So you have heard the rumors. Or you have seen the screenshots. And you are dying to get hold of KDE. But you know next to nothing about this whole “alternative OS” business. Don't worry! You only need to do some (well, maybe not some) reading, that's all!

KDE does not run on any version of Microsoft® Windows® or OS/2 (yet). To run KDE, you need to have a UNIX® system. Please refer to Q: 2.2 for more details.

Decide on a platform and set it up for your system. This FAQ can not help you with this, since KDE runs on many UNIX® platforms.

Finally, you are ready to commence the KDE installation. Please start reading from the next section. To get KDE, please refer to Q: 3.1. Last but not least, if you encounter any problems while installing KDE, please do not hesitate to make use of the KDE mailing lists and newsgroups. But do bear this in mind: no question is too silly to ask, but some are too silly to answer, especially when they are already answered in this FAQ.

Good luck and have fun!

To run KDE it is recommended that you have at least a pentium II processor, 64MB of memory and 500MB of free disk space for a basic installation. While KDE may run on slower configurations than this, performance can be severely impaired. Generally, if your computer runs an X-Server already with other desktop environments or window managers it's probably fast enough to run KDE.

You can find several kinds of binary and source packages for different distributions and operating systems on the ftp://ftp.kde.org/pub/kde/. The binary packages are not made by the KDE Team, but by the distributors themselves, or some dedicated individuals. Please refer to KDE Package Policy Explained for information about the KDE Package Policy. The only “official” release is the source tar.bz2 packages. Please refer to the READMEs and INSTALLs in the several binaries folders. For a list of the available packages for a release, refer to the relevant info page. For the latest release this is the KDE 3.4.1 Info Page.

For KDE 3.4.1, you need the Qt™ library version 3.3 or greater. Please make sure you download the correct Qt™. You will also need the header files, if you want to compile KDE yourself. They are all available, at no cost, from http://www.trolltech.com/download. In addition, there are optional libraries that might improve KDE if installed on your system. An example is OpenSSL which will enable Konqueror to browse web pages securely and is needed in a version >=0.9.6. These should be provided by your distributor; if not, ask for an update.

The base distribution currently consists of twenty packages. Some are required, while others are optional. Each package is available in each of the aforementioned package formats.

aRts and then kdelibs should be installed before everything else, and kdeaddons last. The other packages can be installed in any arbitrary order.

Most package management tools will let you put all these packages in one folder and install them all at once, figuring out the dependencies as they go.

First of all, please make sure that you have added KDE's binary installation folder (e.g. /usr/local/kde/bin) to your PATH and KDE's library installation folder to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH (only necessary on systems that do not support rpath; on Linux® ELF, it should work without). This environment variable may be called differently on some systems, e.g. it is called SHLIB_PATH on IRIX®. Then set the environment variable KDEDIR to the base of your KDE tree, e.g. /usr/local/kde.

Even though you can use most of the KDE applications simply by calling them, you can only benefit fully from KDE's advanced features if you use the KDE window manager and its helper programs.

In order to make it easy for you, we have provided a simple script called startkde which gets installed in $KDEDIR/bin and is therefore in your path.

Edit the file .xinitrc in your home folder (make a backup copy first!), remove everything that looks like calling a window manager, and insert startkde instead. Restart the X-Server. If you use kdm/xdm, you will have to edit the file .xsession instead of .xinitrc. And if there is no .xinitrc or .xsession in your home folder, simply create a new one with just one line containing startkde.

This should present you with a new shining KDE desktop. You can now start to explore the wonderful world of KDE. In case you want to read some documentation first, there is a highly recommended Quick Start guide available. Furthermore, every application has an online help that is available via the help menu.

In principle, this is not necessary. RPM and Debian packages should take care of all dependencies.

If you compile the source code yourself, you should take more care. Instructions for running two different versions of KDE on the same system are given at http://developer.kde.org/build/kde2-and-kde3.html. However, please note that running two different versions of KDE from source can lead to problems if you are not careful.

The most comfortable method to start KDE is to use the startkde script. Simply put the line startkde at the end of your .xsession file (or your .xinitrc or .Xclients file if you are not using kdm or xdm). Please also remove the lines that start your previous window manager. If there is no .xsession, .xinitrc, or .Xclients in your home folder, simply create a new one that contains just one line: startkde.

Yes, you can install KDE in any folder you want. What you have to do depends on the kind of packages you want to install:

You probably tried to start the X server with startkde. The X server is started with startx. startkde is the script that should be run from your .xinitrc, .xsession, or .Xclients to activate the window manager and the necessary server daemons for KDE. See also Q: 4.9.

IBM now officially support KDE on AIX®. You can find details at http://www.ibm.com/servers/aix/products/aixos/linux/index.html. There is also some older information at http://space.twc.de/~stefan/kde/aix.html.

If you can get X Window System® to run on your laptop, you should not have any problem getting KDE to run on it. In addition, you might find the following links helpful:

Assuming the default is /opt/kde and you want to move it to /usr/local/kde, here's what you have to do:

This will put all your KDE files in /usr/local/kde but everything is still accessible from /opt/kde.

There should not be any need to keep the .c and .o files, but you might want to keep the .h files, as they are used by includes if you ever want to compile your own KDE programs. But if you wish to add patches to the source programs as they become available (rather than downloading everything again), then they should stay.

No. In most cases KDE will be able to transport your settings intact. You may need to reenter passwords in some applications (such as KMail or KNode) but most other settings will be safe.

There were mixed reports of results between some previous versions of KDE. To be safe, you may like to back up your entire KDE configuration.

Settings are kept in the $HOME/.kde or $HOME/.kde2 subfolder in your home folder. Copy your old .kde/.kde2 folder to a backup location, install KDE 3.2, and then copy back any necessary mail and news settings. That said, most people can make a direct upgrade, without removing the old .kde folder, without a hitch.

You can override the use of $HOME/.kde by setting the $KDEHOME variable.

KDE uses several temporary files during its operation. These are usually to be found in the following locations:

If the symlinks get broken, usually because a cron or shutdown script is emptying out the /tmp folder, then strange things will happen. These files, and the symlinks, will all be created automatically at the start of KDE so you can safely remove them while KDE is not running.

If you are only getting a gray screen when you start KDE, or if you get an error message telling you to Check your installation, then shut down X and delete all the files listed above, then try to restart X.

Normally (i.e. when not upgrading between KDE versions) it's quite safe to leave these files intact, and you may shave a few seconds off your KDE startup time by doing so.

You need the GNU msgfmt which is part of the GNU i18n package gettext. You should be able to download it from any GNU mirror.

You can uninstall your programs by typing make uninstall in the folder where you did make install. If you have already deleted that folder, then there is only one way, and it is not good: go to $KDEDIR/bin and start deleting files one by one.

If you expect to find yourself in this situation, you might want to consider a program such as GNU stow, found at http://www.gnu.org/software/stow/stow.html.

This has to do with issues with Unisys' LZW patent. GIF support is turned off from Qt™ 1.44 onwards by default. When you want to use GIFs and have the relevant license, recompile Qt™ with GIF support. ./configure -gif.