Sabayon Nostalgia

I came across a post made by Jeff Hoogland on his blog back in March. I never was much of a KDE user myself, but I recall how fast and stable it was in early Sabayon 3.

If you didn know it yet, KDE 3 has been removed from Gentoo Portage tree a while back. Same goes for Qt version 3 and the qt3 useflag.
Being removed from Portage tree does not mean it isn’t available anymore, actually, it still is and is being maintained too!

Everything got moved out tree into the sunset overlay.

I went ahead investigate what it would take to get it running on a current Sabayon 6 installation.

Sync Portage tree and add the sunset overlay:

emerge --sync
layman -a kde-sunset

Now I noticed that so far the only “big” change would be that I needed avahi from kde-sunset overlay. Since kdelibs:3.5 has a dependency on avahi with qt3 useflag.

Look at /etc/portage/package.use and add the qt3 useflag to the avahi entry so it looks like this:
net-dns/avahi howl-compat mdnsresponder-compat dbus gdbm -gtk python autoipd -qt4 qt3

Now we can go ahead and merge kde-base/kdebase-startkde. I tend to always install this one instead of kde-meta. It makes a nice minimal KDE installation.

Remember that you can use Entropy to install additional build tools, to keep as much insync with Entropy.

emerge -av kdebase-startkde:3.5

And there you have it!

Notice the :3.5 I used here. This is NOT a version it is a SLOT.

If you later want to install additional KDE 3.5 programs, e.g. ksnapshot or konsole do it like this:
emerge -av konsole:3.5
emerge -av ksnapshot:3.5

For Entropy users:
Mask avahi, otherwise Entropy will pull in the Entropy version (without the qt3 flag enabeld/available)
equo mask avahi
Finally sync Entropy database, so it is aware of the changes you made:
equo rescue spmsync