The K Desktop Environment

Next Previous Table of Contents

3. Installing the RPM packages.

3.1 Installing the QT RPM packages.

If you are upgrading from an earlier KDE installation, you may already have the correct QT package (qt-1.42) installed; check it with rpm -q qt and skip this section in that case.

Which QT package you need to install depends on which Red Hat release you have. The QT packages will normally come with the KDE distribution, but you can also look for them at ftp://ftp.troll.no/pub/contrib/qt-packages/linux.

Red Hat 5.0, 5.1, 5.2:. The QT package you need is compiled with egcs-1.0.3a and glibc: qt-1.42-3rh51.i386.rpm.

Red Hat 4.2. The QT package you need is compiled with gcc-2.7.2.3 and libc5: qt-1.42-1rh42.i386.rpm.

If you intend to rebuild the KDE RPM packages, or compile any KDE applications, also install the corresponding qt-devel package. name="ftp://ftp.troll.no/pub/contrib/qt-devel-1.42-1rh42.i386.rpm">.

These two binary RPM packages can be also rebuilt from the source rpm: qt-1.42-*rh*.src.rpm.

You are now ready to install the KDE binary RPM packages (or optionally rebuild them from the source RPM packages).

3.2 If you already have an older version of KDE installed:

If you have a pre-1.1 release of the KDE rpm packages installed, you must first uninstall it. Any older installations of KDE which were not installed by rpm should also be removed. In this case, start with a clean /opt/kde directory.

In this case, it is also advisable to remove/rename the KDE configuration file .kderc and directories Desktop and .kde present in users' home directories.

If you previously added entries to /etc/profile or other system or user configuration files to set the environment variable KDEDIR, add /opt/kde/bin to the system path, etc., you should remove these entries. The kdesupport RPM package adds scripts to /etc/profile.d that configures these enviroment variable automatically; Your pre-existing customizations may interfere with this, if you do not remove them.

3.3 Rebuilding the RPM source packages (Optional).

(Skip this section, if you are just installing the binary RPM packages).

To rebuild the binary RPM packages, you must have the C and C++ compilers installed.

If you wish to rebuild the binary RPM packages from their sources on your system, you must do it in the following order:

  1. Rebuild qt first; then install the new binary RPM packages qt, qt-devel.
  2. Rebuild, then install, kdesupport (and the additional kdesupport-qwspritefield subpackage, if you plan to compile the kdegames kdegames collection). Reinstall kdesupport a second time, with the --force rpm option if you are upgrading from an older set of KDE RPM packages that you did not uninstall.
  3. Rebuild, then install, kdelibs. (also reinstall a second time if upgrading).
  4. Rebuild, then install, kdebase. (also reinstall a second time if upgrading).
  5. Now rebuild any other KDE packages (kdeadmin, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultmedia, kdegames, kdetoys, kdeutils, korganizer). Install them when you want. Each of these optional packages will produce a number of binary subpackages, each one supplying a single application (or in a few cases, a small number of applications).

Note that if you already have an older KDE running on your system, and the new RPM packages will install KDE to the same location (i.e., /opt/kde) you should shut down the older KDE before begining the rebuild process.

To rebuild, e.g., kdesupport, you must open a terminal window or console, and type

rpm --rebuild kdesupport-1.1-*rh*.src.rpm
A lot of output from the rebuilding process will scroll up the screen. If the rebuild is successful (you will see a message that the new binary RPM has been written to disk, and the final message will be "+ exit 0"), install the new binary rpm:
rpm -Uvh /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/kdesupport-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm

QT-2.0 will soon be released. If QT-2.0 maintains backward compatibility, KDE-1.1 RPM packages compiled with QT-1.42 will work with QT-2.0, but KDE-1.1 RPM packages rebuilt with QT-2.0 will almost certainly not work with QT-1.42.

3.4 Installing the binary KDE RPM packages.

This section describes how to install the binary KDE RPM packages, assuming that you did not already rebuild and install them as described in the previous section.

First install the KDE base system: this must be done in the correct order:

rpm -Uvh kdesupport-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm  
rpm -Uvh kdelibs-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh kdebase-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm

If you had older KDE rpms on your system, including KDE-1.1pre* pre-release versions, and you did not take our advice to first uninstall them, the following repeat installation of the base KDE system, is strongly recommended:

rpm -Uvh --force kdesupport-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm  
rpm -Uvh --force kdelibs-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
rpm -Uvh --force kdebase-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
(This repetition ensures that certain postinstallation procedures are carried out by rpm without interference from bugs in the older RPM packages being updated.)

You now have installed the base KDE-1.1 system. Either proceed to the post-installation instructions, or optionally install any of the other packages: Collect the packages you want in a directory, then

rpm -Uvh kde*-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm  
The order of installation of these supplementary packages is not significant. (The package kdegames-asteroids requires the extra support library package kdesupport-qwspritefield to first be installed.)

Next Previous Table of Contents