Happily, I can report some progress.

Something in the thread you suggested I look at triggered an idea that I should have had earlier. I still had MLT version 2.2 installed from a previous installation of Kdenlive .4. I had assumed that installing MLT 4.2 with svn would overwrite it, but apparently not.

So, I removed MLT 2.2, and then did the whole process again, and Kdenlive .5 installed!

But, I'm not out of the woods yet.

I think it's not installing in the right place or something. At first I was checking out the svn into /usr/src, and installing from there, but I couldn't find the bin file to execute kdenlive. So then I downloaded kdenlive into my home directory. Then I found that kdenlive was installing into the same directory it is compiling in. So, to start kdenlive, I have to go to /home/dave/kdenlive/kdenlive and run ./kdenlive. That doesn't seem right somehow.

In any case, when I try running it, I get this error at the command line:

~/kdenlive/kdenlive$ ./kdenlive
kbuildsycoca running...
kdenlive:  + + YOUR MLT INSTALL WAS FOUND IN: /usr/local
QPainter::begin: Cannot paint null pixmap
QPainter::setPen: Will be reset by begin()
QPainter::begin: Cannot paint null pixmap
QPainter::setPen: Will be reset by begin()
kdenlive: WARNING: KXMLGUIClient::setXMLFile: cannot find .rc file kdenliveui.rc
KCrash: Application 'kdenlive' crashing...

And then the "KDE Crash Handler" shows me this error:

Using host libthread_db library "/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libthread_db.so.1".
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
[New Thread -1234889008 (LWP 23268)]
[KCrash handler]
#6  0xb701b07b in QMenuData::insertAny () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#7  0xb701b865 in QMenuData::insertItem () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#8  0x0814bd65 in KdenliveApp (this=0x82c14c8, newDoc=false, parent=0x0, 
    name=0x0) at /home/dave/kdenlive/kdenlive/kdenlive.cpp:235
#9  0x0819a795 in main (argc=136645868, argv=0xbfc964f4)
    at /home/dave/kdenlive/kdenlive/main.cpp:94

Is there something I should know about how and where to install Kdenlive so that it's in the right directory?

Do the errors above indicate what I can do to get Kdenlive to work?

Hi,

well, it seems you're near the end :)

No matter from where you install kdenlive (home, /usr/src, ...) if you follow the instructions the kdenlive binary should be installed in /usr/bin, so you can find it there.

If it's not there, that means something is wrong with the installation or you've defined another path (this is, i.e. what the script you tried in the first message is doing). If this is the case, kdenlive needs to know the right path for the rest of programs or it will not run.

My recommendation is to start again from scratch (please do make clean before !! in all directories) and check that kdenlive has been installed in the right directory.

Regards and good luck !

JM

JM,

Total success! From a slightly different angle, though.

I had posted a question about Kdenlive on a thread in the Ubuntu forums, and someone suggested a way to get Kdenlive from the Gutsy repository onto a Feisty version of Ubuntu:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3500669&posted=1#post3500669

It worked perfectly. I now have Kdenlive running, and at this very moment I'm trying out a test rendering to see if some issues in 0.4 have been corrected. So far it looks great, and Kdenlive is definitely still the best video editor on Linux.

But I do have a question still. The version number I see in the repository is 0.5. But when I open Kdenlive and look under "Help->About", it says it's version 0.6svn.

Is it possible that somehow the svn installs I've been doing, as reported in this thread, have somehow combined with, or in some other way affected my installation?

Or is it that I'm just unclear on the numbering for the different versions?