Installing Kst from Source

The following sections detail how to compile and install Kst from source code.

Requirements

Kst v1.10.0 requires the KDE 3.4 libraries and Qt™ 3.3. Almost all major Linux® distributions have packages for KDE and Qt™. Since Qt™ is a dependency of KDE, having the required version of KDE should be sufficient. It is recommended that you refer to your particular distribution's documentation for KDE library installation. Note that the entire KDE desktop environment is not required — in most cases, look for packages called kdebase-* and kdelibs-*. Alternatively, more information is available on the KDE website.

Optional Libraries and Packages

The following libraries and packages are optional, but provide full plugin and data source functionality in Kst if installed. Installation/Download instructions for the packages are given on the linked websites.

Note

You may already have some or all of these libraries and packages installed, in which case there is no need to reinstall them. Also, check first to see if pre-compiled binaries for the libraries and packages exist in your distribution's package management system, as it may be easier to install these packages.

Library	Description
GSL	The GNU Scientific Library (GSL) provides a variety of mathematical operations for the built-in Kst plugins. Having GSL installed enables a variety of plugins such as linear and non-linear fitting, correlation, and interpolation.
CFITSIO	CFITSIO provides support for reading and writing to the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) data format. This is required by all of the datasources which use FITS (currently HEALPix, LFIIO, and WMAP)
CDF	The Common Data Format (CDF) library is required to read files with the CDF datasource
netCDF	The network Common Data Form (netCDF) library is required to read files with the netCDF datasource
muParser	The muParser library is required to use the non-linear fitting plugin.

Compiling and Installing

Once all of the prerequisites have been met on your system you can compile and install Kst. It is assumed that you have already downloaded the Kst source package. If not, please see Obtaining Kst.

The simplest way to install Kst is:

  tar -zxvf kst-version.tar.gz
  cd kst-version
  ./configure --prefix=`kde-config --prefix`
  make
  make install

replacing version with the version of Kst you have.

Important

Note that kde-config --prefix is surrounded by backquotes. It is very important that the kde-config utility returns the correct path (most likely /usr), otherwise Kst will not install properly. You can double-check by running it directly:

kde-config --prefix

Ensure that a non-null path is displayed.

You can read through the messages displayed by the configure script — if it reports any missing libraries (such as GSL) that should not be missing, please go back and ensure that the libraries and header files have been correctly installed in the appropriate locations.