Projects/KDE on Solaris/OpenSolaris

Warning

The KDE on Solaris project, also KDE on OpenSolaris, was active from around the year 2000 until nearly 2014, when the remaining team members ceased active development of the KDE packages. This page should be considered mostly of historical interest, although nothing stops anyone from trying to re-start KDE packaging on a descendant of Solaris such as IllumOS.

KDE on OpenSolaris is like Projects/KDE on Solaris but with some extra setup steps. There are IPS packages available intermittently.

Status: For an overview of current issues, see the KDE4 on OpenSolaris status page.

Effortless building of KDE 4

• Install current Solaris (S11.1; OpenIndiana might work too).
  Make sure you have enough memory (>=2GB) and swap (~2GB).
• Make sure your user ("test" in this case) has privileges to install software etc.

  # usermod -P "Software Installation" test
  

• Download the Solaris Studio 12.3 tarball from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solarisstudio/downloads/index.html and export its location, e.g.

export SPRO=~/Downloads/SolarisStudio12.3-solaris-x86-bin.tar.bz2

• Install Mercurial, the version control system. You need this to keep up-to-date with the packaging information.

  pfexec pkg install developer/versioning/mercurial text/gnu-sed file/gnu-coreutils
  

• Now fetch the repository containing the build information.

  hg clone https://hg.code.sf.net/p/kdesolaris/code
  

• Set-up a configuration file. Usually it's enough to just

cd kdesolaris-code/specs/ ; cp tools/build/config.template tools/build/config

• Let a script install all the dependencies and the build environment.

   ./tools/install-be
  

• Go for a walk, sleep, enjoy the life, as pkg is quite slow and has a lot to do (~1 hour)
  
• When it's finished, do:

  bash
  

  so that the new .bashrc is used
  
• Run

  cd ~/src/kde4-specs-470/specs/; make KDEgdm-integration
  

  to start the build (build time may grow up to 24 hours on a decent machine).
• Logout and login to your brand new KDE4.x session
• Check KDE4 on OpenSolaris status page for workarounds for some known issues.

Installing KDE4 IPS packages

The current KDE4 IPS package server is at http://solaris.bionicmutton.org/pkg/4.6.0 This is a fairly standard IPS setup. The bionicmutton domain is Adriaan's and has been previously used to serve up SysV packages as well. The URL is changing over time, always check the forum (http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=187) or IRC (#kde4-solaris) for the latest news.

To add the kde ips repository:

pfexec pkg set-publisher -p http://solaris.bionicmutton.org/pkg/4.6.0

Remember that KDE includes setuid code. Remember that installing packages from untrusted and unsigned third parties is insecure. Remember that the KDE codebase is huge and not extensively tested on OpenSolaris yet. Consider whether you really want to install KDE4 on the machine you're working on. Then decide to do it anyway. You will need KDEbase-apps for things like Konqueror and Konsole, and KDEgdm-integration to be able to choose KDE as a session; other KDE packages may be installed as you need them (such as KDEpim, KDEgames, etc.). There is a KDEconsolidation package as well that pulls in everything we know of.

pfexec pkg install KDEgdm-integration

After installing KDEgdm-integration, you should be able to log out and choose KDE as a session type from the login manager. Then you get a full KDE4 desktop. On my machine with Radeon graphics it is very slow to start up and launch applications, but fairly fast after that. There is a discussion on performance tweaking on [email protected].

Please report problems to KDE bug tracker with Operating System set to "Solaris". Please check for duplicates [1] first.

Installing KDE4 IPS packages

The current KDE4 IPS package server is at http://solaris.bionicmutton.org/pkg/4.5.3 This is a fairly standard IPS setup. The bionicmutton domain is Adriaan's and has been previously used to serve up SysV packages as well. The URL is changing over time, always check the forum (http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=187) or IRC (#kde4-solaris) for the latest news.

To add the kde ips repository:

pfexec pkg set-publisher -p http://solaris.bionicmutton.org/pkg/4.5.3

Remember that KDE includes setuid code. Remember that installing packages from untrusted and unsigned third parties is insecure. Remember that the KDE codebase is huge and not extensively tested on OpenSolaris yet. Consider whether you really want to install KDE4 on the machine you're working on. Then decide to do it anyway. You will need KDEbase-apps for things like Konqueror and Konsole, and KDEgdm-integration to be able to choose KDE as a session; other KDE packages may be installed as you need them (such as KDEpim, KDEgames, etc.). There is a KDEconsolidation package as well that pulls in everything we know of.

pfexec pkg install KDEgdm-integration

After installing KDEgdm-integration, you should be able to log out and choose KDE as a session type from the login manager. Then you get a full KDE4 desktop. On my machine with Radeon graphics it is very slow to start up and launch applications, but fairly fast after that. There is a discussion on performance tweaking on [email protected].

Please report problems to KDE bug tracker with Operating System set to "Solaris". Please check for duplicates [2] first.