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