I had been wanting to get a better terminal for OS X since … well, since starting with OS X several years ago. I prefer the Linux terminals: gnome-terminal or konsole. Much more elegant.

I had also tried, without much diligence, to install GNOME and/or KDE on my Mac using Fink and DarwinPorts. Neither with success.

Finally had some success today, as I decided not to take errors for an ultimate answer. Spent a lot of [fruitless] time on Google with lots of conflicting advice from newsgroups, faqs, etc.

Here’s what worked for me, for posterity:

Running OS 10.3.9 with Apple’s X11 server.

Had to uninstall the X11 placeholders in Fink using:

 % sudo dpkg -r --force-all system-xfree86 \ 
system-xfree86-42 system-xfree86-43 
 % sudo fink selfupdate
 % sudo fink index

Then re-install Apple’s X11 and X11 SDK. The latter is on the XCode CD; the former on CD 3 of the OS X installer set.

Then a simple:

 % sudo fink install bundle-kde

just worked.

And voila!

Update:

Alas, I can’t seem to copy/paste between Konsole and my native OS X apps. Something about the paste buffer that Konsole uses. Specifically, I can copy from Konsole, but not paste into it.

Bummer.