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QuadKonsole on KDE4

Under KDE 3 I’ve made major use of the wonderful quadkonsole, from Simon Perreault. It’s a lovely thing, allowing you to embed 4 (by default, other permutations possible) konsoles in a single window, with them all resizing together. Kinda hard to explain, but very useful in some situations.

KDE 4 comes along and, finally, is about ready for day to day use. Many improvements, some drawbacks, but on balance I’m now ready to use it in anger for real work. The KDE 4 konsole is quite nice. And it even pretends that it can do something similar to quadkonsole. Which it can only very very slightly.

So us KDE 3 quadkonsolers demand that quadkonsole run under KDE 4! And so it does…. read on.

Well, it does with a little jiggery-pokery. Here’s an overview of the steps to follow, performed on an install of Kubuntu 8.10 (updated from 8.04) I’ve not detailed every last URL and command - email me if you get stuck:

• Get the code tarball from Simon’s page (link above)
• Unzip/untar. Running “configure”, though, will fail miserably.
• The configure fails since the KDE 3 development libs are missing.
• apt-get install kdelibs4-dev
• This installs the dev libs for KDE 3 and deinstalls various dev libs for KDE 4
• You should now be able to configure, make, make install no problem.
• quadkonsole will not yet run, though.
• First, undo the damage from above: apt-get install kdelibs5-dev
• This will deinstall kdelibs4-dev and reinstall the stuff you chucked out earlier.
• Now go find a .deb for Ubuntu KDE 3 konsole. e.g. http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/konsole
• Unpack it (using “ar -x packagename.deb”, or even KDE’s own ark tool), then untar the data portion and locate the libkonsolepart.* files in usr/lib/
• Copy them to /usr/lib/kde3/
• ldconfig
• Run quadkonsole

Hopefully there’s enough there to get you going. I’m guessing that the average quadkonsole user is probably not totally afraid of the cli! If nothing else, it might assure you that you can get quadkonsole working under KDE 4 relatively easily.