Installing Yakuake quake-like drop-down terminal, Suitable for both Gnome and KDE

[Quantumboredom]

Hello. New RHEL/SL user and I don't have much experience with GNU/Linux either, but one of the first things I like to install is a quake-style drop-down terminal. Frankly I can't imagine how anyone that uses the command line more than once a week do without it. The three most often mentioned as far as I can see are Yakuake (KDE), Guake (Gnome) and Tilda (Gnome?).

Anyway I was searching for ways to install such a program, but I couldn't find it in any of the major third party repositories, nor did I find any guides for installing any of them.

It turns out that the more gnome-ish of them (Guake and Tilda) have some dependency problems (dependence on gtk+ >= 2.0). However it turns out that Yakuake has all its dependencies met in the official repositories, so we only have to build it ourselves (which is easy). Yakuake works great in Gnome too even though it's a KDE application.

So in case anyone else is interested (and for my own reference as well), here's how to install Yakuake and set it to autostart, so that F12 brings down a beautiful console.

1. Install some dependencies:
yum install gcc gcc-c++ make cmake kdebase kdelibs-devel

2. Download yakuake source from KDE-Apps.org. I've tested this with Yakuake 2.9.8 on Scientific Linux 6.1. Download and save yakuake-2.9.8.tar.bz2 somewhere.

3. Follow instructions in README. In this example I'm installing to my home directory by setting the install prefix, but you can install where you like.
tar xaf yakuake-2.9.8.tar.bz2
cd yakuake-2.9.8
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/bin/yakuake/ ../
make
make install
(You may have to be root when installing, depending on prefix I think).

4. Set yakuake to start automatically, for example in gnome: System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications.

And that's it! I've just been using it for a few hours but I've encountered no problems.

[redman]

Thanks for posting

[faramir29]

Thanks a lot dude!! It works perfectly on Centos 6.2

[joutlan]

Thanks Quantum for the contri.....I too have always liked that program

[brainz]

On my Scientific Linux 6.1 machine,I just had to install kdebase-devel to get the cmake to work properly.

CODE

(as root) yum install kdebase-devel

Then this installation worked perfectly.