed from fink's packages. I figure it's either fink or apple not sure which, but maybe you like to give info as to how i fix the apple x11 before i delete it's directories and install Xfree86 over it, well?

[Viro]

Well, in order to install KDE via fink you need to have the Apple's X11 SDK installed. This can be found on your XCode CD and it isn't installed by default with the other development tools. You might want to give that a check to make sure it is installed. To my knowledge, fink requires it to work correctly. Even so, you can install XFree86 alongside Apple's X11 without any bad side effects. That's unless the packages for XFree86 try to do something funny and install themselves in the wrong directories.

I haven't had any of my applications break once 10.3.5 is installed. But hey, I don't use KDE on my Mac. Other UNIX apps that make use of the X11 protocol haven't died either, so it could be a problem on your end.

As to posting those instructions before, well, they are going to get fairly complex, they are time consuming and frankly it's just too much effort just to get KDE running on OS X. Its much easier and better to just run Linux along side OS X by dual booting with Yellowdog Linux or Gentoo Linux, something I used to do when I was still transitioning from Linux to OS X.