KDE is a comprehensive desktop environment that builds on XFree86 and QT to provide a window manager and many user tools, including a browser, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation package, games, and numerous other utilities. It provides extensive capabilities for customization.
We divide the KDE instructions into two parts. The first part, the core packages, are needed for the rest of KDE to work. The second part presents additional packages which provide functionality in various areas (multimedia, graphics etc).
As the instructions for compiling and installing KDE were developed, the options to configure were examined and the parameters presented are the most likely to compile correctly. In each of the packages, one other option to configure can be added: --enable-final. This option can speed up the build process, but requires a lot of memory. If you have less than 256MB of RAM, this option may cause swapping and significantly slow compilation.
KDE also has many internationalization packages in the form of: kde-i18n-xx-3.1.4.tar.bz2 where the xx is a two to five letter code for the country covered. We do not cover the installation of these packages here.
All the KDE packages are comprised of various components. The default is to install most of the components. If specific components are to be eliminated, the official way is to set the variable DO_NOT_COMPILE. This comes in handy when there are problems compiling a particular component.
DO_NOT_COMPILE="component1 component2" \ ./configure --prefix=/opt/kde... |
The core KDE packages also honor this variable, but omitting components from the core packages is not advisable since it may result in an incomplete KDE installation.
Note: KDE is a large and complicated set of packages. In some cases, users have found fixes that have not made it into the official KDE sources yet. If you have a problem with a specific application, take a look at the patches in http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/patches/downloads/kde*. The current patches will have the version number, 3.1.4, as a part of their filename.