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Although the simplest way to get up and running with a new version of a complex piece of software such as KDE is to wait for your Linux distributor to release its official software packages, part of the fun of Linux is being able to compute on the bleeding edge.
For any software package, that means compiling from source, but with KDE in particular, rolling your own binaries in this way has often been more trouble than its worth, as anyone whos gotten just far enough through a KDE recompile to disable their desktop environment has learned. (See eWeek Labs review of KDE 3.1.)
Thats why I was pleased to discover Konstruct, a new command-line application for automating the KDE source download and compile process. I downloaded Konstruct from konsole.kde.org/konstruct, and after a few keystrokes, my system set off downloading all the source packages it needed to get itself up and running with KDE 3.1.
In the two Konstruct-guided installs I performed, the application got hung up waiting to connect to busy KDE mirrors, and I had to stop the script and rerun it to get the downloads going again.
In any case, Konstruct delivered the two simplest compile-from-source KDE installations Ive yet experienced.