source: kde/kde-intro.xml@ 47e40b1

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<partintro>
  <title>Introduction to KDE</title>

  <para><application>KDE</application> is a comprehensive desktop environment
  that builds on an <application>X Window System</application> and
  <application>Qt</application> to provide a window manager and many user tools,
  including a browser, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, games,
  and numerous other utilities. It provides extensive capabilities for customization.</para>

  <para>The <application>KDE</application> instructions are divided into
  three parts. The first part, the core packages, are needed for the rest of
  <application>KDE</application> to work. The second part presents additional
  packages which provide functionality in various areas (multimedia, graphics, etc.)
  The third part provides resources for software and web developers.</para>

  <para>There are two alternatives for installing <application>KDE</application>.
  Option one, that is used by most of the commercial distributions, is to install
  <application>KDE</application> in the standard system prefix:
  <filename class="directory">/usr</filename>. This option allows the use of
  <application>KDE</application> without the need for any additional configuration such
  as modification of various environment variables or configuration files. Option two is
  to install it in a unique prefix such as <filename class="directory">/opt/kde</filename> or
  <filename class="directory">/opt/kde-&kde-version;</filename>. This option allows for
  easy removal of the <application>KDE</application> version or maintenance of
  multiple versions for testing.</para>

  <tip>
    <para>All the <application>KDE</application> packages are comprised of various
    components. The default is to install most of the components. If specific components
    are to be eliminated, the official way is to set the variable
    <envar>DO_NOT_COMPILE</envar>. This comes in handy when there are problems
    compiling a particular component.</para>

<screen><userinput>DO_NOT_COMPILE="component1 component2" \
    ./configure --prefix=&kde-dir; ...</userinput></screen>

    <para>The core <application>KDE</application> packages also honor this
    variable, but omitting components from the core packages is not advisable since
    it may result in an incomplete <application>KDE</application> installation.</para>
  </tip>

  <note>
    <para>In each of the packages, one other option to <command>configure</command>
    can be added: <option>--enable-final</option>. This option can speed up the build
    process, but requires a lot of memory. If you have less than 256MB of RAM,
    this option may cause swapping and significantly slow compilation.</para>
  </note>

</partintro>