&Jack.H.Ostroff; &Jack.H.Ostroff.mail;
2014-08-30
4.7.01

# Installation

This appendix primarily addresses the installation of &kappname; under the &Linux; operating system. The final section addresses other operating systems.

## How to obtain &kappname;

&kappname; has existed for a number of years, and we have worked very hard on full integration into &kde;. The earliest stable versions (1.0.x) required libraries from &kde; 3, and so were not available in many Linux distributions, which had already migrated to &kde; 4. However, with the release of version 4.5 in August 2010, &kappname; could be easily compiled and installed on any version of &kde; 4.3 or higher. The current version, 4.7, requires &kde; 4.6, specifically kdelibs and kdepimlibs.

Although work has begun porting &kappname; to the new KDE Frameworks 5, this is still very early, and not yet usable. Hopefully it will be available in the 5.0 version, which we expect to release in early 2015. Until then, if you are specifically interested in following this work, you should subscribe to the developers mailing list &devlist;.

The rest of this section will describe installing &kappname; using the standard software installation process for your Linux distribution. The following section will discuss compiling from source.

### Official Distribution Packages

The best way to install &kappname; is to use the package manager of your distribution, such as apt-get, yum, portage, or pacman. This will take care of all the dependencies and required libraries. Although it takes some time after the release a new version of &kappname; for all the distributions to add it to their official repositories, please check there first.

### Unsupported Repositories

Many Linux distributions have users who provide unsupported repositories that offer more up-to-date packages than the distributions' official repositories. A list of these may be found at the &kappname; home page.

## Compiling &kappname; from Source

More up-to-date information on the latest available version and any known installation issues will be available on the &kappname; home page. That page will also have links to tarballs of recent versions as well as instructions for obtaining the source from &kde; Git, in case you want to compile the latest, development version.

As the previous paragraph implied, there are two distinct reasons to compile &kappname; from source. If you cannot find a version specifically packaged for your distribution, please download the tarball of the most recent stable release. This is version 4.6.0 as of the time this is being written. This is the compile option recommended for normal users.

On the other hand, if you want to see the current state of development, to check out a recent bug fix or new feature, you can download a tarball which is a snapshot of the development repository. You can also check the source directly out of the repository. The version 4.x source is in &kde; Git. (The version 1.0.x source was in SourceForge cvs, but it is no longer being developed or supported at all.) Instructions for access are on the project home page.

The code in the Git repository and in development snapshots is under active development: it may have bugs, it may crash, and it may mess up or lose data. If you use it, be absolutely sure to make adequate backups. Unless you have a good reason to use this, stick to a stable released version.

### Required libraries

&kappname; depends on certain libraries in order to compile and run properly. First is KDE version 4.3.5 or later, specifically kdelibs and kdepimlibs. Depending on your distribution, you may need to explicitly load the -devel versions in order to compile &kappname;, rather than just running a pre-compiled version. As of version 4.6.0, &kappname; also depends on libalkimia, version 4.3.1 or higher. Additional requirements may be detected during the cmake step below.

Additional functionality can be obtained if extra libraries are available at compile time. The two most common are

- libofx, version 0.9.4 or higher, to be able to import financial data in the OFX format, and

- AqBanking, version 5.0.0 or higher, to be able to use certain on-line banking features. Note that version 5.0.14 or higher is strongly recommended, due to bugs in earlier versions.

### Build instructions

&kappname; uses the cmake build system. Further information can be found in the README.cmake file in the root folder of the source. The basic steps are the following:

- `$ mkdir build`
- `$ cd build`
- `$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/`
- `$ make`
- `$ sudo make install/fast`

Note that the last step is required. &kappname; expects to find certain components in standard locations, and if you run it from within the build directory without the install step, you will have missing icons or other surprises.

If you have compiled the source from git, and want to update to the latest revision, most of the time you can do the following:

- `$ cd <path to root of source>`
- `$ git pull --rebase`
- `$ cd build`
- `$ make`
- `$ sudo make install/fast`

However, changes made by the developers sometimes cause compile problems if you do not start with a clean code base. In these cases, you need to do the following:

- `$ cd <path to root of source>`
- `$ git pull --rebase`
- `$ rm -r build`
- `$ mkdir build`
- `$ cd build`
- `$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/`
- `$ make`
- `$ sudo make install/fast`

## Installing &kappname; without Linux

&kappname; has been successfully compiled for &MacOS; X, and is available at the MacPorts web site.

&kappname; is also available for &Windows;. This initiative is still a work in progress, but great improvements have been made in the past year. For more information about running &kde;, including &kappname; on &Windows; see the KDE on Windows Initiative page. For a standalone installer that only installs &kappname; see the download link on the right of the &kappname; home page. Note that the most recent version of this installer no longer works on &Windows; XP. At the time of this release, it was not known if this could be changed, as the issue was related to the tools used to build the application, not the application itself.

If you know of &kappname; being successfully compiled and made available for any other operating system, please let us know, so we can spread the word.