Having fought all the alligators, I at last was able to refocus on my original goal of draining the swamp. Specifically, this was all aimed at getting KDE 2.0 running. Okay, I got a little carried away in the preliminaries, but I had fun doing it, and I learned a lot about configuring XFree86. It was worth the time.

Building the new KDE wasn't especially hard, but it has a lot of steps. The first thing I had to do was to get the KDE snapshots, which came from ftp://ftp.kde.org/kde/snapshots/current/. As with XFree86, I did this before the mirrors had replicated the code, but you could improve your download speed and reduce the load on the KDE team's server by checking the mirrors first. I have also learned, after doing all of this manually, that someone has just released a set of RPMs for Caldera eDesktop 2.4. These can be found at ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/unstable/distribution/. I have not tried the RPMs (for one thing, I don't have eDesktop 2.4 yet) but they are another option if appropriate to your system.

You'll need to install the new QT 2.1 libraries from Trolltech first. Since I'm not using QT to develop commercial software, I downloaded the free version (licensed under the QPL) from Trolltech's Web site and installed it according to their directions (after first backing up what I had, which was 1.44). This is the step where you break compatibility with KDE 1.x, so be very careful to make a backup of QT! I untarred the new QT source under /usr/lib and thus ended up with it in /usr/lib/qt-2.1.0. Before running the build in that directory, you have to export QTDIR=/usr/lib/qt-2.1.0 or the configure will fail. Then you run ./configure -gif inside that directory, followed by the usual make step. After everything is done, you need to add the directory to /etc/ld.so.conf and then run ldconfig as root.

Next, you're ready to build KDE 2 itself. I picked /opt/kde2 as my destination directory for the install, but you can use any directory you like as long as you first export KDEDIR=xxxxx, where xxxxx is the directory of choice (no trailing slash). Don't use your KDE 1 directory.

KDE's source snapshots come with a file called compile_script, which you would think does a correct and complete build. It doesn't, or at least it never has for me. Fortunately, you can edit the script to make it work correctly. Unfortunately, it's not just a single change--you actually have to modify it several times during the process.

Start by adding "kde-qt-addon " (note trailing blank space!) at the beginning of the list of strings on the PACKAGES=.... line. You're now ready to run the script. Each time you run the script, you need to have your KDE 2 destination directory (not the file download directory) as the current working directory for your shell. If you don't do this, you will end up with an enormous mess! Run the script and pass its own directory to it as a parameter so it knows where to find the source code. For example, if you downloaded the .bz2 files to /download/newkde and you are installing to /opt/kde2, then the script command looks like this:

sh /download/newkde/compile_script /download/newkde

(Note the spaces after "sh" and after "compile_script".)

It will crunch along for anywhere from several minutes to an hour or more, depending on the speed and loading of your machine. Then, if you are as fortunate as me, it will die. When it does, look in your /opt/kde2 directory (or wherever you are installing) and see which was the last package it was working on. This can also be discerned from the "leaving directory ....." messages output at the end of the failed "make" sequence. Make that directory current, then run these two commands:

make
make install

This should succeed. What you've just done is to resume the original make at the point where it failed. Note that I'm assuming here that you suffer from the same errors I did--there just seems to be something wrong (memory leak or stack overflow, perhaps?) in the GNU development tools, but make is very smart about resuming a failed build.

If make install works successfully, then do a cd .. to get back to the main installation directory. This step is crucial!

Now go back and edit the compile_script again, and delete from the PACKAGES=.... line all of the packages which have been successfully built so far, including the one where you just intervened manually.

Repeat this process as many times as needed, until you have a full KDE 2 build. It took me about five hours to get through the whole thing, and I finished (finally!) at 4:30 a.m. The "kdemultimedia" package never would build for me, but it's nonessential so I finally just skipped it. There are also a couple of packages that aren't in the compile_script; I haven't gotten around to building these yet.

Next: Step 4: Testing the Installation »