The K Desktop Environment

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2. Things to do before beginning the installation.

2.1 Check if your X Window system works; is it customized?

Before starting to install KDE, make sure you have a working X Window system that runs with a Red Hat window manager. This way, you will not confuse X Window system problems with KDE installation problems.

You need to know if your X Window system has been customized with hidden configurations files like .xinitrc, .xsession, or .Xclients present in your (or other users') home directory; such files will be moved out of the way if you run the usekde post-installation script.

You also need to know if the default X startup scripts provided by Red Hat (/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc, /etc/X11/xinit/Xclients, installed by the xinitrc rpm package, and /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession, installed by the XFree86 rpm package) have been customized on your system: you can test for this with

rpm -V xinitrc
rpm -V XFree86
which will report if there are any differences between the installed versions and the original files supplied by the Red Hat distribution. If there are any special modifications of these files needed by your system, you may have to modify the default KDE configuration files, as explained below in the section on " Customizing the default Desktop". (These instructions will assume that no special customizations are needed by your X Window system.)

2.2 Login as the superuser

You must be logged in as the superuser, root, to carry out most of the installation steps.

2.3 Installation to /opt/kde and disk space requirements.

A full KDE installation will need at least 30-40 MB. The default KDE installation directory is /opt/kde/, but the binary RPM packages are now "relocatable", to install to a different location with: the rpm option rpm ... --prefix=/usr/kde will replace /opt/kde by /usr/kde, for example.

Note that /opt is not part of the Linux File System Standard (FSSTND) and may not exist on your system. It is commonly used by large application packages. If a directory /opt does not exist, it is recommended that you create it with

mkdir /opt

You may wish to create a new partition on your hard disk, and mount it at /opt. If such a new partition is not available, and you do not wish to install KDE on your root partition / (which is often small), you will have to make /opt/kde a symbolic link to some other location. Check the size and available space in your partitions with

df
If, for example, df reports that /usr/local/ has a lot of free space, and you wish to put the KDE installation there, create a directory /usr/local/kde, and make /opt/kde a (relative) symbolic link to it:
mkdir /usr/local/kde
ln -s ../usr/local/kde /opt/kde 
(this assumes /opt/kde does not already exist).

2.4 Which release of Red Hat Linux do you have?

Make sure you know whether you are using Red Hat 4.2, 5.0, 5.1 or 5.2. (The "rh42" RPM packages may work with Red Hat 4.0 or 4.1 systems, but some of the configuration files may need changing: you are on your own in this case!)

If you are installing on Red Hat 5.0, you should now obtain and install the libstdc++-2.8.0 RPM (providing the C++ library needed by binaries compiled with egcs-1.0.x) from the Red Hat 5.2 distribution: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-5.2/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libstdc++-2.8.0-14.i386.rpm or the older RPM from the Red Hat 5.1 distribution: ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-5.1/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libstdc++-2.8.0-8.i386.rpm Now install it:

rpm -Uvh libstdc++-2.8.0-*.i386.rpm

You are now ready to proceed to the next step, installing the RPM packages.

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