Installing KDE on an Ubuntu system

There are different packages to be installed to acquire Kubuntu from an Ubuntu installation depending on which packages you want. Below are the three possible choices, or “routes”, to go down; the packages below are metapackages — they depend upon other, “real”, packages, and with their installation they pull them in. For details on package installation methods, see the wiki page InstallingSoftware. The options are as follows:

(i) kubuntu-desktop — This is the recommended metapackage to install; the full Kubuntu installation, with all the Kubuntu recommended packages. This includes OpenOffice, Kontact, Konversation, amaroK, K3B, and others.

(ii) kde — This will install the following KDE packages: kde-amusements, kdeaccessibility, kdeaddons, kdeadmin, kdeartwork, kdegraphics, kdemultimedia, kdenetwork, kdepim, kdesdk, kdeutils, kdewebdev, kdevelop3 and the kde-core metapackage (see details below).

(iii) kde-core — This will install the core — the bare-minimum required– of KDE. That is, kdebase, kdelibs, arts and fontconfig.

If you choose to not install kubuntu-desktop, then you can still get all the Kubuntu-specific tweaks by installing the kubuntu-default-settings package.

Other Required Packages

KDE requires the x-window-system-core package, but there is no dependency to install it automatically. If you have a full Ubuntu system with Gnome installed, you already have x-window-system-core. But if you did a “server” install of Ubuntu (with no GUI) and want to upgrade it to Kubuntu, KDE will fail to run unless you also install x-window-system-core.

Other Recommended Packages

Also, here are a few other recommended packages if you do not choose to go down the first route:

• kdm — The KDE Display Manager, with the original Kubuntu theme.

• amaroK — A full featured media player for KDE.

• adept — A KDE package manager; similar to — but not as advanced as — Synaptic. Another KDE Graphical Package Manager is KPackage, which is currently more advanced.

• Konversation — An IRC Client for KDE.

From: www.ubuntu.com