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List:       kde
Subject:    Re: [A bit OT] Red Hat and KDE
From:       Torrey Peacock <cybertori () mindspring ! com>
Date:       1998-09-30 21:58:05
[Download RAW message or body]

At 10:03 PM 9/29/98 -0400, Duncan Haldane wrote:
>
>On 29-Sep-98 Torrey Peacock wrote:

>Well, I am the packager of the "rh51" series of KDE rpms, and welcome any 
>suggestions for improvements....   The most recent kdebase-1.0-6rh51
>installs /etc/profile.d scripts that set the path and KDEDIR automatically
>in both bash and tcsh shells, and has a sample .Xclients for copying to
>the user's home directory.   

I expected these things to happen "automatically," and when they didn't, I
ended up doing them all manually.  You might consider that some of the
newer Linux users won't know what to do with a shell script.  Also, copying
the .Xclients to my home directory had no effect whatsoever on my system.
Issuing "startx" still resulted in a bunch of error messages about things
"not found."

>I could make a script (say) "kdesetup <username>" that would be all a 
>user needs to run to
>copy the .Xclients to the home directory, etc.  (Maybe this is holding their
>hands too much?, but maybe this can never be too simple?)  Is this a good
idea?

Its kind of amusing, coming from the Windows world, to encounter developers
who wonder if having a setup program is making things "too simple."  Trust
me, this is a *good* idea!

>> It took me
>> quite some time and determination to get things to work, searching the Net
>> for undocumented information, and a fair bit of simply trial and error.
>
>what was undocumented? what was most difficult?

One point I remember - to get KDE to work I had to edit the xinitrc file in
/etc/X11/xinit.  There was a bunch of stuff in there that I deleted, and
added the single line "start kde."  I had made a note of doing this from
some older kde documentation.  It was not obvious to me what file I needed
to find, where to find it, or what to do with it when I did.  One of my
impressions in working with Linux is that there is so much variability
between the different distributions and versions of everything, that it is
very difficult to formulate setup instructions which will actually work on
a given user's system.

>> In the mean time, the old Window Manager is broken, and I am booting to
a UNIX
>> command prompt, trying to edit obscure config files with vi. 
> 
>does "I am" mean you are still having difficulties?

No, I'm happily in wonderful world of KDE now.   :)   
My concern is that the relative difficulty of getting there will dissuade
many people.  My previous attempts at installing KDE all ended in complete
frustration, and so I decided to wait for 1.0, when presumably it would be
"ready for prime time."  The desktop interface and the basic apps are up to
speed, IMHO.  The installation (and configuration) is still too hard for
beginners.  

> RedHat is a good distribution IMHO, and the compromise is for KDE 
>to offer RedHat users a set of KDE rpms that add KDE to a redhat system as
>easily as possible.

Yes, and thanks again for making these.  RedHat is clearly trying to make
Linux more accessible to the mainstream user.  They need KDE for that,
whether they realize it or not!

Torrey
cybertori@mindspring.com

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