Use KDE and Konqueror on OS X

Feb 15, '06 05:48:00AM

Contributed by: jaguarcy

This seems pretty old, but I just came accross it. It looks like the OpenDarwin group has created binaries for installing KDE specific apps on OS X (the source files are also accessible elsewhere). Just visit kde.opendarwin.org/.

You need to install at least the Qt, kdesupport and kdelibs packages to begin with, so the rest of the packages will work. From there on, I also recommend kdebase and kdenetwork. Through these two packages, I have a working version of the Konqueror browser on my OS X, with all the nice protocol support (such as fish://) that comes with it.

Bugs galore, as development has stopped on these versions in favor of completing KDE4 first, and then trying to port that ... but they still work! I've managed to get them to run on OS X 10.4.4 without many problems (even though the site states that the binaries were compiled on Jaguar), and most of the apps that come with the packages seem to operate just fine (more or less -- see note below). Kile (a LaTeX front end) has a lot of niceness, and I'm experimenting with Kate (which is slow on my system, but I think I can tweak it to run satisfactorily).

I suggest using the second option on that page to download, unless you're on a really fast broadband connection, as there are over 200 megs of binaries to download if you want the full package! (I like the progress bar to know where I'm at.)

Note: As mentioned on the above linked website, these apps sometimes have problems shutting down (they don't die gracefully). To combat that, I wrote a small Terminal script that cleans up memory from all (runaway or not) KDE processes. Other than that, no Terminal usage is necessary to install/play with these applications! Copy the following snippet, save it in a location you can easily access from the Terminal, and then type chmod 755 filename to make it executable:

#!/bin/bash<br />
kill `ps aux | grep kde | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
That's it! If you name the file killkde, and you save it in your home folder, all you have to do is start the Terminal and type ./killkde to terminate all running KDE apps.

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Mac OS X Hints
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