The first time I tried this (with one of the April snapshots) I made a royal mess of my KDE configurations by letting KDE2 share user directories with KDE1. Bad idea. Instead, add the line:

export KDEHOME=$HOME/.kde2

to your /etc/profile script, so that KDE 2 will create its own fresh configuration directories. This keeps it from messing with your previous customizations, which are generally stored in $HOME/.kde for each user on the system.

Login again, or manually enter the above command, so that this variable is defined correctly for your current session. You'll also need to clone the "kde" command from the old KDE 1 installation into KDE 2's bin directory, at least if you're running Caldera. Other distributions may be different. The kde command looks at the /etc/X11/xinit/kdeinitrc file that you duplicated in the XFree86 installation step.

If you are running xfstt, the TrueType font server, and you upgraded to the new XFree86, now is the time to kill xfstt and start xfs (the new version of it) instead. Just type xfs & as root for now; later you can put this in rc.local or some other startup script.

Now, from a console-mode user prompt, just run kde and it should start up. You're ready to start having some fun with the latest code!

Next: My First Impressions of KDE 2 »