Re: Kde 1 or 2 on NetBSd 5.x

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On 9 April 2015 at 03:09, Larry Stotler <larrystotler%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 5:40 AM, David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost> wrote:
>> I'd say a very lightweight window manager to leave as much RAM as
>> possible for whichever X editor you pick!
>
> I installed fvwm1 via pkgsrc, but I'm not very impressed with it.  I
> may try to do fvwm instead.

Maybe google around for reviews and screenshots of lightweight window
managers & then try a couple. There are some quite nice options out
there.

> The reason I want KDE2 is KOffice.  I've used KWord for so long it's
> like second nature to me.  I currently use Trinity Desktop r14 on my
> main laptop(openSUSE 13.2/x64).
>
> Having used KDE2 back when it was new, I know it was less resource
> intensive than KDE1.  I managed to find the sources for KDE2 at:
>
> http://ftp.vim.org/windowing/kde/Attic/2.2.2/src/
>
> But I'm not sure about trying to compile them yet.  I don't know if
> pkgsrc can do anything with them, and I don't know if I need to find
> the qt2 libs for it as well(likely).
>
> I'm also afraid of trying to compile them on a faster machine only
> having to have done something wrong & they not work.  Compiling it on
> the Z50 would probably take forever.....

The last version of qt2 looks to be 2.3.2 (
http://ftp.vim.org/languages/qt/archive/qt/2/ ). It would be possible
to exhume the old pkgsrc entry, and update it, but you are going to
run into issues such as not building against the latest png due the
API having completely changed. Patching qt2 and kde2 to use the new
APIs would be possible, but quite a large undertaking, that is
assuming the code will build with a modern C++ compiler. You mention
Trinity above so you know some people cared enough about kde3 to fork
and maintain it, its a shame no-one did that for kde2 :)

What *might* work would be to checkout the last version of pkgsrc
which contained qt2 (looks to be 2008-09-16) and then build kde2 from
it, I'm ignoring the security issues as I'm assuming you would keep
things nicely sandboxed.

If you wanted to have a go at that I would try the following on a
NetBSD/x86 box first (for the sheer speed). If you don't have one then
install NetBSD in a VirtualBox or similar.

The pkgsrc checkout would be:

cvs -q -z2 -d anoncvs%anoncvs.NetBSD.org@localhost:/cvsroot checkout -D
2008-09-16 -P pkgsrc

then 'cd /pkgsrc/x11/kde2 ; make package-install' and see what
explodes :) I suspect most of it will be unable to find distfiles so
you would need to download them by hand and drop them into
pkgsrc/distfiles.

Once you have it working on x86 then try the build on the z50, or a
mips based emulator on a fast x86 box...