Qt4 does not respect DESTDIR= for installing as a user, but it accepts INSTALL_ROOT= for the same purpose.

It is tempting to build it with -no-qt3support to cut down on the vast amount of things it installs, but that appears to be inadequate to build kdelibs-4.1.3.

Tired of that pesky licensing prompt (probably only useful for scripting,) try: sed -i.orig 's/COMMERCIAL_USER=ask/COMMERCIAL_USER=no/g' configure and append -confirm-license to your configure line