Cannot start KDE apps

[Ian Wadham]

Hi everybody,

On my new Macbook Pro 15 inch with Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6.7
I installed Macports and proceeded to try installing kdegames4.  What
else?  I am a KDE Games developer and would like to see how my
apps look and play on a Mac ... :-)

After one false start, trying to do it all in one "port" command, I decided
to go step by step and install the major dependencies one port  command
at a time (qt-mac, kdelibs4, etc.).  That all succeeded after several hours,
but now none of the installed apps will start.

I followed the post-installation advice in http://mac.kde.org/?id=build
which is also replayed on Mac's Terminal after every KDE install by
Macports.  i.e. start Dbus with launchctl, chown the Preferences/KD
folder to ownership and open the kdeinit4.app in a Terminal.  No
luck.  KDE apps load but immediately crash.

The attempt to start Dbus gives the message 'nothing found to load'.
I looked in /Library/LaunchAgents/ and yes, there is no file in there
called org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist on my system.  Also
kdeinit4.app produced no output at all (failed silently, as they say),
but there is executable code at /Applications/Macports/KDE4.  I
also looked in ~/Library/Preferences/KDE.  It is owned by me and
contains links to places in /var.  Those places and the links are
also owned by me.

I think the problem is the missing .plist file for Dbus, but what should
be there and what contents should it have?

Re the false start with Macports: I did sudo port -v install kdegames4 +Docs
but it got stuck for an hour or two in evaluating dependencies and
kept filling the screen with dots.  So I killed it with Ctrl-C and did
sudo port clean kdegames4.  I hope that did not do any damage.

All the best,
Ian Wadham.