I got impatient last week and installed KDE3.1 on my main box. Which is a 700MHz PIII Dell Notebook running Linux Mandrake 9.0. It is of course hopelessly out of spec by modern standards but runs quite well and has a nice juicy resolution of 1400x1050 on its 14" LCD.
My main reasons was that I wanted the new PGP features of KMail. But also more silently that I really desperately want a Mac but cant afford it. This gives me some of the nice new usability and display features found in Max OS/X but for free.
So I installed KDE 3.1rc6, I'm afraid I just wasnt patient for the final release.
I have to say that while I hate rpm's with a passion, KDE's rpms tend to be allright. When I upgraded my KDE to 3.0x a while back I had downloaded all the rpms I felt I needed in the Mandrake release folder and did a rpm -Uvh *.rpm. Everything installed without a hitch and when I logged in and out it came up beautiful as ever before.
However for the rc6 release all they had was source files. This doesnt scare me at all normally, except for the long build time. Luckily the ever resourceful kde guys have released an automated build/download/configuration system a'la the BSD Ports system called Konstruct.
This makes it so easy. If you had a slightly speedier machine and a faster internet connection it would take no time at all.
I recommend this to anyone with the slightest inkling of what they are doing.
Simply download the latest archive from their site and unpack it.
Read the Readme file and start building.
To build an install a complete KDE system type:
cd meta/kde; make install
It downloads most dependencies, builds it and installs it.
About the dependencies, I'll write another entry in a bit about getting better Anti Aliased Text under Linux than on Mac OS/X. Follow those instructions before you build kde for the best results.
Sweet.