Building KDE 3.2

[sherington]

I've never done this before, so I thought I'd give it a go...

 

I downloaded the KDE 3.2 stable Konstruct, installed the dependencies I needed, and built KDE 3.2 from scratch. Some hours later the build completed without any errors, including all of the KDE packages and koffice and so on.

 

I then followed the instructions in the Konstruct README, specifically to do with setting QTDIR, KDEDIR, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and PATH to point to my newly created ~/kde3.2 directory.

 

I also changed the KDEHOME value to point to ~/.kde32test so that I could keep my old KDE 3.1 settings.

 

I then rebooted (Windows habits die hard).

 

Now, when I log in to my new KDE build I get the KDE 3.2 splash screen, it sticks at "Setting up interprocess communication" for a little while, then the splash screen flashes off and back on again and hangs at "Setting up interprocess communication" again. Meanwhile my desktop starts up and I can start applications and so on.

 

Clearly something is still wrong somewhere.

 

Does anybody have any hints? I don't know where to look for errors in log files etc???

 

Thanks.

[sherington]

If I set up "root" to use my new KDE 3.2 build, and log in as root, it all seems to work.

 

So now I'm guessing it's a privileges problem. But what could it be?

 

I can read/write to "/tmp" without any problems.

 

Any hints at all, please!?

 

[Peep]

i can't really help much, but i can confirm that i have the same issue. the splash screen hangs at interprocess communication. BUT i haven't noticed any loss of functionality and everything seems to be working fine, so i wasn't too worried. have you noticed anything not working? i had just been clicking on the splash screen and it goes away, but if this is an underlying issue, i suppose we should figure it out. :P if anyone has any ideas, i'd be appreciative too.

[sherington]

Well, at first it seemed like stuff was indeed working despite the apparent dcop problem.

 

However, a short while later when I rebooted my machine I got to the logon screen and no matter what I tried (no matter which user I tried) KDE just refused to start and kept returning me back to the logon screen.

 

The reason for my reboot was that something was causing repeated (seemed to be in a tight loop) core dumps to be generated and completely filled up the 4Gb on my "/" partition.

 

Once I'd deleted all of the core dumps, I could no longer start KDE as described just above.

 

It also seems that I can no longer reliably switch back to KDE 3.1. So basically, I am somewhat screwed. I can get back in to KDE 3.1 by manually starting X from a console login.

 

I decided to abandon the whole idea and am now going to download and install the latest Mandrake 10.0 beta which includes KDE 3.2.

 

Admittedly, I am pretty much a Linux newbie (I've been running Mandrake for about 2 years but this is the first time I had a proper go and building my own KDE) so that may be a contributory factor to my problems, but I do pretty much know what I'm doing most of the time. :D

 

So anyway, I too would like to know what the original problem was, but I have more severe problems now and I've decided to jack the whole thing in.

[bvc]

Does Ctrl>Alt>F1 show and errors?

Anything in ~/.xsession-errors?

Using a Display Manager? Don't! Using startx from init 3 will usually give you more error output.

 

You say you set $PATHS to ~/.kde3.2

Whose $HOME is that?

[Peep]

You say you set $PATHS to ~/.kde3.2

Whose $HOME is that?

konstruct installs 3.2 to ~/kde3.2 by default. you can tell it to put it elsewhere, but that's where i left it too.

 

i've rebooted 4-5 times since installing 3.2 and haven't noticed any problems other than the splash screen. (it's a laptop and i shut it down for my commute since suspend to disk doesn't save all that much time and isn't as reliable for me yet) i hope no new problems pop up.

 

apparently there are 3.2 rpms floating around that work now (i've heard, haven't seen yet). maybe you could install those? i'm not exactly sure what happens when you install a kde rpm on a system with compiled kde... i'm a little curious about that in case i need to do it.

[bvc]

still doesn't tell me

$USER

$ROOT

?

'~' could be anyone

[Peep]

ahh. i see. i saw the "." in your ~/.kde3.2 and red flags went up because it's just ~/kde3.2

 

i put the settings in my /home/bill/.bashrc and it SEEMED to work. was that the right thing to do? i've never really messed with environment settings etc before, this is my first big adventure.

[Peep]

ok, wait. are you saying i should have put in the full location of directories instead of using ~/ ?

 

here's what the konstruct readme says to do:

After installation

==================

After installation you have to set some variables allowing your system to find

KDE binaries and libraries and KDE to allow to find its own files, for Bash:

 

  export QTDIR=~/kde3.2

  export KDEDIRS=~/kde3.2

 

  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/kde3.2/lib

  export PATH=~/kde3.2/bin:$PATH

 

Setting KDEHOME too, e.g. "export KDEHOME=~/.kdetest", will tell KDE to save

your settings to this directory and leave default ~/.kde directory unaffected.

 

On shadow password systems you have to set $(prefix)/bin/kcheckpass SUID root

or SGID shadow - otherwise you will not be able to unlock a locked desktop.

 

The complete KDE desktop is started with "startkde", most distributions start

it if you set it to the WINDOWMANAGER variable in your shell initializations.

 

so i basically put all of those lines into my .bashrc (removing the "export" from each because it didn't seem to work with them in there). could that be causing weirdness?

 

and as long as i'm exposing my cluelessness... was i supposed to leave "$PATH" as that, or insert something else in its place? that may be my whole problem right there. :unsure:

[Falcdragon]

You could try moving .kde in your home directory just to check that 3.2's not ignoring the KDEHOME variable. Also check you ~/tmp folder it may be using that instead of /tmp.

Edited February 7, 2004 by Falcdragon

[sherington]

>still doesn't tell me

>$USER

>$ROOT

>?

>'~' could be anyone

 

I built KDE as "my normal non root login user", and as per the konstruct readme it puts the output of the build into "/home/<my normal non root login user>/kde3.2". That's why I just used "~" in my original post. Apologies if it wasn't clear.

 

The konstruct readme says to use "~", but with hindsight it would have been better I think to specify the full absolute path instead.

 

The other folder mentioned, ".kde32", was used to store the new KDE 3.2 settings/config so that I could keep my original KDE 3.1 settings untouched in ".kde".

 

I also edited my .bashrc file to include those new environment settings like Peep described.

 

I would have liked to have persevered with this, but the bizarre core dump problems I was experiencing meant I got some unofficial KDE 3.2 RPMS via a link from pclinuxonline and used those.

 

Now everything appears to be fine.

 

Thanks all for helping.