A Quick Introduction to KDE 3.2 Installation

KDE 3.2 is out. This is the buzzword today in the linux community. If you are someone who want to install KDE 3.2 today itself but don't have any clue about how to do it, this tutorial is for you. Maybe someone will write a detailed tutorial later. This is just a mini tutorial for users who are in a hurry to experience this latest release from KDE immediately.

Installing KDE for the first time

If you are installing KDE for the first time in your Fedora box, open a linux console and execute the following commands.

$ cd /tmp/kde
$ sudo rpm -ivh *

This will install KDE 3.2 in your system. Now you can select KDE from your login screen and login. KDE 3.2 splash screen will appear logging you into K Desktop Environment.

Upgrading an existing KDE installation

If you are upgrading from an existing KDE installation, please make sure that you login through GNOME or through a text terminal. This is needed for a proper installation of KDE.

$ cd /tmp/kde
$ sudo rpm -Uvh *

This will upgrade your system to KDE 3.2. Instead of upgrading all the packages, you can alternately upgrade just the packages you have installed. To do that

$ sudo rpm -Fvh *

Thanks to Bill Rhodes for pointing me to this issue.

Now you can select KDE while logging in.

If you are installing for the first time or if you are upgrading from an existing installation, please make sure that you have downloaded the necessary files and you have taken care of all the dependency issues.

To use yum to install KDE 3.2: (Thanks to Hoyt Duff, our contributing author for this suggestion)

Please understand that neither myself nor Hoyt Duff have checked this type of installation. Please let us know if there are any problems with this approach.

Login as root. You can use /root/KDE32 as a download directory.

After downloading all the files to /root/kde32, create the yum header files:

# yum-arch -v /root/KDE32

Then add the following to /etc/yum.conf:

[KDE32]
name=Fedora-KDE32
baseurl=file:/root/KDE32

Then update yum:

# yum check-update
# yum update kde

It is update not upgrade since "upgrade" is deprecated. Because there is no 'kde' package, yum uses it as a shell glob and gets all the packages with 'kde' in the name. In fact, you can also use sudo instead of logging in as root.

Since we didn't get a chance to test the yum installation, I am adding the experience of one KDE user.

The command yum update kde failed, I had to use yum update kde*. That worked perfectly.

When I logged back into KDE, I got the KDE 3.2 splash screen, but to make a long story short, I had to move my ~/.kde directory somewhere else, and let it create a new one. That wasn't too big a deal, I had to restore a few things, but overall it wasn't difficult.

You are welcome to send me your opinions regarding yum installation. I will share with others if I find that it will be of use to someone.

There is a yum repository for KDE at http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/ (Thanks to Darren LaChausse for his suggestion to add this information in this HOWTO). They don't have 3.2 yet but it should be there anytime now.

If you want to have KDE 3.2 in your native language, download and install the necessary RPM from http://ftp.us.kde.org/pub/kde/stable/3.2/RedHat/Fedora/noarch/ (Thanks to Eric Benard for this suggestion).

You can get KDE 3.2.1 from here