A few months ago, Helio blogged about building KDE 1 (again) on modern systems. So recently while cleaning up some boxes of old books, I found the corresponding books -- which shows that there was a time that there was a market for writing books about the Linux desktop.

Particularly the top book, "Using KDE" by Nicholas Wells, is interesting. The first page I opened it up to was a pointer to the KDE Translation teams, and information on how to contribute, how to get in touch with the translation teams, etc. You can still find the translation info online, although the location has changed since 2000.

There's also tips and tricks on getting your .xinitrc right, and how to safely fall back to twm. I find this amusing, because I still use the same techniques when testing new Plasma 5 packages in a FreeBSD VM. It's good that the old standalone twm is still there, but it would be much more amusing to fall back to KDE 1.1.2 if Plasma 5 doesn't start right, I think.