Basic Installation
==================

        KDE uses the cmake build system. The simple instructions for
building kopete are these commands (starting in kopete source directory):

                        mkdir build && cd build
                        cmake ..
                        make
                        make install

        This will not work unless necessary prerequisites are met. These are,
in the order in which they should be built:

                        kdesupport
                        kdelibs
                        kdepimlibs
                        kdebase/runtime

        Various components of kopete and the KDE modules listed above have
other dependencies as well. If these are not met when the 'cmake' command is
run, those components will not be built. The output of 'cmake' should make it
clear what these dependencies are and how to meet them.

	Arguments can be given to cmake similar to those given to a traditional
configure script, like the install prefix. See 'cmake --help-full' for more
information. For example, 'configure --prefix=/usr/lib' translates to
'cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/lib'.

Finding Plugins
===============
If you don't see any "plugins" listed in the Configure Plugins
dialog, or the list of messaging protocols in the Add Account Wizard
is empty after installing, Kopete you may have installed it in a
directory where KDE doesn't look for additional resources like plugins.

It's also possible that you've just been too impatient :)

Kopete installs several .desktop files that have to be processed by a
KDE application called 'kbuildsycoca4'. If you run Kopete directly
after installing it this process might still be running and Kopete
doesn't see the new plugins yet. Try running 'kbuildsycoca4' from a
console and restart Kopete when it finishes. If that doesn't help,
please read on.

KDE applications by default look in all directories listed in the
/etc/kderc file, the $KDEDIRS environment variable, in $KDEDIR if
this variable doesn't exist, and ultimately in the directory where
kdelibs is installed. Unless you take special precautions applications
will _NOT_ look in other directories, even if you install additional
software (like Kopete) there.

The best solution is to add the following to /etc/kderc (create the file
if it doesn't exist yet):

    [Directories]
    prefixes=/the/prefix/I/used/for/kopete

If you don't have write access to /etc/kderc, or if you want to use more
parallel builds of KDE and/or Kopete you need to rely on the environment
variables instead.

If $KDEDIRS currently points to /opt/kde4 and you installed Kopete
to /usr/local then you need to set $KDEDIRS to '/opt/kde4:/usr/local'.
You need to store this change in a file that is picked up by all shells
and for all users, like /etc/profile. The name of the preferred version
varies from system to system.

As a last resort you can simply install Kopete in the same directory as
where your KDE resides by adding a flag to configure like

    cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/lib

if KDE is installed in /opt/kde4. The downside is that you'll probably
end up installing Kopete into directories used by your distribution,
instead of a separate path for your own packages like the /usr/local/
tree. Whether or not your package manager has problems with that and
whether or not you'll accept those problems should they occur is of
course up to you to decide, but we strongly recommend to not install
source-compiled packages like Kopete in directories that are managed
by a package manager and only use the KDE prefix if you compiled all
of KDE from source yourself.
