phenorbitalBlog of a graduate working in banking IT in London.

KDE on WindowsFiled Under: Technology

Following up from my blog on IM Applications, mulletron linked me to the KDE Windows Project installer, which was recently released in a pre-release state. I had a rummage around and also found the instructions.

I therefore decided to give this a look and have installed some of the things that I use on my KDE install at home. First up, naturally, was the kdenetwork package containing Kopete. The installer itself is quite simple, you tick the packages you want, and it goes off and grabs the right dependencies and whatnot. These packages are then downloaded into a folder of your choosing, installed (again into a folder of your choice) and away you go.

As the downloaded files included Qt, kdebase and kdelibs it took some time, but this was not unexpected (especially over the wireless connection on this machine).

In the previous post I did suggest that ideally I’d be after a portable solution. Unfortunately KDE doesn’t really fit this at the moment due both to being over 1GB in size, and also requiring environment variable settings (which obviously won’t be possible everywhere).

Once it was installed and I’d set up my environment variables I ran kopete.exe… and it crashed. So, reading the other information on the wiki, I ran kbuildsycoca4.exe by hand and then re-ran kopete.exe, and hey presto there was the Kopete GUI (along with a whole host of other apps that I tested such as kwrite and konqueror - although that had some issues browsing HTML it seems).

Unfortunately it seems that there was something wrong with the Jabber implementation, as I couldn’t add that account, and there seems to be something else that’s not quite there with Kopete as it seems not to want to connect to the MSN servers.

Obviousy with this being a pre-release version I wasn’t expecting great things. The fact that it runs at all is a great indication to me that there is a chance of this all being pulled together very soon. I’d also like to see the install being more automated, with setting environment variables and whatnot, but we’ll have to see.

Tags: kde, windows