after a multitude of (highly unsuccessful) attempts to compile and install kde 4 from source using the directions at techbase (everything would build fine, but i would encounter strange errors upon login and plasma was broken), i finally decided to format an i686 machine i had kicking around with arch and install the kdemod4 testing packages.

if you use arch linux, then chances are you've become accustomed to relying on the command line for package management. pacman is, after all, a very robust and powerful package manager, and definitely one of the distribution's strongest features. unfortunately, it also lacks decent gui frontends. i'm new to arch and the first thing i found is that most of the current frontends to pacman are either discontinued or highly confusing, so i've decided to take matters into my own hands.