It’s been a while since I last played with the neat LEGO briks, but I still love them; with such a title this post could talk about Irregular Web Comic or Legostar Galactica two of my favourite webcomics, both of which uses LEGO characters and LEGO scenes (well, IWC only on some themes, but that’s well enough I suppose 🙂 ), but I’m not going to talk about those, I can just say “give them a try”, you won’t be disappointed.
A couple of days ago, I noticed the KLDraw program on KDE-Apps, the screenshot is neat, and I wanted to try it.
Today I found some free time and decided it was worth trying getting an ebuild ready.
The good news is that’s a pretty standard KDE package so I had no trouble to create an ebuild for it, the bad news is that it needs the parts library from the ldraw project that’s not Free Software. I also had a hard time to figure out what the latest version of the parts library was, as it has a lot of “Updates” packages, and a single complete package that’s not versioned at all.
Now, if you get my overlay, you’ll find two ebuilds, one for ldraw-parts and one for kldraw, the first has fetch restriction (you can find the license in the proper licenses/ directory) and will require you to rename the downloaded tarball.
Unfortunately, even after doing this, I had some trouble, as one of the four views does not appear at all, and the 3D thumbnails on the parts selection don’t appear at all, and I get a long series of error coming from Qt/GLX.. I’m not really sure what the problem is, I’ll have to check kldraw on Gentoo/FreeBSD and see if there it works (using the non masked version of mesa and a different video driver).
Who knows, maybe in a couple of years I’ll be able to give to my nephew for his birthday a custom LEGO construction set.
