I am writing these lines
From inside a lion
And it’s rather dark in here

Well, it’s not really from inside a lion, but something vaguely similar. Today I got KDE4 compiling again on OpenSolaris, just in time for a talk at the Sun offices. Not in the limelight at Sun, since they were busy acquiring database companies, but there was sufficient interest and pointed questions. The build only just finished 20 minutes before my scheduled time, so I was glad to have something to show.

The hydra-like KNotify notifications that tell you no multimedia backend is available has been fixed by me, albeit in a hackish fashion. Only one message is displayed per process, which avoids the hydra behavior. On the other hand, you still get one such message box per event, so that is still a lot of them. This leaves tons of other things to fix for runtime behavior, like konqueror crashing a lot . But because KDE4 builds and runs, I can now switch my default desktop on Solaris to KDE4. That is a big step; there is dogfood, and it can be eaten.

Tomorrow I hope to take time out from the Community day to write up some instructions (a simple 19 step process) to get KDE4 installed on a Solaris box.