I am compelled to thank all of those involved with Linux from Scratch and the BLFS project for the excellent instructions provided for the building of KDE-4.9.1. I've been building KDE since the version 1.0 days and was fairly accomplished with the KDE 3 series to the extent that I was -- almost -- able to do it by rote memory.

KDE4 is a whole 'nother world and is a daunting task even for someone like me that's been comfortable with building from source for a long time. The BLFS step-by-step guidelines made this major undertaking both pleasurable and a great learning experience. There's no way I could have tracked down the vast chain of dependencies for this complex desktop environment and determined what tweaks were needed to each package to have all the pieces fit together so perfectly.

I really appreciate the hard work (and the smart work) done by the LFS/BLFS crew to make KDE-4.9.1 come together so well...by scratch!

It is quite a learning experience, congrats to you on your accomplishments including gentoo

Thanks for the kind reply. I go back to the SLS and TAMU distribution era ("when men were men and wrote their own device drivers..." as Linus phrased it). While I do often like the pragmatism afforded by the high abstraction level of Ubuntu, CentOS and other prepackaged distros, the sheer joy of rolling it all by hand is indeed thrilling. There's generally some frustration along the way but that which doesn't kill me only makes me more ornery stronger.

Gentoo is a nice compromise between between the fully-packaged systems and I sometimes revert to using ebuild to observe the steps in a more granular fashion than emerge. That said, the satisfaction that comes from the greater involvement intrinsic to the LFS/BLFS/CLFS/CBLFS approach does take me back to some twenty years ago when Linus unleashed his marvel on the world and we had to leap the hurdles of jump tables when creating shared libraries of the old a.out-based systems.

I tried to install gentoo didn't get too far. I got stuck at"USE" never got a bootable system, with LFS atleast I can boot into it.