I installed KDE4.1 using these instructions:

1. Ensure that you have at least 1GB of free space on /, and especially /opt as KDE 4 packages will be installed in /opt
2. To be sure that everything will be installed cleanly, you may want to remove previous KDE 4.0.x package :
urpme qt4-common; urpme libkdecore4; urpme libkdebase4; urpme kdenetwork4-core; urpme kdelibs4-core; urpme kde4-nsplugins
3. Once done, you can visit the Mandriva page on kde.org 4.1 release page. There you will find the list of mirrors from where you can download KDE 4.1 packages for Mandriva
4. To have the complete URL needed for urpmi.addmedia, you just need to right-click on one of the mirrors, and do "Copy Link Location", then paste the URL after the urpmi.addmedia command and append RPMS/i586 just after the URL as follow :
urpmi.addmedia KDE41 MIRROR_URL/RPMS/i586
5. For example for the lip6 mirror, you will have the following command :
urpmi.addmedia KDE41 ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/X11/kde/stable/4.1....driva/RPMS/i586
6. Now you can install qt4 4.4.0 packages : urpmi -a libqt; urpmi libqtxml4 libqtsvg4
7. After this, you just need to install the task-kde4 metapackage to install KDE 4.1 : urpmi task-kde4
8. Several questions will be asked, please be sure to select each time the KDE 4.1.0 or 4.0.98 packages and the Qt 4.4.0 ones.
9. If some packages failed to be installed, please do not hesitate to launch again the previous urpmi command. At the end everything will be fine.

The installation went fine, but when I start it I get: 'could not start kstartupconfig4. Check your installation'.

I've also removed kde3.5 (don't ask )

Anyway, now I don't have any kind of working GUI, and I'd like to get one working, either 3.5 or 4.1.
Any help would be appreciated

I'd follow the instructions to remove the failed KDE 4 install in point 2.

Then, I'd just simply do:



providing of course that you have all your repos configured correctly, this should get you back to where you were.

Just logout using a different window manager (whatever), and rename the hidden kde directory at your user's folder. Now logout, and log back in to kde4.

Well, "no package named task-kde"

now kde4 takes me to a primitive GUI, which is a start..

Hmm, maybe your repos are not set up to install it. Click the easyurpmi link at the top of this page, and then set up all the repos so you have access to the software. You can then download and install the packages from the internet using the gui application manager, or using the urpmi command like I mentioned earlier.

Hope that does it

I believe the package names are task-kde3 or task-kde4, not just task-kde.

That should do it, except that when earlier the kde4 command opened a really simple GUI, now for some reason it does nothing. I guess the setting up can't be done in my other OS, vista? Firefox doesn't really work without a GUI..


none of those commands do anything

It's task-kde4... "urpmi task-kde4" as root. I cannot see any task-kde3 metapackage.

First, make sure your repos are up to date then type in this from a terminal:


before saying "yes" just make sure it wants to install kde3.5.X and not kde4.X. This should get you back to the older version of kde.

I'm quite sure that they are not up to date, because none of those packages were found.