KDE 3.0 Review: Bumpy Install, Smooth Run

By: Dee-Ann LeBlanc
Monday, April 8, 2002 10:13:47 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/4138/1/

Introducing KDE 3.0

For once, I wish I could rate the installation process separately from the product itself. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) is a nice, mature Graphical User Interface (GUI). It's been around for years, a lot of people like it, and it's free. Can't ask for much more than that. The huge problem is this, though: getting a new version of KDE installed is a big pain. Once you actually get into the GUI itself it's great and a lot of fun. Personally, I look forward to when KDE 3.0 comes pre-rolled into the newest distributions.

Supported Platforms

KDE 3.0 runs only on Unix-based operating systems, and I am going to focus on Linux since that's my reader base here. Architecture and other requirements depend on your particular distribution's requirements more than on KDE.

Getting KDE 3.0

To see if there's a binary set of packages available for your particular Linux distribution, FTP go ftp ftp.kde.org and look in the directory /pub/kde/stable/3.0. If there isn't, then you either need to find out if a version is coming for your Linux distribution from that distribution's web site or contact email address, or you'll have to build KDE 3.0 from source (see http://www.kde.org/install-source.html for how to accomplish this task).

In this article, I assume you're using one of the following Linux distributions that already has a binary version of KDE 3.0 available: Connectiva, Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, SuSE, or YellowDog. Since the vendors themselves provide the KDE binaries, be sure to check and see if any more distro versions have been added since this article was written.

There are a lot of packages involved here. Typically, I just grab them all so I don't have to go back and get more, but I've got a high-speed connection. If you don't want to wait there for the whole thing you can either download it in parts as you go through the installation process, or order a CD-ROM from the KDE web site containing all of the KDE code.

If you really hate installing this kind of stuff, you can always wait to get a distribution version that has KDE 3.0 in it by default as well.

What's Different in KDE 3.0

Of course, with all this downloading ahead of you, you're probably asking yourself why you should bother. After all, nothing's wrong with the version of KDE you've got now, right? Under the hood, the main change is that KDE 3.0 utilizes the Qt 3 library set. On the surface, however, there are a massive number of changes. These additions include:

  • A pile of bug fixes.
  • A collection of improvements in the arts package for those who like to use various sound applications.
  • Full set of SSL certificate tools.
  • Better CUPS integration in the KDE print tool.
  • Does not move your cursor focus to a new window as it opens.
  • Any number of tiny performance tweaks to the operation of keyboard, mouse, desktop, and windows.
  • XML plugin for Kate, a text editor for programmer.
  • Additional functionality for Konqueror, including controlling how much to show animated GIFs and whether or not to allow JavaScript pop-up windows.
  • Much additional functionality to Konsole, the KDE command line terminal window, including the ability to monitor for new activity, or no activity.
  • Font installation assistant.
  • A huge collection of new features for Kmail including distribution lists, aliases, and SMTP over SSL.
  • Much, much more.

The full list of new features and fixes is too long to include here. See the changelog at http://www.kde.org/announcements/changelog2_2_2to3_0.html for more details.

Installing KDE 3.0

What you have to do to install KDE depends on what distribution you're running, what software you already have installed, and what packaging system your distribution favors. Many people would rather have their toenails pulled out one by one than deal with installing such a complex package with so many separate components. Why? Even if you use your distribution's packaging system (RPM or DEB, typically) the individual pieces are not all collated together in one large install. I'm working on SuSE 7.3 with RPM, my own comments will be biased toward this setup. However, I'll try to keep them pretty general, since I have no way of knowing what packages you've installed on your system. You might have a lot more dependencies to satisfy before you can proceed than I do. In my case, I started by trying to install the kdebase3 package, since if I can't install that there's no point bothering adding any of the special KDE 3 widgets to go along with it.

Trying to install this package of course gave me a pile of dependencies from RPM. So, I looked through the list and noticed that one of the items was straightforward: ksysguardd. I tried to install that using rpm -ivh but got a conflict, so tried rpm -Uvh instead, and that did the trick. So, back I went to trying kdebase3 again. The list was shorter but I still had a way to go.

