KDE4 on FreeBSD is moving forward apace. There are ports in progress, and Qt4 can be built normally as a port from the main ports collection. No word on 4.4-copy, though.

What is kind of missing is an overview of what is where. The main KDE on FreeBSD site is not well maintained, and is missing links to all the essential bits. So here they are:

  • The Techbase project page for KDE on FreeBSD is very sparse. I started that one because I didn’t know about the other pages, yielding an ETOOMANYWIKIPAGES in accept(2), but it hasn’t been fixed yet, and it contains at least some useful links.
  • A Getting started page also exists on Techbase, which contains a number of technical hints when using kdesvn-build. Some of the workarounds are quite tricky; thanks to Joseph K. for starting that up.</a>
  • Both Techbase pages refer to the KDE4 on FreeBSD wiki which is part of the FreeBSD wiki. The K-F website doesn’t point there as far as I can see, which is a shame. It doesn’t show up very high in searches, either. Still, that is the place to go for information on getting the experimental ports for KDE4. One thing I don’t see is any instructions on how to use the experimental ports, so at this point I’m stuck again. I suppose a day of actually thinking about FreeBSD would help; my mind is too Solarified right now to be much use.

Since the latest Qt in ports is a 4.3 version, we’re stuck trying to build qt-copy for work on trunk, and that has its own little issues. Like phonon falling over spectacularly in the gstreamer backend. Much like the include order issue for CLucene on Solaris (where we don’t enable gstreamer yet, so this issue hasn’t cropped up) it’s about bad header directories sneaking in. In this case, /usr/local/include gets in ahead of the Qt4 build directories, and the wrong Qt headers are used. Anyway, it keeps the CPUs warm.

The Wayback Machine does not archive everything. Broken links are marked like this with HTML data indicating where they were.