| 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 builds on
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| 5 | <productname>XFree86</productname> and <productname>QT</productname> to provide
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| 6 | a window manager and many user tools, including a browser, word processor,
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| 7 | spreadsheet, presentation package, games, and numerous other utilities. It
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| 8 | provides extensive capabilities for customization.</para>
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| 9 |
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| 10 | <para>We divide the <acronym>KDE</acronym> instructions into two parts. The first part, the
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| 11 | core packages, are needed for the rest of <acronym>KDE</acronym> to work. The second part
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| 12 | presents additional packages which provide functionality in various areas
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| 13 | (multimedia, graphics etc).</para>
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| 14 |
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| 15 | <para>As the instructions for compiling and installing <acronym>KDE</acronym> were developed,
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| 16 | the options to <filename>configure</filename> were examined and the parameters
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| 17 | presented are the most likely to compile correctly. In each of the packages,
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| 18 | one other option to <filename>configure</filename> can be added:
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| 19 | <command>--enable-final</command>. This option can speed up the build
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| 20 | process, but requires a lot of memory. If you have less than 256MB of RAM,
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| 21 | this option may cause swapping and significantly slow compilation.</para>
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| 22 |
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| 23 | <para><acronym>KDE</acronym> also has many internationalization packages in the form of:
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| 24 | <filename>kde-i18n-xx-&kde-version;.tar.bz2</filename>
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| 25 | where the xx is a two to five letter code for the country covered. We
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| 26 | do not cover the installation of these packages here.</para>
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| 27 |
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| 28 | <para>All the <acronym>KDE</acronym> packages are comprised of various components.
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| 29 | The default is to
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| 30 | install most of the components. If specific components are to be eliminated, the
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| 31 | official way is to set the variable <userinput>DO_NOT_COMPILE</userinput>.
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| 32 | This comes in handy when there are problems compiling a particular
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| 33 | component.</para>
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| 34 |
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| 35 | <screen><userinput><command>DO_NOT_COMPILE="component1 component2" \
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| 36 | ./configure --prefix=/opt/kde...</command></userinput></screen>
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| 37 |
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| 38 | <para>The core <acronym>KDE</acronym> packages also honor this variable, but omitting components
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| 39 | from the core packages is not advisable since it may result in an
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| 40 | incomplete <acronym>KDE</acronym> installation.</para>
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| 41 |
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| 42 | </partintro>
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