David Edmundson's two little entries on the planet about KDE testing for 4.10 reminded me that there's another release coming up, and that I could help out. Besides, it'll be fun, futzing around with a bit of C++ code again and around with apps that I normally wouldn't use. Last I tried this, it was to clean up the KDE 4.4 buglist, so it's been a while. I shuffled some hardware around so I could set up some virtual machines.


For some reason I don't understand, I  get completely bogged down in modern Linuxes when trying to do any kind of development. Maybe it's the rabbit hole of OpenSUSE documentation that stops me. In any case, after spending some time trying to get the excellent build-tool working (I know it's excellent, I've used it in the past) I gave up on that VM. It'll be a test-machine for future upgrades or something.

I tried to get OpenSolaris (well, OpenIndiana) up again, but my existing virtual disks wouldn't boot. I didn't feel like re-starting entirely and then trying to figure out how to get a compiler again, since the KDE4-OpenSolaris stuff was written for the SunCC compiler which is no longer easily obtainable. So strike that off the list for now. At some point I'll have to do some comparisons across VMs with a similar version of KDE, for kicks. A quad-core CPU ought to be able to run three VMs with single-core virtual processors at once, right?

So I end up back up with my old love, FreeBSD. By accident I downloaded the 9.1-RC3 disk, which installs just the barest of systems (for FreeBSD, anyway, so that means a complete set of development tools, ports and src if you want them). Since it is an -RC there are also no pre-built packages for it, so that meant compiling everything. Which isn't that bad, you can (roughly) just start in kdebase-workspace and xorg, build and install those two (plus all their dependencies) and you're good. I followed the area51 instructions, which (for me at least) do the right amount of explanation and I can follow along the compilation steps in the Makefiles. Some ports have been recently updated while area51 hasn't been updated to match, but a little chat on the K-F channel cleared that right up (PCRE has a newer .so version, as does SASL, which also has a broken -ish header file -- that kind of things). After a few other gotcha's (system-configuration thingies, basically because I haven't used FBSD much these past two years), I've now got a suitable KDE 4.9.3 system up and running. Time to update bits of that to 4.10 and commence testing!