Getting Started

Getting_Started

Installing KDE SC and its Prerequesites

There are several ways to install KDE SC so that you can use and develop KDE software. Below are complete instructions for installing KDE4 on a Linux system based on whether you want an Official Release, a Nightly Build, Stable 4.x Release, or Trunk.

Official Release	Nightly Build	Stable from Source	Trunk
For the casual user, or a developer who is working on applications outside of KDE SC	For application developers or package managers who are not modifying the core of KDE SC	For KDE SC and applications developers that want to spend less time setting up a build system	For developers working on core KDE SC functionality
1. Use a Distribution with KDE to set up a fully functional KDE system in one step. Also install the "developer packages" if you want to compile KDE software	1. Install build requirements from your distribution	1. Install build requirements from your distribution	1. Install build requirements from your distribution
	2. Download and setup KDE SC easily using Project Neon	2. Download KDE source from SVN	2. Download KDE source from SVN
		3. Build a stable 4.x release	3. Build KDE SC from trunk
		4. Set up scripts to ease KDE development	4. Set up scripts to ease KDE development

For instructions on installing KDE SC on Windows, BSD, or Mac OS X, or instructions for installing KDE3, please see the other supported platforms page. There are also upgrade instructions from a branch to trunk.

Below is additional information you may be interested in before installing KDE.

Build Notes for Special Users

Distribution managers may be interested in installing KDE SC using a virtual machine.
Core developers may want to use a common KDE developer setup (this page is not complete).

Qt

In each installation scenario above, Qt is installed in the most appropriate way. For you reference, there are three ways to install:

System Qt: Often the easiest way to go, because most people have it already, you may have to install the QCA plugin as root though.

KDE-Qt: Previously known as qt-copy -- This is the minimum version of Qt any of your users are expected to have. Some bugs may be fixed in new Qt, so you may have to work-around bugs in lower versions, including this one.

Main Qt: Get it straight from Nokia, experience the latest cool features, but note that many people will be using older distributions with older Qt.

Source Repository

Currently, KDE SC source code is accessed using svn, but in the future, we are migrating to Git. Amarok has already migrated to Git.

Troubleshooting the build

See Troubleshooting

Compile and Linking errors are frequent sources of discouragement. Make careful note of the first occurrence of an error in your build process. It could be as simple as a bad environment variable, an unexpected version of a library or missing prerequisite.

Please review your logs and do searches for fixes. If you cannot find a solution, try Build/KDE4/Errors, the IRC channel, and the mailing lists. You can post your detailed issue from Build/Stories.

If you are building from trunk and following the instructions linked from here or from Build KDE 4.5 on Kubuntu and would like free support, please contact:

Aaron Peterson

206-334-5925 (lives in GMT -8 hours)

Or leave a message at http://techbase.kde.org/User:AaronPeterson

Extra Tools

You will likely want to use a stable package from your distribution instead of the ones of the KDE version you are working on.

For most development topics, and documentation, see Development

Opening and creating KDE project files

Contribution

You may not need the latest bleeding-edge version of KDE with which to develop. Much of the code will be similar between versions and your patch might work. However, Trunk is where major changes are introduced, and branches are mostly for maintenance/bug fixes.