There is one feature of CentOS I dislike very much: the tendency to drag in a lot of 32-bit packages as unnecessary dependencies on a 64-bit system. I found the bundled version of KDE 3.5.4 one of the more badly broken ones. I really wanted to try 3.5.10, if I could. When I attempted to add the KDE-RedHat repo to Yum the default instructions didn’t work. I spent more time trying to understand why, unsuccessfully, than I eventually spent just doing it all manually. In the bargain, I managed to avoid dragging in a bunch of 32-bit junk. So the first move was to completely eliminate the entire group of KDE packages: yum groupremove kde-desktop.
Since the KDE repo was built off the Fedora EPEL project, I first installed that repo via RPM, and it worked okay. I still had to hunt down the actual file archives on one of the mirrors because Yum just would not yield it’s secrets to my lame brain. Then, I opened a simple console session for root and went to work. Mostly it was a matter grabbing the obvious first decencies, such as aRTs and some lib packages from EPEL. One by one I eliminated the missing decencies until I got the RPMs from KDE-RedHat to install.
First, as stated, was to wget the newer aRTs RPM and install it. Then came some goodies like OpenEXR, Taglib, Gnokii, Wavpack, Akode, Libmodplug and Xine-libs, mostly from EPEL. I always tried Yum first; if that failed, I used wget and a direct RPM installation. Back to KDE for KDEbase, and all the other packages which seemed to match what would have been installed from CentOS. Some dependencies required me to Google a bit, but eventually I got it all installed.
Upon logging out of GNOME and back into the new KDE desktop, I was rewarded with a much better working system. Apparently the packagers at KDE-RedHat have been very careful with their defaults, because I really didn’t have to do much to make things suit me. While I don’t recommend this method, sometimes you have to get creative to get what you want.
