tde-packaging-gentoo/Documentation

This is now the official trinity Gentoo overlay from the TDE team.

Currently it only supports the latest master branch, which means live version, which is R14.1.x as of writing, which some TDE team members are using in private life too, so it should be not perfect, but stable for the most part and also Gentoo users are very invited to test and reports bugs to TGW and so to be some part of TDE. This choice is also made because of realism that otherwise the maintaince burden would be most likely too hard for this overlay. So it is better to support one version, but that good instead of mutiple versions which are more likely to break here and there.

But there are also efforts to support the stable branch of TDE (R14.0.x - R14.0.7 as of writing), if someone is willing to help with that. The support of v3.5.x was removed completely with the clean up progress, because it is too old now.

This overlay is largely based on the very good and hard work of Fat-Zer (fatzer2@gmail.com) who created and maintained this overlay many years, to a time when Gentoo users had no other choice, because Gentoo devs don't wanted to support TDE (which they resist to do so still) and TDE had no official overlay for Gentoo users. It also tries to be some central place, in which all goods of other floating around TDE overlays should be centralized. So everyone is welcome to contribute to it, just with creating some PR in TGW.

Please don't report bugs to Gentoo bugzilla or Fat-Zer and instead of this, report issues to the tde-packages-gentoo repo at TGW.

The overlay will be filled with ebuilds of ported to CMake programs from the Trinity Project mainly and that is the goal, but while CMake conversion is still in work and will be for some time, it will most likely offer also ebuilds of TDE applications not already converted to CMake and using autotools instead.

Another goal is to offer also custom versions of specific libraries like libsdl or xine-lib, with added support for TDE and aRts, for example, which is deactivated from the official Gentoo ebuilds or preserve ebuilds related to TDE and/or TQt, which were removed from Portage. So the hope is, we can get the good old user experience of a KDE3 (now TDE) based Gentoo system back and get back control, like it was until 2008.

While the goal is that this overlay works out the box without any problems, there can't be any guarantee for that and you might expect some problems from time to time, if there are Gentoo or TDE specific changes, for example. If so, you are free to open some issue in TGW to the tde-packaging-gentoo repo about that and maybe the problem can be fixed in some time.

If you are interested in ebuilds for some packages that are not in the overlay or you have any fixes, you can create some PR in TGW and if your work is good, the ebuilds can be added. Also *any* help, from every Gentoo user loving TDE will be highly appreciated. You can also join the TDE IRC channel to get in touch with Chris, if you need any further help or want to help out with this overlay.

Some guideline for this overlay is: Freedom of choice for everything. There should be in no case any forced or hardcoded USE flags, to build in any optional support some Gentoo users don't want to have or want on their systems. All building options TDE is offering, should be reflected in this overlay.


How to add this overlay to Gentoo and install TDE?

Just use:

layman -o https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/tde-packaging-gentoo/raw/branch/master/Documentation/overlay.xml -f -a trinity-official

Add all keywords from the "trinity.live.keywords" file to your setup, so the packages can be installed without any problems. If there are still missing ones, just add them too.

After that just run "emerge -av trinity-base/tdebase-meta", which should pull in all you need to end up with a slim TDE desktop, just like in good old Gentoo KDE3 days. If you need more, just look what the overlay offers at the moment and have fun.

If you want to use TDM (KDM replacement of TDE), just don't forget to change "/etc/conf.d/xdm" to use "tdm".


Re-building TDE:

From time to time it is an good idea to update your TDE install, because as it is build from master branch, there are changes nearly every day. If you don't know how this changes are related and your last re-build was some time ago, the best is to rebuild tde full. You can simply do that with the following chain of commands. First make sure you have emerged "gentoolkit" and use that command that should re-build nearly all TDE related packages:

"emerge --oneshot tqt && emerge --oneshot tqtinterface && emerge --oneshot arts && emerge --oneshot tdelibs && emerge -a --oneshot `equery depends tdelibs|awk '{print " ="$1}'`"

Updating translations of TDE

The good thing about the live ebuilds is, you can always install the latest translations, if you have some active translator for your language working on TDE, you can instantly profit from that new translations.

Just use: "emerge --oneshot tde-i18n"

With that, you will have the latest translations at least for all the TDE core stuff, like tdebase, tdegraphics, tdenetwork and so on.


Working at TDE under Gentoo:

That above is also just some example of how handy it can be to use Gentoo also for TDE development. Maybe you want to contribute to TDE and work on some things? You can profit instantly from your work, if the work was already merged. Just rebuild that package and enjoy! If you want to fix or add some translations, you can join TWTW (https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/weblate) and some days later, you can enjoy your changes on your system already after re-building the tde-i18n package.