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This page is accurate as of 2008-07-19 for building KDE stable 3.5.9 (please report problems to kde-devel if they do not work for the latest stable 3.5.x). Other pages containing similar information are being consolidated to here. Similar pages include:
The old stable version of KDE stable is 3.5.10 (current stable version is a 3.4 branch as of 2009/11/20). You will want to build KDE stable if you are a maintainer for an OS distribution. Otherwise, you may want to install KDE stable using the tools provided by your OS distribution or vendor.
The recommended way to install KDE stable used to be Konstruct, a build system which helped you to install KDE releases and applications on your system. It downloads defined source tarballs, checks their integrity, decompresses, patches, configures, builds and installs them. A complete KDE installation should be as easy as "cd meta/kde;make install".
By default Konstruct installs to your home directory, which means you don't have to possess root privileges or risk to damage your system or affect another KDE.
Currently it does not work and is not maintained any more.
The following instructions describe how to build KDE 3.5.x yourself, i.e. without using Konstruct or kdesvn-build.
To compile KDE you need:
In order to run KDE applications, you need the Qt, arts, and kdelibs packages. For a simple desktop (with a window manager, panel, etc), you will also need kdebase. The other packages contain many other applications by topic: networking, graphics, multimedia, games, utilities, toys, software development, etc.
You can find the Qt library (qt-x11-free-3.3.8) from ftp://ftp.trolltech.com/qt/source/
KDE 3.5.x is available from ftp://download.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/
Unlike most compiled software, Qt is compiled in the place where it will stay instead of using a make install. Please read the INSTALL instructions in the Qt package. You need to set the environment variables $QTDIR and $KDEDIR to the locations where Qt and KDE will be installed, respectively. Also, append $QTDIR/bin and $KDEDIR/bin to your $PATH and $QTDIR/lib and $KDEDIR/lib to $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Alternatively, instead of using $LD_LIBRARY_PATH, you may add your Qt and KDE library paths to /etc/ld.so.conf, but don't forget to run ldconfig as root after installing Qt and kdelibs, otherwise configure scripts will fail to find the newly installed libraries!
If your distribution sets $XDG_DATA_DIRS and/or $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS you will want to update them to include the correct $KDEDIR/share/ resp. $KDEDIR/etc/xdg/
KDE TechBase bunzip2 qt-x11-3.3.8.tar.bz2
tar xvf qt-x11-3.3.8.tar
cd qt-x11-3.3.8
less INSTALL
# Set up QTDIR, KDEDIR, PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH,
# XDG_DATA_DIRS and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS
cd $QTDIR
./configure -system-zlib -qt-gif -system-libpng \
-system-libjpeg -plugin-imgfmt-mng -thread -no-stl \
-no-xinerama -no-g++-exceptions
make
Note that -thread is required (KDE will not run or even compile if you omit it), that -no-xinerama is only if you're not using xinerama, and -no-g++-exceptions is strongly recommended if you're using gcc.
Make sure to compile and install arts first, and afterwards kdelibs and then kdebase before any other packages. Also, if you want to use kdeaddons, it should be compiled last as it requires kdebase, kdemultimedia, etc.
For each KDE package:
bunzip2 <package>.tar.bz2 tar xvf <package>.tar cd <package> ./configure make make install
uic: File generated with too old version of Qt Designer
try
which uic
and
uic -v
to find out with which version of the UI compiler you are working. For KDE 3.5 and koffice 1.6 you will need a 3.x version.
