Kile - an Integrated LaTeX Editing Environment

Help

Browse the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section or read about compiling Kile on Linux/BSD systems.

FAQ

I don't have root privileges, can I still install Kile?
Kile complains about "LOG/DVI/PS/PDF file not found" error.
Kile becomes unresponsive and slow after a while.

Q: I don't have root privileges, can I still install Kile?

Yes, you can install Kile in your home directory. You will have to compile and install Kile from source. Instructions for doing so can be found here.

Q: Kile complains about LOG/DVI/PS/PDF file not found.

This is an old bug, it happens sometimes after upgrading from an old version of Kile. You need to restore Kile to its default settings. The easiest way to do this is to remove your own settings. First close Kile then open a Konsole and type
rm $HOME/.kde/share/config/kilerc Then start Kile to activate the default settings.

Q: Kile becomes unresponsive and slow after a while.

For some systems the autosave feature triggers a bug in the underlying filesystem used or in the KDE libraries. The easiest way is to turn off autosave in the Settings->Configure Kile dialog.

In the same way the LyX server emulation also gave problems for users having their home folder on a remote buggy AFS filesystem. This feature can be turned off in the Settings->Configure Kile dialog as well.

How to compile Kile for Linux/BSD

This section describes how to compile Kile for KDE4 locally, for testing purposes for example. If you want to perform a system-wide installation, it is strongly recommended to install Kile via your distribution's package management system.

Be prepared!

Installing Kile is not difficult, but if you do not have the right software installed, you will find that it is impossible to do. To compile Kile you will need:

KDE Libraries 4.2 or better. Be sure to check that the KDE development packages are also installed if you have not compiled the KDE libraries yourself. KDE libraries 4.4 (or better) are required for enabling additional functionality in Kile.
Qt 4.5 or better. Here too, you have to ensure that the Qt development package is installed.
CMake 2.6.2 or better
a recent C++ compiler, for example GCC 4.4

Get the source!

Get the released source code either from the download section (or from KDE's Subversion repository as described here). Then for the released source code extract the tar ball using (for kile-2.1.tar.bz2):
tar jxf kile-2.1.tar.bz2 or (for kile-2.1.tar.gz)
tar zxf kile-2.1.tar.gz

Start compiling!

It is recommended to create a special directory which will contain the Kile executable and related files. In that way it is easier to upgrade Kile.

We assume in the following that the directory $HOME/kile-install is used for that purpose. If you do not want to use a separate directory, you can also install Kile into the local KDE directory for your user, which is named $HOME/.kde usually. The different steps for compiling Kile are now as follows:

First change to the kile-2.1 directory
cd kile-2.1 Then create a build directory and configure the build system:
mkdir build cd build cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/kile-install -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Debug" This will install Kile into the directory $HOME/kile-install later on.

If CMake finished successfully you should run
make -j 2 and then (after a while) install Kile
make install -j 2

Run Kile!

You can start Kile with the following command:
KDEDIRS=$HOME/kile-install:$KDEDIRS $HOME/kile-install/bin/kile