To begin, we install KDE on admin. The easiest, quickest and most fool-proof way to install KDE is to use pre-built binaries. Most Linux distributions come with easy-to-install KDE packages, though KDE binary and source packages can also be downloaded directly from KDE's file servers at http://downloads.kde.org. The latest stable release can be found in the /pub/kde/stable/latest directory on that server.

If you choose to install the KDE packages by hand (as opposed to using a helper tool such as apt-get that handles dependencies and installation order for you), remember to first install arts (the KDE media system ), then kdelibs, and then kdebase. After those base packages are installed, the rest of the KDE packages can be installed in any order.

Upon completion of the install process, all of the KDE files will be found under a single directory in the file system, which we'll refer to as $KDEPREFIX. When installing binary packages, $KDEPREFIX is often /opt/kde or /usr. When compiling from sources, $KDEPREFIX is /usr/local/kde (this default can be changed by passing a different path to configure using the --prefix option).

For this article, we'll assume that $KDEPREFIX is /opt/kde. If KDE is installed elsewhere on your system, simply replace /opt/kde in our examples with your $KDEPREFIX.

If you look at the contents of $KDEPREFIX, you should see something similar to the following:

# ls -AF /opt/kde 
bin/  doc/  etc/  include/ 
lib/  man/  sbin/ share/ 

Of these directories, the one we're most interested in is share, since it's the place where KDE stores default application data and configuration files. A quick peak in the share directory reveals places for configurations (share/config), data (share/apps), icons (share/icons), wallpaper (share/wallpapers), and more.

SHARING RESOURCES

Once KDE has been installed on admin, our next task is to copy the /opt/kde/share directory (and all of its contents and subdirectories) from admin to a shared file system hosted by fileserv. Using the admin machine, copy /opt/kde/share to any file system that can also be remotely mounted by admin and the desktops, such as NFS and SMB shares.

For example, if /shareda is a widely-accessible NFS file system on fileserv, and it's mounted locally on admin as /remote/shareda, you would do something like this to perform the copy:

# cp -pr /opt/kde/share/remote/shareda/kde-share

With the share directory now on the file server (it's at fileserv:/shareda/kde-share), we are ready to create and configure a standard desktop. But first, let's review how KDE finds and uses application data and configurations.

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KDE:The Korporate Desktop Environment

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