# Installation

This chapter describes obtaining and building &quanta;.

## Acquiring &quanta;

### &quanta; binary packages

Many linux distros are bundling &quanta;. Please check your favorite vendors site for a package tailored to your distro. If that fails, see Linux Easy for a RedHat oriented rpm of the latest cvs source.

### &quanta; source code

#### &quanta; releases

Release versions of the &quanta; source code can be obtained from the SourceForge home page. Once downloaded, simply unpack it into a directory and then go to Building the source to finish.

#### &quanta; CVS access

If you have to have access to the very latest features (and potentially, bugs), you can obtain &quanta; via anonymous CVS with the following:

    %cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.kde.org:/home/kde login
    CVS login:<enter>
    %cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.kde.org:/home/kde co quanta

A short download later, you should have a quanta directory under your current working directory.

To finish things up, `cd` to the quanta/admin directory and type:

    %cvs update -P -C -d -R -r KDE_3_0_BASE

A short while later, all these files will be updated. One last bit before we can build the source.

    %make -f Makefile.cvs

This creates a number of files necessary to build the source. From here go to Building the source to finish.

## Building the source

If you acquired &quanta; source from CVS, be sure to read this.

&quanta; uses automake and autoconf to ease installation from source. If you're familiar with these, skip to &quanta; build considerations, otherwise, please read the following.

To install quanta you need KDE 3 and Qt 3.0.x, and run:

    %test `echo $KDEDIR` && echo "KDEDIR ok" || echo "KDEDIR not exported"
    %test `echo $QTDIR` && echo "QTDIR ok" || echo "QTDIR not exported"
    a
    b

If these don't return KDEDIR ok and QTDIR ok, you need to set them permanently or in a script that you call to execute &quanta; and before you continue with the build process.

Once these are verified to be set, run the following:

    %./configure
    %make
    %make install (as root)
    ...

    *************** Important *************************

     Add path-to-kde3-bin-directory to your PATH

     Please report bugs with our web form at
     http://bugs.kde.org
        Crediting original team members
     Alexander Yakovlev yshurik@kde.org
     Dmitry Poplavsky   dima@kde.org
        Current maintainers are
     Eric Laffoon       sequitur@kde.org
     Andras Mantia      amantia@freemail.hu

     The Quanta developers wish you fun with Quanta.
    ****************************************************

### Considerations when building

It's reasonable that you would want to customize the location of the &quanta; files on your system. To this end, autoconf has a number of options that can be passed to the configure script to control this setup. To get a complete listing of these options, type `./configure` `--help`. These are straight forward and will not be covered here.

If you're having trouble with &quanta; running properly, you should check your path to ensure that the kde3 bin directory is in there. Also, be sure that you don't have any older versions of KDE laying about that appear in %PATH before your kde3 bin directory. The same holds true for Qt.