Introduction
KMess can be installed through several channels:
- The KMess Installer package.
- Official packages supplied by your own distribution/vendor.
- Compiled from source code.
Each method has it's own advantages. We recommend to use the 'KMess Installer' package from our download page, as it always contains the most recent version of KMess.
Using the KMess Installer
The KMess Installer package works on every x86 Linux system. It only needs a KDE version of 3.2 or higher. Please follow the instructions to install the package. It's worth mentioning the installer has a user-friendly look.
Installing from source code
Installation from source code is more difficult, as it may require some troubleshooting during the installation process. This is only needed when a binary package is not available, or doesn't support the system you use. All binary packages at the download page are also created from the source package.
System preparation
Before a Linux system is able to install from source, a few additional packages need to be installed:
- make
- gcc-c++
- autoconf
- automake
At most Linux systems, each package has a separate "dev" or "devel" package too. Use your package-manager to find the following packages, and install them:
- qt-devel (can also be called qt3-devel)
- kdelibs-devel (can also be called kdelibs3-devel, kdelibs4-devel on Debian/Ubuntu)
- x-devel (can also be called xfree-devel/xorg-x11-devel/xorg-devel)
- libstdc++-devel
You might need some creativity here, the package names differ slightly between Linux distributions.
It's very like you'll be prompted to install the dependencies of these packages. If this doesn't happen, make sure you have the following packages installed as well:
- fontconfig-devel
- freetype2-devel
- libfam-devel (or fam-devel)
- libjpeg-devel
- libpng-devel
- zlib-devel
- libart_lgpl-devel
Extract the source package
After you've downloaded the source package, extract it with:
tar zxvf kmess-1.5.1.tar.gz
Then navigate to the newly created directory:
cd kmess-1.5.1/
Starting the compilation
This step translates the KMess source code to a runnable program. Run the following commands to compile KMess:
./configure make
The first command verifies your system. It stops if a required package cannot be found. This often happens when you forgot to install the accompanied "devel" package.
The second command builds the application. This step could take 10-20 minutes, depending on your system. When this command completes you'll have a runnable program at:
./kmess/kmess
Installing
It's finally possible to install! Run the following command. It will ask for your root password first.
su -c 'make install'
Alternatively, you can use checkinstall to install the application instead. This makes it easier to uninstall KMess later. Using checkinstall, the installation becomes:
su -c 'checkinstall'
Building a KMess package
The rpmbuild command is suitable for distibutions using the RPM package format. This includes distributions like SuSE, Mandriva, Redhat and Fedora. A KMess RPM package can be created with the command:
rpmbuild -tb kmess-<version>.tar.gz
The rpmbuild command runs a full source-based installation, but builds a package instead of installing KMess. The final package can be found in a subfolder of /usr/src/packages/ or /usr/src/rpm/. You can use that package to install KMess.
If you have a clean, newly-installed system, without any KDE upgrades, you can share the package with others. Make sure users can always download the source package too, as required by the GPL license. However, we recommend to use our KMess Installer whenever possible.
Tip: when you install the autopackage-devel tools before building the RPM package, the rpm spec script uses apbuild to create a cleaner binary.