[kde-solaris] KDE 3.5.3 build for Solaris 10

[Heiko Falk]

Dear all,


I'm happy to announce that I was finally able to create a build of KDE 3.5.3 
for Sparc Solaris 10. In contrast to the painful work done by Stefan Teleman, 
I didn't use the SunStudio compiler. Instead, I used a really cool GCC 4 
derivate, see

http://cooltools.sunsource.net/gcc/index.html

This gccfss compiler consists of a standard GCC 4.0.2 parser, frontend and 
optimizer. However, it is coupled to the backend, optimizer and code 
generator of SunStudio so that highly optimized Sparc code is generated. This 
compiler has the advantage that only very few KDE source codes need to be 
patched in order to build the entire KDE - totally, I needed to path 44 
files. Additionally, the resulting code quality is extremely high.

In addition, I tried to use as many standard libraries delivered with Solaris 
10 as possible. This includes e.g. zlib, bz, gtk, usb, fontconfig and lots 
more. I believe that this is better than re-building really all the libraries 
from scratch since hopefully, the Sun people took care and did some testing 
concerning the stuff delivered with Solaris 10...

The resulting KDE 3.5.3 is relatively nice. The individual KDE tools are 
pretty robust and work fine. However, there are some things I'd like to ask 
you since they're are annoying:

a) The time displayed by e.g. kicker's clock or korganizer etc. doesn't
   treat my timezone correctly. My box is configured for MEST, but the
   KDE tools all use GMT/UTC so that I have an offset of 2 hours.
   Does anybody know how to correct this?
b) What is more serious and where I really need your expertise:
   When modifying the appearance of the KDE-GUI within the control center
   (window decorations, background, ...) I regularly reach the point in
   time where kwin misbehaves. All windows are placed at the top border
   of the screen. You can move them left/right and enlarge them, but you
   can't move them away from the upper screen border. After that, this
   behavior is 'stable', i.e. logging out and in leads to the same
   style of window positioning.
   I was unable to identify/isolate where this misbehavior comes from.
   Has anybody else already reported this behavior? I'm also not sure
   whether this stems from KDE/kwin or from my qt build. I had some
   trouble building qt-3.3.4 with the gccfss compiler, maybe this is the
   reason. I tried several other ways to build qt but finally wasn't
   successful.

Kind regards from Germany

  Heiko Falk

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Dr. Heiko Falk

University of Dortmund
Department of Computer Science 12 (Embedded Systems Group)
Otto-Hahn-Strasse 16, Room E-19

44221 Dortmund
Germany


Phone:  +49 231 755 6124
Fax:    +49 231 755 6116
Mail:   Heiko.Falk at udo.edu
WWW:    http://ls12-www.cs.uni-dortmund.de/~falk
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