There have been a number of conflicting suggestions about problems with compiling KDE apps, and I suspect the various suggestions/thoughts may be right for different configurations. However, as it now stands, it is not clear what the problem many people seem to be having, or what the solution is. Some say "there's a bug", the packagers say "no, there's not".
I have read /usr/share/doc/libqt3-mt/README-Debian.gz, and tried the various suggestions there, but the problem doesn't seem to be addressed. However, I am not a coder, and really know nothing about how compiling programs work, so probably wouldn't know the solution if I read it somewhere. I also want to say that this is (for me, in any case) not a big issue; the KDE debs made available by Ralf are fabulous, work great, and have made a big difference for anyone wanting to run KDE on a stable machine. If I can't compile the one or two programs not available through ktown.kde.org, I don't really care. So, rather than griping, I figure the least I can do is try to digest some of the information on the list to help sort out what appears to be a fairly common problem. Here's what I can gather to date: First, I am still not sure which QT development packages need to be installed to compile KDE3 applications. There are two, mutually exclusive packages - libqt3-mt-dev, and libqt3-dev. They conflict, and installing either one will remove the other. The description for libqt3-dev says it is deprecated in favour of libqt3-mt-dev; to quote: WARNING: The nonthreaded version of Qt3 is considered deprecated and may disappear anytime in the future. Please use libqt3-mt instead I assume this means: Install libqt3-mt-dev instead of libqt3-dev Second, when I (and several others) install the current 3.1.2 version of the libqt3-mt-dev package (libqt3-mt-dev_3.1.2-0woody1_i386.deb), it creates the following symlinks in /usr/share/qt3/lib: libqt-mt.so --> ../../../lib/libqt-mt.so.3.1.1 libqt-mt.so.3 --> ../../../lib/libqt-mt.so.3.1.1 libqt-mt.so.3.1 --> ../../../lib/libqt-mt.so.3.1.1 libqt.so.3 --> ../../../lib/libqt.so.3.1.1 libqt.so.3.1 --> ../../../lib/libqt.so.3.1.1 These all point to /usr/lib. However, there is no *.so.3.1.1 in /usr/lib; the file names there are *.so.3.1.2. This would explain why people who experience the above behaviour cannot compile anything, as configure cannot find the qt development libraries. Changing the symlinks to point to ../../../lib/libqt.so.3.1.2 seems to work for most people (though it doesn't for me, I expect there is something else wrong with my system). So the next question is: Is there a bug in libqt3-mt-dev, in that the symlinks in /usr/share/qt3/lib point to the wrong place?? Bruce