skot,
Ummm please don't be scared at what i am gonna say. To keep your box uptimum, especially RH, i will VERY strongly advise you to wait for RH official updates. Downloading the whole of KDE on your modem is a painfull experience ( i have been on 33.6 for 2 1/5 years ). Now the important information is the following:
-Linux is just a kernel, vendors/groups/associations/developpers are providing the rest of the operating system software, hence why linux is known as distro.
Distro like RH and Mandrake ( also caldera, JBL, Suse etc .. ) like to particulary customised their system. Good. Problem is that they do this by following extremely new and ALPHA versions of the software to include more functionnalities ( the race is with windows, and linux as it stand today is far from winning this one ). Therefore these distributions have usually their own kernel, with special patches ( Virtual Memory, IDE patches etc ... ), as well as special tweaked ways. On this distros installing something other than what provided by the vendor is hazardous, and apart from a basic program you are more likely to encounter problems (dependancies etc ...).
Now there is another breed of distro, which are the reverse, minimalistic, no fancy graphical installer, no fancy HW recognition. These are Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, LR-s or LFS ( Linux From Scratch )....They have usually a pure GNU/GPL license and do not provide commercial software. This doesn't mean for example, that the commercial version of wine would not run on those
. On these, well they are NOT recommended to start with, but they are appreciable once you get the 'hang' of linux.
The main advantage of Linux reside in the ability to 'rebuild' a program, adapting it to your processor, architecture and capabilities. This is called compiling.
When Windows ship a program, you have a binary ( an executable or *.exe file ). This binary has already been compiled but not on your machine. Not with your processor !!
On linux, you can download any source code and compile it on your machine, even more optimize it for a P4 ( sagers
).
A RPM package ( or a .deb for debian ) is the same as the .exe windows files. These are precompiled binaries. So the real tip is, dll KDE 3.1, but not the RPM, but the full source. To recognise them, they are 'file.tar.gz' *.tar.bz2 or *.tgz. Then you could attempt to build KDE 3.1 from source, optimized for your P4 on your own machine ! Will take some time and uses 100 % of the CPU but for real improvement in Speed and Stability. By the way if you stumble across files like *.src.rpm, forget about those, they are src rpms, you may as well get the real full source
To build or compile a program
ex: foo.tar.bz
first untar/decompress the package :
laclasse@monster $ tar -xvzf foo.tar.bz
{lots of lines} < -- results of decompression
This will create a new directory called foo-version in the present directory. Then :
laclasse@monster $ cd foo-version
laclasse@monster:foo-version/ $ ./configure
laclasse@monster:foo-version/ $ make
(then, assuming no erro4rs so far )
laclasse@monster:foo-version/ $ make installl
after long imcomprehensible lines.....
thats it the program is ready
Whoa what a post, got carried away
hope it is useful, have no idea where you stand in linux ......Cheers.
at winmodems ......This kind of pay for the hardware and i will rip you off should be punished !!!
but I guess feb 15 is suppose to be the release of KDE 3.1 for Redhat, so I dont know...I would like to figure out how to do this all myself before then, since I hate waitin for things,lol. But I'll have other worries to deal with before then anyway...like installin VMware and gettin XP running on it well...and get my damn modem to work...I definitely need cable or dsl 
I'll let you know how it goes...thanks again for ur help.
