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.

Next: Configuring and Running KDE 3.0 »