I'm looking for some help and suggestions regarding the best way to upgrade the version of KDE that comes with Red Hat Enterprise 6. I'm a long time KDE user, a long time Linux user, an electrical engineer with some programming skills, but new to things like git, svn, and building applications from source. My employer provides outstanding Linux support for the engineering team, but being interested in stability is currently distributing RHEL 6.

My goal is to improve the overall environment by getting to a version of KDE that's slightly more polished than 4.3. Specifically I want to find out if more recent versions of KWin and its compositing features work any better with my employer-issued hardware. Currently I'm running a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 (Intel Core2Duo 2.6 GHz) with ATI FireGL + fglrx driver, and it can't run compositing in KDE at all without weird video effects and freezing within the first couple minutes.

My home machine, a desktop, is much older - a Pentium IV Sony Viao. It also has ATI + fglrx and has been running Kubuntu/XP dual boot for the last year or so. Yesterday I upgraded to Kubuntu 12 with KDE 4.8.2 ... runs perfectly with most excellent compositing. So I can see what benefits there are in upgrading KDE.

I have spent the last couple weeks experimenting with kdesrc-build on both of these machines. The Thinkpad built qt-copy OK, and by fiddling with the settings of "branch" and "tag" I could get it to build phonon and phonon-gstreamer. Beyond that though I have been generally unsuccessful in convincing it to build things like strigi and its components.

I was able to get almost all the components listed in the default kdesrc-buildrc file to build on the desktop machine but had to install dozens and dozens of developer libs to get past all the cmakes. And this was on Kubuntu 11.10, just prior to yesterday's upgrade.

My questions are as follows:

[list=]
[*]Is it worth going through the build attempt on RHEL 6? It seems likely that one of those dozens of dev libs is just not going to be available in the repos available to me ... primarily EPEL.
[*]What is the recommended version of KDE? RHEL comes with QT3 so perhaps the last version to use that?
[*]Suppose I want to try to build the latest - 4.8.2. What is the likelihood of success trying to use the qt-copy that I built, in a production environment where I need to use the machine to get real work done?
[*]How do I coerce kdesrc-build to select the exact version that I want? Seems like the "branch" and "tag" operators only work for specific versions of specific modules, not all of which are the same.
[*]In the end how likely is it that I'll solve my fglrx-related compositing issues by getting to a newer version of kwin?
[/list]

New to the board so please advise if I have posted to the wrong place. I appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.

Whilst I cannot tell immediately, changes in both X and the Linux Kernel, as well as KDE itself may be the causes of your improved performance on your system at home. This will be due to bug fixes and optimisations on all of the above mentioned components, which when combined can have a significant impact.

Are you using the latest version of fgrlx on your work computer?

Thanks for your reply.

My RHEL 6 distro is using kernel 2.6.32-220.4.2.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP

ATI's Catalyst Control Center reports a "driver packaging version" of 8.892-11091 4m-125703C-ATI and a "2D driver version" 8.89.4

Key follow-up questions:

1. What is the LATEST KDE version consistent with these levels, and
2. How to persuade kdesrc-build to build specifically those versions? From recently browsing the KDE GIT repository I am starting to think that the "branch" and "tag" values could be different for each and every component? For example, suppose I want to build KDE 4.5.x ... how do I know which versions of each component to tell kdesrc-build to use?

THANKS AGAIN really appreciate your comments.

In general, building the latest version of KDE is recommended, so I would recommend starting there. You probably want the released, current stable, KDE 4.8 series.

As I only build the latest development code with kdesrc-build I am not sure as to how it needs to be configured. Have you read the kdesrc-buildrc-example file to see if it gives you any ideas on how to get it to build the KDE/4.8 branch?

Yes, I actually printed out the kdesrc-buildrc sample file and crawled through it more-or-less line by line.

It does give a lot of general suggestions, as does the documentation page (http://kdesrc-build.kde.org/documentation/), on setting the "branch" and "tag" values. But nothing specific on how to get the exact version of all the components that were used to build a specific release.

Somewhere there must be a list of exactly what levels of each component were used in KDE 4.8.2, for example, or 4.6.(last) ... either of which would be a huge upgrade for me. How do I find that list?

I do appreciate your comments!
Tony

For most KDE main modules, the KDE/4.8 branch should be appropriate. For all kdesupport modules, using the latest version should be sufficient.

bonaccio, were you able to get KDE compiled/installed? I'm also running KDE 4.3 on RHEL 6.3 and would love to upgrade it.

Unfortunately not. The good news is that I got a pretty good idea of HOW to do it and found one or two folks in our organization that are interested in working on it. Also there have been recent updates to the kdesrc-build script and its documentation that I think will help in accessing the desired stable version of each module.

The big concern with RHEL remains, though -namely that some required lib just won't be readily available or build able for RHEL.

I wish there was a kde- redhat project for RHEL 6 as there was back in the KDE 3.5.10 days.

Thinking about this some more ... wondering if one approach would be to set up a RHEL 6.3 virtual machine image on my Kubuntu desktop. Then I would be able to try the build in the RHEL environment in my spare time, rather than on my "production" Thinkpad. Hmm.

What would be an appropriate virtualization platform for Kubuntu 12.04 running KDE 4.8.x. How is a RHEL 6 VM created? Any suggestions?

Hi Tony,
I think we're in the same "organization" as I've seen your name on similar posts you've made to our forums. You can find me in blue pages as rcbell.

Like you, I'd love to run a modern KDE on RHEL 6.3. I actually went down the path you suggested of building it on a VM, which I did with the KVM tools that we have on our RHEL version. I did this on my production/work laptop, since the VM is pretty well isolated. Setting that up was the easy part.

I spent about four vacation days on the project before I decided that i didn't want to spend my entire week off building KDE (my personal life felt jealous)! but I only got about halfway done with the builds. I haven't gotten back to it, as my priorities go moved around, but I might try again.

I'm slammed at work at the moment, but at some point we could collaborate on doing this, maybe over the holidays?

Craig

Indeed, I think there are enough potential users to justify the effort.
I'll contact you via internal mail.
Tony

Did you guys ever upgrade your KDE on RHEL? I'm interested in doing the same on Oracle Linux 6.3, which is just re-branded RHEL.

Thanks,

Jeff

No, unfortunately not. Another try is in the cards soon, though, and kdesrc-build (the script that the KDE team provides to do the build) has been improved recently.

Tony

Hi all,

I tried to build KDE SC 4.9 on CentOS 6.3 with kdesrc-build but I am stuck with dependency Attica. The CMAKE scripts have several problems and don't seem to be able to find QT_QTGUI_LIBRARY despite I custom built latest QT 4.8.4 and CMAKE 2.8.10. For now I'm a bit stuck with this, don't know enough of cmake to find and fix this.

I however compiled KDE 3.5.10 quite easily (despite some const/non-const problems in the code) and I'm using this now, together with amarok 1.4 kdevelop etc.

Bastiaan

The problem with finding QtGui was likely because either:
1) "qmake" from the self-compiled Qt was not in $PATH
2) QtGui was not compiled (due to missing dependencies, please check the ./configure output of Qt)