Revision as of 14:24, 22 July 2010

This describes the potential of using a virtual machine to contain development, for testing system level KDE tools like KDM without mucking up the rest of your system. Also, virtual machine snapshots can be shared with casual developers so they can have an up to date, rich environment for their minor fixes.

In the included example, a person sets up KDE trunk on a Suse 11.3 Linux Virtual Machine.

Basically nothing special except using root account directly.. And it is in a virtual machine, Note that the build requirements are moving targets so examples are all but useless.

We use KVM because it is faster than other free alternatives, and can use multiple processors (You will need to have a CPU that supports virtualization, cheapernewer computers have cpus that dont advertise if they have this feature or not so you may need to do some homework)

Virtual Machine Setup

Create a KVM virtual machine. KDE 4 fits into 10 GB minimum, I recommend 40GB, one partition. As much ram as you can spare, You will need at least 1GB ram for the virtual machine, 4 doesnt hurt if you have it, install SUSE Linux 11.3.

You will need to set your SUSE CD as your virtual machine's cdrom.

setup for SSH

To be able to log in to your VM using ssh, stop and disable the firewall:

rcSuSEfirewall2 stop
chkconfig SuSEfirewall2_setup off
chkconfig SuSEfirewall2_init off
/etc/init.d/sshd start

Inside the VM, install some needed packages:

yast -i libopenssl-devel subversion gcc-c++ boost-devel libbz2-devel libxml2-devel pcre-devel \
libxslt-devel giflib-devel libjpeg-devel libgpgme-devel xorg-x11-devel glib2-devel libpng-devel \
make dbus-1-devel taglib-devel

yast -i libmysqlclient-devel libmysqld-devel cmake libical-devel git cyrus-sasl-devel libredland-devel \
libqt4-devel docbook-xsl-stylesheets

Now it is time to do a snapshot or clone from your VM.

You will be able to return to this machine state whenever you want. (you may want to do this again after you have downloaded all the stuff but before you muck with stuff)

a few more steps

The rest assumes you are root, which may not be safe.

su -

on an x64 distribution

If and only if you have a /lib64 path, you are on an x64 distribution. Make sure you have the needed environment variables and alias set by having a file /root/.bashrc.

cat >.bashrc<<EOF 
export KDEDIR=/usr/local         
alias cmakekde="cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=\$KDEDIR -DLIB_SUFFIX=64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull && make -j8 && make install"
alias cmakekdelibs="cmake ../kdelibs -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=\$KDEDIR -DLIB_SUFFIX=64 -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull && make -j8 && make install"
alias makeqt="./configure -dbus -openssl -plugin-sql-mysql -libdir /usr/lib64 -prefix /usr && make -j8 && make install"
export QTDIR=/usr
EOF

Now activate this file

. /root/.bashrc

on another distribution (incl 32bit)

Make sure you have the needed environment variables and alias set by having a file /root/.bashrc.

cat >.bashrc<<EOF
export KDEDIR=/usr/local         
alias cmakekde="cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=\$KDEDIR -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull && make -j8 && make install"
alias cmakekdelibs="cmake ../kdelibs -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=\$KDEDIR -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=debugfull && make -j8 && make install"
alias makeqt="./configure -dbus -openssl -plugin-sql-mysql -prefix /usr && make -j8 && make install"
export QTDIR=/usr
EOF

Now activate this file

. /root/.bashrc

Aquire and Build KDE as root

you will need to use svn://anonsvn.kde.org ) Many of these require ckdemake, so the order of the rest is wrong. If something fails you may need to make clean. Building QT takes a few hours.

kdesupport

cd
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdesupport
cd kdesupport
cmakekde

phonon

cd
git clone git://gitorious.org/phonon/phonon.git
cd phonon
cmakekde

dbusmenuqt

cd
git clone git://gitorious.org/dbusmenu/dbusmenu-qt.git
cd dbusmenu-qt
cmakekde

libiodbc

cd
wget http://www.iodbc.org/downloads/iODBC/libiodbc-3.52.7.tar.gz
tar xvzf libiodbc-3.52.7.tar.gz
cd libiodbc*
./configure && make -j8 && make install

kdelibs

KDELIBS requires an out-of-source build, that is why it is more complicated to build:

cd
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs
mkdir kdelibs-build
cd kdelibs-build
cmakekdelibs

Verify it has been correctly installed - the following must be possible:

kde4-config --prefix
/usr/local

kdepimlibs

cd
svn co svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs
cd kdepimlibs
cmakekde

kdebase

cd 
svn co https://svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdebase
cd kdebase
cmakekde

Config

First allow root login. You will need it as you do not have another login:

sed -i "s/AllowRootLogin.*/AllowRootLogin=true/g" /usr/local/share/config/kdm/kdmrc

Now stop your running display manager:

/etc/init.d/xdm stop

And start your self-compiled display manager:

kdm

To enable automated startup of your kdm, you need to change some SUSE-specific paths in /etc/init.d/xdm:

KDM_BIN=/usr/local/bin/kdm
KDM4_BIN=/usr/local/bin/kdm