• KDE4
• Install

Installing KDE4 on FreeBSD

Before you start, make sure that you have read the Preparation section.

Preparation

• Make sure you have a fresh ports tree.

• Make sure your ports are all up to date. http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html

• To avoid possibly loosing KDE3 configuration files, make sure to backup ~/.kde, ~/.config, ~/.cache, and ~/.local.

Installation

To install KDE 4.2 in its entirety, simply do the following as root:

# cd /usr/ports/x11/kde4 
# make install clean

Problems and Bug Reports

• Before you send mail about problems, please make sure you don't send a duplicate report.

  Please search the archive of the kde-freebsd mailinglist. http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-freebsd/

Known Problems

• KDE4

Tips and Tricks

ATI/Nvidia Performance

• We know about bad performance problems. So, before you flame, please a look here:

  • http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/GPU-Performance

  • http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA

Starting KDE4

• Using KDE3's KDM.
  • You can use your kdm from KDE3 to start a KDE4 session. Create kde4.desktop file with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Type=XSession
Exec=/usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4
TryExec=/usr/local/kde4/bin/startkde4
Name=KDE4
Comment=The K Desktop Environment.

• and put it under /usr/local/share/apps/kdm/sessions/ . Now you can choose KDE4 from the session list of kdm.
• Using xinit.
  • Add following lines to ~/.xinitrc file:

PATH=/usr/local/kde4/bin:$PATH
export PATH
startkde4

• Run xinit as usual.