Does anybody have any experience installing the KDE for Windows port?

I come from a Linux/Unix development background and my latest job uses a Windows XP based development environment. I find that I'm missing a lot of functionality that I got used to when working with Linux and KDE 4. Particularly the Konsole application. I noticed that there is a beta of KDE 4 with several ports of KDE applications for Windows XP/Vista/7. Does anybody here have any experience with these 开发者_运维技巧ports?

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Konsole is not available as part of the Windows KDE port, because Windows doesn't provide the Unix "pseudo terminal" (pty) interface that terminal emulators need to communicate with the programs running in them. For that, you need Cygwin (or one of the other Unix layers for Windows, but I'm not aware of KDE ports for them). Cygwin of course also gives you all the usual Unix command line utilities.

The Cygwin distro itself does not provide KDE, but an additional package collection called Cygwin Ports does. This includes Konsole. You'll need an X server, with x.org provided by Cygwin being the obvious choice.

Note, however, that getting the X server and KDE working with Cygwin requires quite a bit more fiddling than it does with the likes of Kubuntu or OpenSuse. For something simpler, although lacking tabs, you might want to have a look at Cygwin's mintty, which is an xterm-compatible terminal with a native Windows user interface that doesn't require an X server.