Install KDE 4 on Windows

The preferred way of installing KDE apps under windows is the KDE-Installer. Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista are supported.

The installer is a small piece of software which pulls the required packages from the remote repository and installs them on your Windows machine. It also automatically downloads any packages which are required to satisfy any dependencies which makes it very user friendly. Detailed installation instructions as follows…

* Installer Download it here..
* Download and save the latest version to a directory, e.g. C:\KDE4
* Run the installer, download what you need [see Download needed packages below].
* Add a KDEDIRS environment variable [Start >> Control Panel >> System >> Advanced >> Environment Variables, click [New] User variable and create Variable name KDEDIRS with Variable value the directory where you installed KDE4, e.g. C:\KDE4].
* Add your lib directory and your bin directory to your Windows %PATH%. (Start >> Control Panel >> System >> Advanced >> Environment Variables, double-click the Path System Variable and add “%KDEDIRS%\lib;%KDEDIRS%\bin” to your path separated by semicolon.]
* If you don’t have Visual Studio 2005 installed, download and install the “Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)” [1]
* Try running a Qt application in the bin directory, such as linguist.exe
* If that works, try running a KDE application such as kwrite.exe.

The download for me took a long time since the installer had to pull in over 400 MB of packages. But once all the necessary packages finished downloading, the installer then proceeded to install all the packages in the specified location.
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There are a number of applications already such as the KDE games, KWrite, Konqueror, Dolphin file manager and so on and all of them worked on my machine. I have to concede that other than the KDE games which played quite well, most other software is at the least, still buggy. Konqueror and KWrite guzzles up memory like there is no tomorrow. The Konsole (KDE terminal) has yet to be ported to Windows and so you cannot access the terminal from within Konqueror. Dolphin complains that it cannot find the home directory each time I open it in Windows. KWrite is a lot slow in opening up and so on.

Update:1 [02/15/2009]

Simple steps to uninstall Windows KDE from Windows XP or Vista……