Are you me? I just posted the same thing above. I attempted to get KDE working during my freshman year of college (2004-2005) on what was either a high end P4 or Athlon X2, it would spend 10-15 hours compiling X and then break, leaving me no clue what to do but I went from using Ubuntu for about 5 months to a stage 2 Gentoo installation. I never did get it working.