KDE 3.4 and the KDE desktop environment is going to be the reason that many move from windows to Linux. There is a problem in finding information because the tendancy is to categorize by Linux distribution rather than KDE as a whole. I am posting this experience because tracking down the information to a single source is very difficult for a newcomers to Linux or those switching distros. Here is my list of steps for CentOS. I had to find each step at different forums and had to try and read three languages other than english to get the information.

If you are developing or programming in PHP, Perl or C++/C, sooner or later you will find yourself in the world of Linux. Linux as a development platform for these languages is just easier than windows. This is true mostly because of the web hosting market status quo of LAMP and the fact that windows as a generic C++/C programming enivironment is not happening. After a marathon of installs and two weeks of trials I have finally settled on CentOS as my Linux platform for web development. I have previously used Xandros ( a perfect transistion Linux for windows users) and have installed and been frustrated by Kubuntu 5.04 and Suse 9.3. I wanted to use KDE 3.4 and all the dev tools that come with it. Getting KDE 3.4 by install or upgrade and also getting hardware support so that KDE was the only thing to worry about was not easy. CentOS was the distro that gave the least amount of resistance for a new comer.

The install

1. Install CentOS 4 (a red hat 4 distro with kde 3.3)

2. download kde-redhat using yum
yum-2.1 and newer
NOTE: Fedora Core 3+ and Red Hat Enterprise 4+ include yum >= 2.1.

Download

* Fedora Core: http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat...kde-redhat.repo
* RedHat, RedHat Enterprise: http://apt.kde-redhat.org/apt/kde-redhat...kde-redhat.repo

and drop it in /etc/yum.repos.d/

x86_64 users may have to modify this to enable both i386 and x86_64 repos.

3. import the pgp key that will be asked for at the end of the package download. Use the following command
rpm --import http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/gpg-pubkey-
ff6382fa-3e1ab2ca

4. type 'yum update' and things should start flying.

The download is 369mb and you will have to confirm that you will do this. There are some caveats though if you have a fresh or old install that you like. Installing the kde 3.4 package will wipe out some of those nice settings and configurations that CentOS has done. Like the device tab in file manager will not work , mozilla firefox may be a bit quirky and need to be reinstalled or restarted several times. You will lose the CentOS icons and gain Red Hat ones. If you have any mounted disks in windows then they may be lost and need to be redone. Bookmarks and caches get wiped clean. This alll happens when doing the update from kde. It may go better if done from Gnome and then go back to KDE. But I don't belive in doing this. Give yourself 2-3 hours for this install.

Problems, Fixes and Configuration

To fix the file manger linking for icons that go to hd and other devices, change references of device:/ to media:/ , apparently the wording or protocol was changed between versions.

You may experience that the vfat or linux partitions cannot be mounted (ntfs uses another device mapper). There is an error 'device' already mounted or busy when trying to use the mount commands. This is because the update adds livdevmapper.so.101 but leaves behind livdevmapper.so.100 (the older file). A little tug of war results in nothing being able to access the disks renaming the file to livdevmapper.bak and then rebooting the system should fix this. If you are unix litterate then use 'exit' or another command to stop the version 1.00 script from initiating.

I hope this post has enough keywords in it so that others can find the info. I have joined 5 forums in the last week in an attempt to help and get answers. I wish the opensource and Linux community would embrace some sort of distributed authentication for forums.

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