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Notes on the KDE-1.1 RPM Packages for Red Hat Linux

The KDE Packaging Team, redhat-rpms@kde.org

v1.12, 12 February 1999


Information and quick installation instructions to accompany KDE-1.1 "rh42", "rh50egcs" and "rh5x" packages for Red Hat Linux 4.2, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.2, available at ftp.kde.org.

The i386 versions of these RPM packages are available at ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/1.1/contrib/distribution/rpm/ in the RedHat-4.2/i386, RedHat-5.0-egcs/i386, RedHat-5.1/i386, and RedHat-5.2/i386 subdirectories. RPM packages for other architectures may be available; substitute the architecture name (e.g, alpha) for i386 in these instructions,

Red Hat RPM packages mentioned here can be found at Red Hat's ftp site ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/ or at mirror sites listed in http://www.redhat.com/mirrors.html.

Changes in the KDE-1.1 RPM packages. If you have previously installed KDE RPM packages for Red Hat, you will notice many new packaging features (as well as improvements in KDE itself):

1. Which version of the QT toolkit to use?

These rpms are built to use QT v1.42. The rpm packages should be available where you obtain the KDE rpms; if not, look for them at ftp://ftp.troll.no/pub/contrib/qt-packages/linux

For RH4.2 (Red Hat 4.2), get the RPM package qt-1.42-1rh42.i386.rpm. This is compiled with gcc-2.7.2.3 and libc5.

For RH5.0, RH5.1, or RH5.2, get the RPM package qt-1.42-3rh51.i386.rpm. This is compiled with egcs-1.0.3a and glibc2. (For those who requested it, this package now includes the qimageio extension.)

If you plan to compile additional KDE applications, also obtain the corresponding qt-devel RPM package.

If a future QT-2.0 release maintains backwards compatibilty, appropriate qt-2.0-*rh*.i386.rpm RPM packages may work with these KDE-1.1 packages, but this cannot be guaranteed.

2. Why are there various different sets of KDE RPM packages?

The evolution of the Red Hat distribution means that there are binary incompatibilities between different releases (except between RH5.1 and RH5.2, which use the same RPM package).

Since the "rh50egcs" RPM packages are not compiled with the gcc-2.7.2.3 compiler supplied with RH5.0, they require that the C++ library libstdc++-2.8.0 taken from the Red Hat 5.1 or 5.2 distribution is added to your RH5.0 installation. (KDE RPM packages for RH5.0 compiled with the gcc-2.7.2.3 compiler and glibc2 currently have broken PAM support, and will not be released unless this is fixed).

3. Things to do before installing the RPM packages.

(For more information, see the Installation Guide for the KDE RPM packages for Red Hat Linux; this will be available in /usr/doc/KDE-1.1/ after the kdesupport RPM package is installed).

ONLY INSTALL KDE IF YOU CURRENTLY HAVE A WORKING X WINDOW SYSTEM ON YOUR RED HAT SYSTEM. FIX ANY PROBLEMS WITH "X" BEFORE INSTALLING KDE.

Then login as the superuser (root).

The standard KDE installation is in $KDEDIR = /opt/kde, but the RPM packages are relocatable: you can install them to another location such as /usr/kde with the rpm ... --prefix=/usr/kde option. If you use this option, you will have to make sure that any KDE applications you later install that are not part of this distribution install to the correct location.

You will need 30-40Mb disk space for a full KDE installation. Type "df" to see available space (in Kb) on your disk partitions.

Ideally, /opt is the mount point of a separate partition, but this is not part of the current Linux File System Standard followed by Red Hat. (It is however part of the new File Heirarchy Standard (FHS) v2.0, which has been announced to be part of the forthcoming Linux Standard Base (LSB) standard). If you do not have (or do not wish to create) an /opt partition, (and do not wish to relocate the RPM packages), you can either:

  1. Do nothing: in this case, KDE will install to a directory /opt/kde on the root partition /. (If not enough space is available, this may cause problems by filling your root partition!)
  2. Create a directory /opt, and make /opt/kde a symbolic link to a directory on a partition with free space, e.g.:
    mkdir /opt
    mkdir /usr/local/kde 
    ln -s ../usr/local/kde /opt/kde
    
    This provides the greatest flexibility, as other packages that install to /opt can be then be placed on different partitions using symbolic links. (Do this BEFORE installing KDE ! ):

If you have an older version of KDE installed we strongly recommend that you should uninstall if it is older than KDE-1.1 (or move it out of the way so the installation to /opt/kde will be clean).

