Compiling from source

First, download and install development packages for KDE, Qt, and X11. Those should be available in your distribution, for example in Debian the package names are kdelibs4-dev, libqt3-mt-dev and xlibs-dev. You may need other development packages as well.

Getting sources

Official release

Download the latest .tar.bz2 from the Files section of KPlayer project at SourceForge. Then extract it

tar xjf kplayer-0.6.2.tar.bz2

The code will be in the kplayer-0.6.2 subdirectory

cd kplayer-0.6.2

Current CVS

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@kplayer.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/kplayer login

and hit Enter if it asks for a password. Then download the code

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@kplayer.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/kplayer co -P kplayer

The code will be in the kplayer subdirectory

cd kplayer

Compile, install, run

Create the configure script

make -f Makefile.dist

and run it

./configure --prefix `kde-config --prefix`

If at this point you are getting errors about missing libraries, you will probably need to install more development packages from your distribution. The configure script is very verbose, you will be able to tell which package you need from its output. If you need even more information, look in the config.log file. You will need to go to the bottom and then scroll a page or two up to get to the point where it reported the error. If everything fails, ask for help on the KPlayer user forum. Do not forget to include the full output of configure and the config.log file.

Once configure succeeds, compile the code

make

If this step fails, you can again ask for help on the KPlayer user forum providing the full output of make.

Once make finishes, install the program

su -c 'make install'

and run it

kplayer

This last command will also produce quite verbose output on your console. This is the output you need to send in if you ever submit a bug report or ask for help.

Notes

Mandrake 10

At least some Mandrake 10 versions put libGL.la in the wrong place, so if the configure script cannot find it, you will have to create a symbolic link

ln -s /usr/lib/libGL.la /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.la

Ales Tosovsky wrote a detailed HOWTO in Czech about compiling KPlayer on Mandrake 10 and translated it into English.

Fedora Core 2 on x86_64

Fred successfully compiled KPlayer on x86_64 using Fedora Core 2 and 2.6.6-1.435.2.3smp kernel. Here is how he ran configure:

./configure --prefix=`kde-config --prefix` --enable-libsuffix=64 --with-qt-includes=/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/include --with-qt-libraries=/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/lib

all on one line of course.