The first item on the list now was a package containing the string DCOP, so I typed the following to see if this item is in one of the packages I downloaded: 

rpm -qlp * | grep DCOP

Turns out that it is, so from there it's just a matter of figuring out which package. After playing for a while with regular expressions I found that the file was in kdelibs3, so I went to install that package, but got caught up in yet another dependency issue. This time I ran the same command as before but grepped for libartsflow, which turned out to be in the arts package. Of course arts needed yet another dependency (are you starting to see why so many people don't like to do this manually?), which I found in qt3. No surprise there, qt3 is the programming library used to build KDE.

From there part of it was like dominos. Installed qt3, arts, and tried kdelibs3 but I still needed another dependency for that one. Tracked it to libxslt, which needed libxml2, so I installed libxml2 (had to use another update there), libxslt, kdelibs3, and then kdebase3.

Now that I had the base package installed, I went for the relatively painless bells and whistles: kdeaddons3, kdegames3, kdeadmin3, kdeartwork3, and so on.

Configuring and Running KDE 3.0

There is much to the configuration part of the process as far as the basics go. The most important step is typing at the command line: WINDOWMANAGER=kde3. The KDE 3.0 installation doesn't overwrite your KDE 2.2 install, so this action ensures that you'll be opening the right GUI. You have to do this for every account that you want to utilize KDE 3.0 within.

Even better, add this environment variable setting to your .bash_profile or .profile (depending on what distribution you're using) so it will be set properly at boot time. To accomplish this, be sure to add the following line to one of those files: 

WINDOWMANAGER=kde3

Then, ensure that you either add WINDOWMANAGER to the end of the export line, or create this line at the end of the file: 

export WINDOWMANAGER

After this, type startx or init 5 or whichever your preference is to enter KDE 3.0. When the GUI opens you'll have the opportunity to choose the settings you were using back in KDE 2.2 or to set the GUI up all over again. From here you just make selections in dialog boxes. See Figures 1 and 2 for the differences between the same account in KDE 2.2 and 3.0 with all of the default settings.

These are of course just the basic configuration issues. A trip through the K Control Center will certainly let you change any number of KDE's GUI characteristics, that's half the fun.

Of course, it won't do to just tell you about installing this new GUI. I use Konsole a lot when I'm in KDE since I like to work at the command line, and it's great to have access to History functions right there in the Konsole Edit menu. I could swear the colors are actually brighter in KDE 3.0 than in my KDE 2.2.2 install but maybe it's just a figment of my imagination or difference in settings.

The ability to monitor a Konsole shell for activity reminds me of the days of hanging out in the computer labs at Penn State and playing Nethack (no one ever accused me of being a study fiend) in one window while programming in another. Also fun are the Edutainment packages, especially the planetarium! Definitely check this section out whether you have kids or not.

There are a lot more changes, many of them are subtle such as window movement or specialized such as additional KMail features. Once again, check out the changes list mentioned earlier.

Wrapping Up

It would really make my day if there was a way to install KDE with a single command. It seems to me that we have the technology to do this in Linux with a smart enough RPM setup, but then I'm not a programmer and it's really easy and fun for non-programmers to dream up "simple" projects for programmers, so I bet it's not as easy as I think. My major, super, stupendously big beef here is that under SuSE 7.3, I end up with a system with a broken useradd command. Before installing KDE 3.0 I could create user accounts with no difficulty. Now (at the command line) I create a user account and the command doesn't make a home directory for that user! That's a pretty serious problem.

There's a workaround available, though. The account's created properly in /etc/password and so on, there's just no home directory. So, you can always create a "blank" account before installing KDE 3.0, then from inside /home after you create the user and add their password (in a system where all of the users are assigned to group users): 

cp -a <blankdirectory> <newusername>

chown -R <newusername> <newusername>

or on a system where all users get their own group: 

cp -a <blankdirectory> <newusername>

chown -R <newusername>.<newusername> <newusername>

Whenever possible it's nice to be using software with less bugs, and KDE 3.0 certainly has a lot of bug fixes. It's also got quite a list of new features. However, my personal preference is to stick with the GUI version that my distribution came with, and update it when I update my distribution as a unit. Otherwise it gets just too fiddly (as you saw in the installation process) and some things invariably break, as I discovered with my ability to add users--still, I could fix the useradd problem with a quick shell script if this was my main machine. What I'd recommend is going through the list of features and seeing if any of them is something that you need. That makes it worth the hassle right there. Otherwise, only do it if you want to look at it as a learning experience, you enjoy a challenge, or you really really want to have the latest, greatest KDE GUI available--or if there's a piece of software you need that won't run without KDE 3.0.

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