As some of you may have heard, KDE4 is going to be a major upgrade for the K Desktop Environment. They plan on releasing libraries to allow their applications to run on OSX’s aqua, X11, and win32. Besides those few major upgrades, there has been much work on improving the UI and graphical elements of the system. Today, I will show you how to setup a KDE4 developer snapshot for OSX. This will allow you to run all of the KDE applications without any X server. (Beware: this is a snapshot, so there *is going to be* bugs).
The first thing you need to do for this kickass setup is to make sure you have room on your harddrive. I downloaded the ‘everything’ package which was 1.96gb. (There are alternate packages though, listed below). To get these packages, you’ll need a bittorrent client, which I’m not going to go into how to use, then you’ll need to grab the torrent files. You can choose between the following torrent packages:
- Everything: #1 #2
- Qt: #1 #2
- kdesupport: #1 #2
- kdelibs: #1 #2
- kdepimlibs: #1 #2
- kdebase: #1 #2
- kdeedu: #1 #2
- kdegames: #1 #2
- kdenetwork: #1 #2
- kdepim: #1 #2
- koffice: #1 #2
Note: All links labeled #1 are from the official mirror which is linked to at the bottom of this post. All links labeled #2 are my own personal mirror. Also, these files are only for OSX 10.4
Also, as quoted from the official page:
You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs and kdebase are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)
Once you have downloaded these packages, installation is a breeze. It’s just like installing any other OSX application. Double click on the dpkg, then click on one of the mpkg files provided inside the Finder window.
From here, just continue installing the files until you have everything you want. They will be stored in /opt/kde4. (It’s a Fink distribution). According to the official snapshot page, you need to launch these applications from a terminal window. Now, I did not need to do this, but I do not doubt the knowledge of the developers. (My shell setup is *way* modified compared to the default OSX release.) So to take care of these few issues, you need to run the following in a terminal window:
export PATH=”/opt/kde4/bin:/opt/kde4-deps/bin:/opt/qt4/bin:$PATH”
eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`
As I said, according to the main page for these files, it says to try to launch them from the terminal. If launching them by double click does nothing, here is how you can start them:
/opt/kde4/bin/kwrite.app/Contents/MacOS/kwrite
These directions are based off the official ones which can be found here. I would just like to take this time to thank the KDE developers for what they are doing. They are really taking a stand to improve the desktop interface overall. This project really shows the strength open source can have if harnessed properly.
Note: I’m still a gnome guy.
Here are a few screenshots for you:
Kwrite:
Konqueror:
I still need to get a legal copy of Photoshop CS2 for this box though. If only it was cheaper…
