I've spent the past hour and a half trying to figure out a way to test a C++ plasma applet without installing it to the proper directories in /usr, thus requiring root access. I haven't found anything so far, I've searched the internet, asked in IRC, nothing.

I looked for documentation or something somewhere to tell me how exactly to use plasmoidviewer and plasmapkg and all I found were age old posts to mailing lists, copied by several different mailing list archive sites about patches made to the software. From what I can see, that tutorial is the only sort of documentation for programming a C++ plasmoid that I can find anywhere. I could just be missing something, but if so I have no idea what it is.

I think by installing the .desktop file to ~/.kde4/share/kde4/services I managed to at least get it to show up in plasma's widget list, but I still wouldn't know where to put the .so, I tried a few different directories and setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH and a few other environment variables as well to help it along with no success. It always complains about a missing component.

I apologize if I seem irritable as I've spent way more time trying to figure this out than I should have for what would seem to be an otherwise simple task.

Create a directory somewhere ( ~/.kde/localapps in this example ) and install all KDE things you manually compile there.

You need to set the following environment variables before the KDE session begins ( I use ~/.bashrc for this )

Code: Select all

export KDEDIR=/usr
export LOCALAPPSPREFIX=${HOME}/.kde/localapps
export KDEDIRS=${KDEDIR}:${LOCALAPPSPREFIX}
export PATH=${LOCALAPPSPREFIX}/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LOCALAPPSPREFIX}/lib
export XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share:${LOCALAPPSPREFIX}/share
export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=${LOCALAPPSPREFIX}
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${LOCALAPPSPREFIX}/lib/pkgconfig:${LOCALAPPSPREFIX}/share/pkgconfig

Finally, success. \o/

Thanks.