| 1 | <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
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| 2 | <!DOCTYPE partintro PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.4//EN"
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| 3 | "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.4/docbookx.dtd" [
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| 4 | <!ENTITY % general-entities SYSTEM "../general.ent">
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| 5 | %general-entities;
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| 6 | ]>
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| 7 |
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| 8 | <partintro>
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| 9 | <title>Introduction to KDE</title>
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| 10 |
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| 11 | <para><application>KDE</application> is a comprehensive desktop environment
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| 12 | that builds on an <application>X Window System</application> and
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| 13 | <application>Qt</application> to provide a window manager and many user tools,
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| 14 | including a browser, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, games,
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| 15 | and numerous other utilities. It provides extensive capabilities for customization.</para>
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| 16 |
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| 17 | <para>The <application>KDE</application> instructions are divided into
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| 18 | three parts. The first part, the core packages, are needed for the rest of
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| 19 | <application>KDE</application> to work. The second part presents additional
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| 20 | packages which provide functionality in various areas (multimedia, graphics, etc.)
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| 21 | The third part provides resources for software and web developers.</para>
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| 22 |
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| 23 | <para>There are two alternatives for installing <application>KDE</application>.
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| 24 | Option one, that is used by most of the commercial distributions, is to install
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| 25 | <application>KDE</application> in the standard system prefix:
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| 26 | <filename class="directory">/usr</filename>. This option allows the use of
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| 27 | <application>KDE</application> without the need for any additional configuration such
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| 28 | as modification of various environment variables or configuration files. Option two is
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| 29 | to install it in a unique prefix such as <filename class="directory">/opt/kde</filename> or
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| 30 | <filename class="directory">/opt/kde-&kde-version;</filename>. This option allows for
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| 31 | easy removal of the <application>KDE</application> version or maintenance of
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| 32 | multiple versions for testing.</para>
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| 33 |
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| 34 | <tip>
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| 35 | <para>All the <application>KDE</application> packages are comprised of various
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| 36 | components. The default is to install most of the components. If specific components
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| 37 | are to be eliminated, the official way is to set the variable
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| 38 | <envar>DO_NOT_COMPILE</envar>. This comes in handy when there are problems
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| 39 | compiling a particular component.</para>
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| 40 |
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| 41 | <screen><userinput>DO_NOT_COMPILE="component1 component2" \
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| 42 | ./configure --prefix=&kde-dir; ...</userinput></screen>
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| 43 |
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| 44 | <para>The core <application>KDE</application> packages also honor this
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| 45 | variable, but omitting components from the core packages is not advisable since
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| 46 | it may result in an incomplete <application>KDE</application> installation.</para>
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| 47 | </tip>
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| 48 |
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| 49 | <note>
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| 50 | <para>In each of the packages, one other option to <command>configure</command>
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| 51 | can be added: <option>--enable-final</option>. This option can speed up the build
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| 52 | process, but requires a lot of memory. If you have less than 256MB of RAM,
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| 53 | this option may cause swapping and significantly slow compilation.</para>
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| 54 | </note>
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| 55 |
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| 56 | </partintro>
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