Getting Started/Build/Historic/KDE4 Windows

    From KDE TechBase


    Projects/KDE_on_Windows/Installation


    Note
    Perhaps actual developers should summarize status of KDE4 on Windows here, while we encourage users to describe their experiences on the Talk page?


    KDE Installer for Windows

    You can use this installer to download and install the various binary packages that you need to run KDE applications on MS Windows. KDE is free and open source so you can build all the applications "from scratch" from their source code; but as a convenience for others, volunteers create these precompiled packages and make them available on the Internet.

    Disclaimer These are early days for KDE4 on Windows, some programs work better than others and some fail to run altogether.

    If you experience any problems please have a look into our mailing list.

    You can also use the KDE Installer for Windows to install source code and the packages that you need to build KDE4 on Windows (although if you are building KDE4 on Windows you may prefer to use the emerge system to build KDE and its requirements from latest source); see Getting Started/Build/KDE4/Windows.

    Summary of Steps

    • Visit http://download.cegit.de/kde-windows/installer/
    • Download and save the latest version to a directory, e.g. C:\KDE4
    • Run the installer, download what you need (see Download needed packages below).
    • Add a KDEDIRS environment variable (Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables, click [New] User variable and create Variable name KDEDIRS with Variable value the directory where you installed KDE4, e.g. C:\KDE4).
    • Add your lib directory, %KDEDIRS\lib, and your bin directory, %KDEDIRS\bin, to your Windows %PATH%. (Start > Control Panel > System > Advanced > Environment Variables, double-click the Path System Variable and add this to your path separated by semicolon.)
    • If you don't have Visual Studio 2005 installed, download and install the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)" [1]
    • [TEMPORARILY] Follow the instructions at post-install steps
    • Try running a Qt application in the bin directory, such as linguist.exe
    • If that works, try running a KDE application such as kwrite.exe.

    Download needed packages

    A single program in the The K Desktop Environment depends on many other libraries and packages; that is why each .exe is comparatively small. The KDE Installer for Windows has some awareness of dependencies, but not complete. So, the first few times you try to run an application you may see alerts about missing DLLs.

    If you do not intend to build from source, do not click "all" and do not click "src", as you do not need to download the source for each package. Unclear whether you need lib for each.

    There are two development systems for KDE on Windows, Microsoft's Visual C and MinGW. Even if you are only running binaries and do not intend to build KDE4 yourself, you need to choose between these because of the provided runtime environments. You're free to decide which to take.

    The KDE programs themselves are organized into several groups: kdeedu, kdegames, and kdegraphics.

    Here are some of the minimal packages you need to run a KDE application:

    dbus-msvc, kdebase-msvc, kdewin32-msvc, qt-msvc, vcredist, ??

    The Dependencies tab for a particular package lists some of the additional packages it needs. However, the dependency checking currently only works for first-level dependencies Other dependencies are not easy to determine in advance. For example, if you install kdegames only with its dependencies, you will not be able to start it because you also need libstreamanalyze (for which you have to install the strigi package). rhabacker: This is fixed in installer version > 0.8.4.

    Getting_Started/Build/KDE4/Windows/3rd-party_libraries is a more complete list of libraries that a full installation needs.

    Issues with KDE Installer for Windows

    If you find an issue, please report to [2].

    Successful? completion

    If something goes wrong during installation, for example a file can't be replaced because it is still in use, the installer may still report successful completion. If you see any alert or failure message from the installer, when it completes quit and re-run it.


    Testing your installation

    Navigate to the bin directory.

    See if you can run the Qt program assistant.exe. Qt programs have fewer dependencies than a full-blown KDE application.

    If that works, try running a simple KDE application, such as lskat.exe from the kdegames package.

    The first KDE application you run will start a console window in order to run the D-Bus daemon.

    Fine-tuning

    Set Oxygen style for widgets

    The default KDE widget style on Windows is the native one. You already have Oxygen style installed (which is a plugin library %KDEROOT%\lib\kde4\plugins\styles\oxygen.dll), so it can be used as well. To set it for a single user:

    1. edit %UserPROFILE%\.kde\share\config\kdeglobals with any text editor (e.g. kwrite) Note: `cd %UserPROFILE%` will change to the right directory, effectively telling you what %UserPROFILE% expands to, such as "C:\Documents and Settings\mark"
    2. locate the General section (a line containing the text "[General]"). If there is no General section, create one.
    3. Within the General section ([General]), edit the line containing widgetStyle=.... so that it reads widgetStyle=oxygen. If there is no such widgetStyle=... line, create it.

    Newly started applications should be displayed with Oxygen style now.

    Status

    Using kdewin-installer-gui-0.8.6.exe to install 4.00.60 packages:

    • starting a KDE program correctly starts dbus-daemon.exe
    • many games run
    • choosing File > Open correctly starts klauncher.exe, kioslave.exe and kded4.exe, and runs kbuildsycoca4.exe as needed.
    • Full-text search in khelpcenter does not work because Perl scripts are disabled.
    • Many applications have a generic icon in Windows Explorer.
    • Applications that try to play sounds might display an alert about "Multimedia Backend" problems. This requires the Windows backend for Phonon. The amarok package installs an experimental Windows phonon backend. Amarok plays music!!

    General notes:

    • There are many other KDE programs that are not part of KDE 4.0.0 and are not currently packaged for Windows, such as KOffice 2.
    • By design, KDE-windows does not provide the full-blown KDE desktop, thus no KWin composite manager, KDE-specific "start" menus, Plasma desktop, etc.

    Package status and contents

    package status contains applications
    kdebase packaged Konqueror, Dolphin, KWrite, etc.
    kdegames packaged Kgoldrunner, Kpat, KMahjongg, etc.
    kdesdk packaged Kate, Umbrello, etc.
    kdetoys packaged KTeatime, etc.
    kdeedu packaged Marble, Parley, KStars, KHangman, etc.
    kdegraphics packaged Okular, kolourpaint, etc.
    amarok packaged Amarok music player
    koffice not packaged KWord, Krita, Karbon, etc.
    kdepim not building KMail, AKregator, etc.
    kdenetwork not building Kopete, KGet, etc.
    kdeutils not packaged KGpg, KWallet, etc.

    Deprecated: post-install steps

    After manual installation of a package one has to run the included post-install.bat script (inside the manifest folder). This batch file includes at least the following steps.

    Run update-mime-database

    Be sure that you have no KDE-related applications running: run the Windows Task Manager (taskmgr.exe), switch to its Processes tab, and kill all occurences of dbus-daemon.exe, kded4.exe, kioslave.exe and klauncher.exe (and all other KDE apps).

    Open a Windows command prompt (cmd.exe) and navigate to the directory where you installed KDE. Say you installed KDE to C:\KDE4, then run from the cmd.exe window:

     C:\KDE4> bin\update-mime-database C:\KDE4\share\mime
    

    This will give you a lot of warning message. Most of them you can easily ignore; even if you should set XDG_DATA_HOME or XDG_DATA_DIRS it worked perfectly. If it says you should rerun update-mime-database as root then you're not within your installation directory.

    Run kbuildsyscoca4

    After finishing the previous step, run

     C:\KDE4> bin\kbuildsycoca4 --noincremental
    

    If this tells you that your disk is full (which is most probably not the case) you have still some executables from KDE running. Please close them and try again.

    Excuse us for the inconvenience — we hope for a better solution in the next release.