The K Desktop Environment

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1. Introduction.

1.1 Supported Red Hat Linux releases.

These notes are intended to provide detailed information about installation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) on Red Hat Linux releases 4.2, 5.0, 5.1 or 5.2. The packages are "RPM" packages made to be installed with the Red Hat Package Manager, rpm.

1.2 Free Software License issues; no Red Hat support for KDE.

KDE v1.1 is Free Software, written by many authors, that has been released mainly under the GPL (GNU General Public License, v2.0 or later), though some parts are released under other Free Software licenses, such as the Artistic License, and the main KDE Libraries are released under the LGPL (GNU Library General Public License). KDE-1.1 is designed to be dynamically linked to the QT toolkit library v1.42 from Troll Tech, freely available for use with free (open source) software under the QT Free Edition License.

KDE's use of the QT Free Edition toolkit has been controversial among some proponents of Free Software, who feel QT Free Edition is not "free enough" (QT Free edition v1.42 is only freely distributable if unchanged). To end this controversy, Troll Tech have recently announced that as of QT Free Edition v2.0 and later, QT Free Edition meet the requirements to be called Open Source(tm), as it will be freely distributable with modifications provided they are in the form of patches.

Unfortunately, even this has not been enough to end the debate on whether KDE can be GPL-compliant. Some interpretations of the GPL hold that because of the restrictions on modifying QT-1.42, and the residual patch requirement for modifications that will remain after QT-2.0, the GPL is presently incompatible, and will remain incompatible, with dynamical linking to the QT Free Edition libraries; the KDE developers have stated their disagreement with this strict and untested interpretation of the GPL.

Unlike some other Linux distributions, Red Hat have stated (citing the QT licensing issues) that they will not include KDE as an integral part of their distribution at this time. However, the KDE team are making these RPMS available for Red Hat users for download from the KDE ftp site. We understand that they will also be made available for download from the contributed section of RedHat's ftp site.

1.3 RPM packages in this KDE release.

The KDE v1.1 release release consists of nine collections; kdesupport, which provides various free software packages used by KDE, but not written by the KDE team, kdelibs, the KDE libraries (LGPL License), kdebase, the KDE base distribution, and seven further collections of optional applications, grouped according to function: kdeadmin, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdetoys, kdeutils, plus a standalone application korganizer.

In this RPM release, the components of the seven optional collections have been separated into RPM subpackages supplying individual applications (a few of the subpackages still group a number of related small utilities and games). Also, some separation of kdesupport libraries into subpackages has taken place (and support libraries available in the Red Hat distribution have been dropped). The kdelibs and kdebase packages remain monolithic.

A typical package is kdenetwork-ppp-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm which provides the kppp application from the kdenetwork collection.

The calendar and appointment-scheduling application korganizer-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm is not part of the kde collections, but has been made officially part of the KDE-1.1 distribution. Other selected KDE apps that are not yet part of the "Official" KDE distribution, but are believed by the Packagers to be stable, may also be added to this RPM collection.

The additional support for Red Hat systems, including these documents, the Red Hat post-installation configuration scripts (usekde, kdm_on, kdm_off), and the default user configuration installed by usekde, is also provided by kdesupport, and is not part of the standard KDE distribution.

Binary RPM packages for KDE on Red Hat Linux have names like

kdebase-1.1-1rh50egcs.i386.rpm
Here kdebase is the KDE package name, 1.1 is the KDE version, 1rh50egcs is the RPM release number, which indicates that it is the release number 1 of the "rh50egcs" set of RPM packages (intended for Red Hat 5.0, and compiled with the egcs compiler), and i386 indicates the processor architecture (here "i386" = Intel PC processors and clones, compatible with the 80386 chips, including 80486, Pentium, Pentium II, etc.). This binary RPM package is obtained by building the source RPM package
kdebase-1.1-1rh50egcs.src.rpm
on a system with the "i386" architecture. Information about building the binary RPM packages from their sources is given below in the section " Rebuilding the RPM source packages".

1.4 The three RPM families: "rh42", "rh50egcs" and "rh5x".

Because of differences between the Red Hat releases there are three sets of KDE-1.1 RPM packages:

When full names of RPM packages are used in this document, they will be given (unless instructions are specific to a particular Red Hat release) as:
kdebase-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
where *rh* represents any of these three sets. When you follow the instructions, you can type the file name in this form (provided you only have one of the *rh* sets present).

While the "i386" (PC) architecture is the most common one, you should substitute "alpha", "sparc", etc, if you are installing binary RPM packages built for different processor architectures.

Detailed installation instructions follow. (For many users, the simple installation instructions in the document "readme-redhat-rpms" will be all that they need).

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