Installing KDE 4 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 you have X.Org (x11/xorg) installed.
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 KDE 3 configuration files, make sure to backup ~/.kde, ~/.config, ~/.cache, and ~/.local.

Installation

To install KDE 4.3 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 mailing list: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-freebsd.

Known Problems

Please, have a look here.

Tips and Tricks

ATI/Nvidia Performance.
We know about bad performance problems. So, before you flame, take a look here:
- http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/GPU-Performance;
- http://techbase.kde.org/User:Lemma/KDE4-NVIDIA.

Starting KDE 4

Using KDE 4's KDM.
Add the following lines to /etc/rc.conf:

local_startup="${local_startup} /usr/local/kde4/etc/rc.d"
kdm4_enable="YES"

Using KDE 3's KDM.
You can use your KDM from KDE 3 to start a KDE 4 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.

Put it under /usr/local/share/apps/kdm/sessions/. Now you can choose KDE 4 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.