Note that uninstalling an older KDE will not affect users' personal KDE settings, which are stored in their home directory in the ~/.kde/ directory tree (and in a file ~/.kderc). However, if these personal settings are from an older version of KDE, and KDE does not run properly, users may need to move their ~/.kderc file and ~/.kde/, and ~/Desktop/ directories out of the way, so a new default KDE configuration is installed when they start KDE, and then transfer those old settings they want to keep to the new KDE configuration.

Red Hat 4.2 users (rh50egcs RPMS) must make sure the Red Hat RPM package gdbm is installed.

Red Hat 5.0 users (rh50egcs RPMS) must make sure the Red Hat RPM packages gdbm and libjpeg-6a are installed.

Red Hat 5.1/5.2 users (rh5x RPMS) must make sure the Red Hat RPM packages gdbm, libjpeg-6b, and libungif are installed. (For Red Hat 5.1, the last two packages must be the updated RPM packages found at Red Hat's ftp site ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/updates/5.1/i386/jpeg/ in the jpeg subdirectory of the Red Hat 5.1 updates).

4a. Install libpng-0.96 if needed (Red Hat 4.2 only)

Red Hat 4.2 users need a newer version of libpng than that supplied by Red Hat. The KDE Packaging Team provides RPM packages libpng-1.0.1-5rh42 and libpng-devel-1.0.1-5rh42 (taken from RedHat 5.2 and rebuilt on Red Hat 4.2) with the KDE "rh42" RPMS. They will also need to update to zgv-3.0-5rh42 (also supplied), as this depends on libpng. They will also need to upgrade their version of rpm to 2.5 or greater. (rpm-2.3.11 which was part of the original Red Hat 4.2 distribution will not work with these RPM packages). Updates are available at Red Hat ftp site.

4b. Install libstdc++ if needed (Red Hat 5.0 only)

Red Hat 5.0 users need to obtain the libstdc++-2.8.0 RPM package from the Red Hat 5.2 (or 5.1) distribution, and install it on their Red Hat 5.0 system. They will also need to upgrade their version of rpm to 2.5 or greater. (rpm-2.4.10 which was part of the original Red Hat 5.0 distribution will not work with these RPM packages).

Get it from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-5.2/i386/RedHat/RPMS/libstdc++-2.8.0-14.i386.rpm and install it:

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

If you intend to compile KDE applications for your Red Hat 5.0 system, you will also need to install the egcs-1.0.3a compiler from the Red Hat 5.2 distribution (or the egcs-1.0.2 compiler from Red Hat 5.1) on your Red Hat 5.0 system. See the document gcc_to_egcs-HOWTO for details (kdesupport installs it in /usr/doc/KDE-1.1).

If you are still using Red Hat 5.0 (Red Hat's first glibc release) you should seriously consider upgrading to Red Hat 5.2.

5. Installing the RPM packages.

From the directory that contains the RPM packages: First install QT:

rpm -Uvh qt-1.42-*rh*.i386.rpm
where *rh* is 1rh42 for RH4.2, and 3rh51 for RH5.0, RH5.1 and RH5.2. Also install the corresponding qt-devel RPM package if you plan to compile any KDE applications.

