Compiling the KDE4 from the SVN under Kubuntu Intrepid/Hardy

Since I critisized Kubuntu Intrepid Ibex so much, I decided it was time, to show something instead of just telling people how cool is the SVN and how much the Kubuntu packages suck.

First things first:
- SVN means in english: current development snapshot, it may not work at all, and it may break stuff, but in most cases it works just fine, so use it at your own risk
- Compiling the whole thing takes time, on my machine it takes up to 12 or more hours, so it is best to set it up to compile at night ;)
- You need a lot of free space in your home directory to begin with, in my case : 7,5 GB for the sources+built files and 2GB for the compiled binaries, so you would tipically need at least 10GB
- by default qt-copy(qt with patches) installs in ~/qt and kde installs in ~/kde so don't worry, you can compile a broken KDE, but you can't break your system, kdesvn-build itself does not require root, and will leave your base system intact

For compiling the SVN I use kdesvn-build, a script that automaticly downloads and compiles the KDE sources, it's easy to use and very flexible, so there is no real reason not to use it.

The first step is to ensure that the dependencies of KDE4 are met, there are a lot of dev packagees that are needed, but this needs to be done only once.

Kubuntu hardy users need to enable the intrepid backports repository because there are packagees which are needed from that repository, ex: cmake.


I've got a really long list of packages that are required by kde from: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/KDE4/Kubuntu_and_Debian

sudo aptitude install build-essential xorg-dev cdbs debhelper cmake  \
kdesdk-scripts subversion ssh xserver-xephyr doxygen graphviz libqt4-dev \
dbus-x11 libdbus-1-dev libstreamanalyzer-dev libstrigiqtdbusclient-dev \ libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev shared-mime-info libgif-dev libpcre3-dev \
libclucene0ldbl libclucene-dev libjpeg62-dev libkrb5-dev libsm-dev\
libssl-dev libbz2-dev \
libpcre3-dev libxml2-utils libpcre3-dev libopenexr-dev libjasper-dev \
libenchant-dev libavahi-common-dev libaspell-dev libasound2-dev libboost-dev \
libgpgme11-dev libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libxine-dev libqimageblitz-dev \
libsmbclient-dev libxkbfile-dev libxcb1-dev libxklavier12-dev libxdamage-dev \
libxcomposite-dev libbluetooth-dev libusb-dev libcaptury-dev \
network-manager-dev libsmbclient-dev libsensors-dev \
libpam0g-dev libnm-util-dev libusb-dev libcfitsio3-dev libnova-dev \
libeigen-dev libopenbabel-dev libfacile-ocaml-dev libboost-python-dev \
libqca2-dev libqca2-dev libqca2-dev libsvn-dev libsvncpp-dev \
libcommoncpp2-dev libidn11 libidn11-dev libxtst-dev librdf-dev xsltproc \
libxrender-dev libfontconfig1-dev libpci-dev libxss-dev libxft-dev

These almost covered all needed packagees except for a few others:

sudo apt-get install libphonon-dev libical-dev libsasl2-dev libldap2-dev

On hardy libical and libical-dev is old, you need to manually grab the new versions:
First you go to http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libical0 and http://packages.ubuntu.com/intrepid/libical-dev , download the debs for your architecture, and install them.

Another missing package was alsa-lib, which I prefered to compile from source, because it is simply fast and easy to do so :)

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
wget ftp://ftp.alsa-project.org/pub/lib/alsa-lib-1.0.18.tar.bz2
tar xvf alsa-lib-1.0.18.tar.bz2
cd alsa-lib-1.0.18
./configure
make
sudo make install

The howto is posted here: http://techbase.kde.org/Getting_Started/Build/kdesvn-build

..next step is to download the kdesvn-build script, and run it:

mkdir -p ~/kdesvn
cd ~/kdesvn
svn cat svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/scripts/kdesvn-build > kdesvn-build
svn cat svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdesdk/scripts/kdesvn-buildrc-sample > ~/.kdesvn-buildrc
chmod +x kdesvn-build
./kdesvn-build

After the build is done, we need to tell our display(login) manager where to find our newly compiled KDE:

kdesudo kate /usr/share/xsessions/kde4-svn.desktop

Here is a template of what this file should contain, you must replace 'username' with your respective unix username:

[Desktop Entry]                                                                              
Encoding=UTF-8                                                                               
Type=XSession                                                                                
Exec=/home/username/kde/bin/startkde                                                                       
TryExec=/home/username/kde/bin/startkde                                                                    
Name=KDE4 SVN                                                                                                                                                                       
Comment=The K Desktop Environment. A powerful Open Source graphical desktop environment

After this is done, save the file, and reboot the system, and you can log in to your fresh KDE4, and every time you want to update it, all you need to do is run the kdesvn-build script again and sit back, enjoy.