How to install the KDE-1.1 RPM packages on Red Hat Linux systems:: Introduction.

1. Introduction.

1.1 Supported Red Hat Linux releases.

These notes are intended to provide detailed information about installation of the K Desktop Environment (KDE) on Red Hat Linux releases 4.2, 5.0, 5.1 or 5.2. The packages are "RPM" packages made to be installed with the Red Hat Package Manager, rpm.

1.2 Free Software License issues; no Red Hat support for KDE.

KDE v1.1 is Free Software, written by many authors, that has been released mainly under the GPL (GNU General Public License, v2.0 or later), though some parts are released under other Free Software licenses, such as the Artistic License, and the main KDE Libraries are released under the LGPL (GNU Library General Public License). KDE-1.1 is designed to be dynamically linked to the QT toolkit library v1.41 from Troll Tech, freely available for use with free (open source) software under the QT Free Edition License.

KDE's use of the QT Free Edition toolkit has been controversial among some proponents of Free Software, who feel QT Free Edition is not "free enough" (QT Free edition v1.41 is only freely distributable if unchanged). In addition, some interpretations of the GPL hold that because of the restrictions on modifying QT, the GPL is incompatible with dynamical linking to the QT Free Edition libraries, and there has unfortunately been heated debate in Free Software circles on this issue. The KDE developers disagree with this interpretation of the GPL. (Note: Troll Tech have announced that as of QT Free Edition v2.0 and later, QT Free Edition will be freely distributable with modifications in the form of patches, but even this has not been enough to end the debate on whether KDE can be GPL-compliant).

Unlike some other Linux distributions, Red Hat have stated that because of the QT licensing issues, they will not include KDE as an integral part of their distribution at this time. However, the KDE team are making these RPMS available for Red Hat users for download from the KDE ftp site. We understand that they will also be made available for download from the contributed section of RedHat's ftp site.

1.3 RPM packages in this KDE release.

The KDE v1.1 release release consists of ten packages; kdesupport, which provides various free software packages used by KDE, but not written by the KDE team, kdelibs, the KDE libraries (LGPL License), kdebase, the KDE base distribution, and eight further packages of applications, grouped according to function: kdeadmin, kdegames, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdetoys, kdeutils, korganizer.

The additional support for Red Hat systems, including these documents, the Red Hat post-installation configuration scripts (usekde, kdm_on, kdm_off), and the default user configuration installed by usekde, is also provided by kdesupport, and is not part of the standard KDE distribution.

Binary RPM packages for KDE on Red Hat Linux have names like


kdebase-1.1-1rh50egcs.i386.rpm

Here kdebase is the KDE package name, 1.1 is the KDE version, 1rh50egcs is the RPM release number, which indicates that it is the release number 1 of the "rh50egcs" set of RPM packages (intended for Red Hat 5.0, and compiled with the egcs compiler), and i386 indicates the processor architecture (here "i386" = Intel PC processors and clones, compatible with the 80386 chips, including 80486, Pentium, Pentium II, etc.). This binary RPM package is obtained by building the source RPM package


kdebase-1.1-1rh50egcs.src.rpm

on a system with the "i386" architecture. Information about building the binary RPM packages from their sources is given below in the section " Rebuilding the RPM source packages".

1.4 The four RPM families: "rh42", "rh50egcs", "rh5x", and "rh5xegcs11."

Because of differences between the Red Hat releases there are four sets of KDE-1.1 RPM packages:

rh42 RPM packages for Red Hat 4.2.
rh50egcs RPM packages for Red Hat 5.0.
rh5x RPM packages for Red Hat 5.1 and 5.2.
rh5xegcs11 RPM packages for Red Hat 5.1 and 5.2 systems which have been upgraded to use the egcs-1.1 compiler (these RPM packages will probably only be made available for the Digital/Compaq (tm) alpha/AXP processor architecture.)

When full names of RPM packages are used in this document, they will be given (unless instructions are specific to a particular Red Hat release) as:


kdebase-1.1-*rh*.i386.rpm

where *rh* represents any of these three sets. When you follow the instructions, you can type the file name in this form (provided you only have one of the *rh* sets present).

While the "i386" (PC) architecture is the most common one, you should substitute "alpha", "sparc", etc, if you are installing binary RPM packages built for different processor architectures.

A special note about the "rh50egcs" RPM packages: these are not compiled with the gcc-2.7.2.3 compiler supplied with Red Hat 5.0, because such binaries do not work properly at present (support for PAM - the "Pluggable Authentication Modules" used by Red Hat for password checking - is broken). The "rh50egcs" RPM packages are built with the egcs-1.0.x compiler that comes with Red Hat 5.1 and 5.2. To use them, you must install the C++ library supplied by the libstdc++-2.8.0 RPM package from either Red Hat 5.1 or 5.2, which can be found at Red Hat's ftp site ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/. If you wish to compile additional KDE applications, you will also have to install the egcs-1.0.x compiler from Red Hat 5.1 or 5.2 on your Red Hat 5.0 system; see the document "gcc_to_egcs-HOWTO" for details (the procedure is simple and reversible). If the problem with gcc-2.7.2.3-compiled code gets fixed, gcc-compiled "rh50" RPM packages will be made available.

Detailed installation instructions follow. (For many users, the simple installation instructions in the document "readme-redhat-rpms" will be all that they need).

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