Now install the KDE base system:

First install kdesupport:

rpm -Uvh kdesupport-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
where *rh* is *rh42 for RH4.2, *rh50egcs for RH5.0, and *rh5x for RH5.1, RH5.2. Once this is installed, you will have access to the KDE-Red-Hat-support documents in /usr/doc/KDE-1.1. If you are upgrading from earlier KDE RPM packages (including 1.1pre releases), that you did not first uninstall, repeat this step with
rpm -Uvh kdesupport-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm --force 
Now login again as root (important!), and type
env
In the output of env, you should see PATH=/opt/kde/bin:... and KDEDIR=/opt/kde. (If you are relocating the KDE files to say, /usr/kde, using
rpm -Uvh  .... --prefix=/usr/kde
the output of env will reflect yout relocated prefix; you will need to use the --prefix= option for each RPM package you install.)

Continue the installation with

rpm -Uvh  kdelibs-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm 
rpm -Uvh  kdelibs-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm  --force   
rpm -Uvh  kdebase-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm 
rpm -Uvh  kdebase-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm  --force   
(The second, forced reinstallation of each RPM package is unnecessary unless you are upgrading over an installed older KDE release). If anything about your KDE installation seems wrong, your first fix should be to try such a forced reinstallation of the base distribution (also look in the troubleshooting section of the installation guide in /usr/doc/KDE-1.1)

This completes the installation of the Base KDE distribution. If you wish, continue with installation of optional KDE components, or do this later.

Now install the optional KDE RPM packages

rpm -Uvh kde*-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
where kde* is any of: kdeadmin*, kdegames*, kdegraphics*, kdemultimedia*, kdenetwork*, kdetoys*, kdeutils*, or kdeapps*. The "*" in these package names is a (hopefully) explanatory name for the contents of the package. Before installation, you can get information about the contents of a package in your current directory with
rpm -qip kde*-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm
Most of these packages are subpackages from the seven collections of optional KDE applications that, with the Base distribution, make up the KDE-1.1 distribution. A typical subpackage is kdenetwork-ppp-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm which supplies the kppp application for setting up ppp network conections, while kdenetwork-tools-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm supplies a subset of smaller utilities.

This does not include the RPM packages which are not from an official KDE collection, but accompany the KDE packages. The only such package which is currently part of the official KDE-1.1 distribution is the calendar and appointment scheduling application korganizer. However, other KDE applications which are believed to be stable ("non-beta") may be included by the KDE Packaging Team.

Finally, at least one official KDE application, the game kdegames-asteroids-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm, requires installation of the the additional QwSpriteField support library, supplied by the RPM subpackage kdesupport-qwspritefield-1.1-*rh*-i386.rpm.

6. Things to do after installing the Base RPM packages.

To use the KDE X Display Manager kdm as a substitute for xdm, type

/opt/kde/bin/kdm_on      
kdm_on makes small changes to two Red Hat configuration files (/etc/inittab, /etc/X11/xdm/Xsetup_0). (These changes can be reversed by typing "/opt/kde/bin/kdm_off"). If the system is already running xdm in runlevel 5, (and no X Window sessions are active) type
telinit 3 ; telinit 5
to shut down xdm and start kdm.

For each user who wants to use KDE as their desktop, type

/opt/kde/bin/usekde <username>                
(Users may also do this for themselves by just typing "usekde" after they next log in.) A hidden file .Xclients installed in the user's home directory starts the KDE desktop in their next X Window session; they can simply delete this file in the (unlikely) event that they no longer wish to use KDE.

It is also simple to configure the system so all users use a KDE desktop by default, and to customize the initial KDE desktop that they see. For details, see Installation Guide, which also includes troubleshooting hints, and is installed by the kdesupport RPM package into /usr/doc/KDE-1.0, along with other Red Hat-specific documentation.

The KDE configuration initially installed by these RPM packages places icons for printing, and for mounting/unmounting floppy-disk and cdrom drives on the desktop. The System Manager must ensure these are correctly configured for the system before they will work (or delete them if they are not wanted). The System Manager may wish to customize the default KDE Desktop for the system; see the Installation Guide for more details.

Now enjoy KDE on your Red Hat system next time you open an X Window session!

The KDE Packaging Team

Send comments or corrections to: redhat-rpms@kde.org


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